I arrived at the Forum Theatre a few minutes before the show started and squeezed my way through the crowd. The venue was warm and bustling, and the regular routines flowed: friends held hands to snake through the mosh, looked up at the sparkly ceiling in awe, then questioned how real the gothic statues are. The stage seemed bare–-a quiet contrast to the lively scene that the rest of the theatre witnessed. There was no more decor other than the instruments waiting to be played. Such minimalism can be refreshing, allowing the audience to focus on the music and be fully enveloped by it with no distractions or frills. This was a concert style from a time when people did not need a sparkly acrobatic multimedia performance to feel entertained. But the bare-bones nature of this show risks greatly missing the mark and being boring, which, much to my disappointment, was what lay ahead in Thundercat’s performance.

They began playing and the crowd was hyped. Whilst Thundercat held his typical low-key stage persona, not seeming any different to how he might play on his own, the drummer, Thomas Pridgen, put his all into his performance and dominated the space. This is no complaint–his playing was an incredible show that felt no less than epic, flowing through different fills, beat patterns, and time signatures with a mad funk-rock energy you couldn’t turn away from. However, Thundercat and the keys player (Dennis Hamm) stood out as a dull contrast, both wearing a low-effort coolness that quickly gets tiring. He barely moved, only slightly leaning into his bass as he played; between songs, a chuckled “how’s everyone going” was the most he’d say to the crowd. He sang songs that, except for the most popular ones, blurred into one long hour of music everyone seemed to just be politely watching.

The low energy feel of the concert was a consequence of the music and the flat visual factor. Almost every song had an improvised solo played by Hamm or Thundercat (or both in succession). They played big, fast riffs up and down the funk chords while Pridgen kept up an unpredictable drumbeat, lasting for a minute or two each time. The first time they did this, they finished with a roaring crowd. The second time was met with some cheers. And from the third time onwards, only some scattered shouts seemed to be fans who indulged in the music alone. I wondered if this was a fault of the crowd being uptight and self-conscious (myself included), not getting into their more experimental dancing side as a few people on the outskirts demonstrated–a style akin to how hippie kids dance at concerts (absolutely no hate to those kids and the I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-anyone-thinks style). But as the strangers who I chatted to after the show summarised, Thundercat’s performance was just a bit weird and got a bit boring.

I am usually in favour of an improvised solo, a defender of it even. Their first solos were a spectacle to watch, but so much of their significance is in them lasting only a short, precious time and there being variation within and between them. You can expect to see never-ending rounds of solos at a jazz gig, but they are not just a sequence of individual improvisations. Rather, their method entails an intimate conversation between the musicians and a dynamic flow that creates a story, ultimately bearing a unique, personal stage-presence that lures the listener in. It creates a suspended moment where the audience does not know what will happen or when it will end, which works to stand out from the predetermined linearity that the rest of the show follows. Instead of achieving this, Thundercat wrung out all the value an improvisation can give by resorting to the same style of improv song after song, reducing the solos into something that could only be described as a time-filler.

Thundercat’s lack of visual performance combined with the solo-fest made their performance a show that struggled to capture the audience, but I am still taken by how impressive all the artists’ musical skills are. Hopefully they can unleash their potential next time they’re in Melbourne, just with a bit more of a desire to engage with the crowd in front of them.