Live: Abri @ Blue Frog

Dubai rock act Abri played the Blue Frog on Thursday, May 28. We were there for the festivities and Gnarls Barkley cover.

There once was a singer named Terence Trent D’Arby. He had a few hits in the late 1980s and was hailed as pop’s next big thing. Then, he faded into oblivion. According to his Wikipedia page, he changed his name to Sananda Maitreya and moved to Europe. We say he moved to Dubai and changed into Hamdan Al Abri, the frontman and vocalist of soul band Abri.

If you’re old enough (and some of us at Indiecision are), you couldn’t have helped thought of D’Arby when Hamdan started belting his eponymous band’s jazz-tinged, funk-filled R&B tunes. But it wasn’t just long-forgotten acts from the 1980s that were channeled on stage, James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson could also be heard in the band’s listener-friendly original tunes. Abri, both band and frontman, have very wisely embodied these acts not only in sound but also in spirit. And that’s exactly what gives them that extra special something.

Their music may not be wildly original but it’s delivered with such sheer showmanship that seeing them in concert is a quick lesson in how a band can transfer the fun it has playing their music to the crowd that’s hearing them. Abri did this more tightly and efficiently than many of the rock bands the Frog’s got down. We’ve rarely witnessed more energy on a weeknight at the club, and when Hamdan – with his powerful voice and wide range got to the covers stage of their act – it seemed that the entire pit was rapt in attention.

When a singer takes on ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley, ‘Little L’ by Jamiroquai and ‘Back To Black’ by Amy Winehouse in succession, does his own take on them and does them well, you know you’ve got a good thing going. One could argue that these made for the most memorable parts of the night because we were familiar with the material, but not all the group’s own tunes were quite as strong – we bought their CD, all of which they performed at the gig, and concluded that they are a band best heard live. They managed to draw a small but attentive during the first visit to Mumbai, and we’d happy to be see more of them sometime.

Indiecision: B+