Washed Out – Scala, London 09/08/11

It’s the kind of task that must have left Ernest Greene turning in his sleep: grabbing a celebrated collection of songs, all written while on holiday and made up of dozens of synthetic layers, and making them work in dark club venues with a full live-band. When Washed Out began a few years back as a personal project, Greene could only dream up the process it would involve. When they were first recorded, these songs had no real intention of seeing the light of day on a touring circuit.

Chillwave’s bedroom producers are all riddled with the same dilemma. And to date none of the original crop – with the exception of perhaps Toro Y Moi – have managed to truly refine and succeed with a live show.

Tonight, Greene’s tall frame lurches over his keyboard with one hand gripping the microphone stand. He looks like a true performer rather than the uncomfortable, solitary figure that he used to resemble during his live sets. Those around him shake tambourines and encourage applause, set against a predictable backdrop of swirling, overexposed colours and visuals of corn fields and girls on the beach. And despite the fact that since Washed Out’s remarkable emergence, we always expected the experience to be something like this, it still remains a surreal event – watching an internet sensation come into actual being.

Strangely, some of Greene’s first releases adapt to the stage better than highlights from his first full-length Within and Without. ‘New Theory’ has the audience chanting out its wordless chorus, whilst ‘Feel It All Around’ has a much welcomed upping of pace in comparison to its recorded version. Much like the debut album itself, many of these songs merge into one extended, calming haze, and so it’s with some relief when Greene chooses to introduce a more dated, familiar effort from his early tape and EP releases.

It’s not until a truly celebratory encore of ‘Eyes Be Closed’ that the audience begin to snap out of a shared sense of surrealism. Right before our eyes, people applaud, sing back the words and demand an encore from an act whose appeal was, for a time, limited exclusively to the music snobs of the web. And while the transition from bedroom to tour bus is evidently beset by some growing pains, everything is on the right track. As reluctant as some might be to admit it, the genre that Greene pioneered is desperate to break out to bigger audiences and it won’t be long before it does just that.