If The Cardigans are a band in an irreversible commercial tailspin – as their record sales attest – it is a decline which they have chosen to ignore.
Playing a rare Irish show (the first since their ‘Erase/Rewind’ era pomp) the Malmo outfit had the air of arriving superstars – a necessary deception fans were happy to play along with.
At their peak, it was common to point out the distance between The Cardigans' frontwoman Nina Persson, a vision of tresses and cheekbones, and the group’s pot bellied, greasy mopped rank and file.
If anything, the years have emphasised Persson’s vitality – her cloud-scraping vocals anchored last year’s Super Extra Gravity LP, a suite of torch-songs that deserved better than what it got: the status of interesting footnote.
The Cardigans have announced that this tour is ‘for the fans’: a coded acceptance that they don’t expect all the dates to sell-out and thus feel under no obligation to trot out all the hits they are sick of playing. They proved true to this implication, with a set that leaned heavily on Super Extra Gravity’s slow-build torch songs.
Forays into their songbook focused on the gnarlier end of the Cardigans catalogue. So 'My Favourite Game' arrived lurching and ill-tempered; slow building and sulky, 'Erase/Rewind' was an anthem that had forgot what it is to be anthemic. Nobody asked for 'Love Fool' and The Cardigans did not play it. Life in the shadow of old glories, may not, one senses, be all that much of a burden.