Scouting for drums

Foot Village, Blue Sabbath Black Fiji.
Dalston Trinity Centre. 14nov09.

There is a tall, raised stage at the Trinity Centre but neither band tonight bother to use it. Better, it seems, to be amongst ones public, when one is trying to bludgeon their senses.

For Blue Sabbath Black Fiji, this does appear to be the intention of their starkly apocalyptic, caterwauling, nihilistic noisecore. Frankly they make Fuck Buttons seem like Brian Conley playing Buttons in a production of Cinderella at the Runcorn Brindley.

With distorted guitars set to stun, distorted samplers keen to mutilate and distorted vocal mics ready to serve whatever meat is left hanging from you in a seeded bun, Blue Sabbath Black Fiji, as they say in their native Glasgow, set aboot ye.



It is brief but brutal stuff with Charles taking time out to charge into the crowd during his screams. Clearly he’s not noticed the “No Running! No Bullying!” sign pinned to the wall.

For this is, essentially, a scout hut we’ve been lured into, and with no lighting rig, a keen thinker improvises by crashing their open palm continually over the wall switches, the strobing of the tube lights continually flickering being perfectly in keeping with BSBF’s fractured din.



Foot Village are similarly stark and powerful, but with the focus much more on rhythm. It becomes clear we’re in for a lively old throwdown when all the players start to limber up with stretching exercises before they get amongst the four drum sets they have hunched into a tight central heart. Heart of beats, if you will. The pit of hit.

The Village aren’t the only band around doing the whole drums and vox thing, but while Wildbirds and Peacedrums are made ethereal flesh by Mariam Wallentin’s vocal patterns, Foot Village are all about the bones, big bones at that, and taking the concept to it’s arguably logical scream therapy conclusion.



They supplement the drums with two megaphones, like the liveliest picket line ever, and the odd off-‘mic’ roar. Frankly, though, they had me at the first collective thump of snares, as it’s hard not to give into the primal energy of ol’ Doctor Beat. Although tonight the good physician has arguably been replaced by his brother, PT instructor Beat, repeatedly lobbing medicine balls towards our face.

The band are pretty tight when they want to be, when they’re not chasing round the circle, hitting drums as they go, crashing into the opening row of bodies peering into their hectic, captivating workout. As such, their time with us passes all too quickly and, thankfully, before any of them pass out.

Foot Village @ MySpace
Blue Sabbath Black Fiji @ MySpace

It's good, but is it as good as Phillip the Good?

Circulus.
Borderline. 12oct09.

At Shakespeare’s Globe, they always perform in period costume, and have a band of strolling players playing music evocative of the era as you assemble in your seats or shuffle into the Courtyard. This is ‘re-enactment’, with the expressed intention to present the culture of an age in as close to the original manner as is possible without forcing the assembled punterage out of their jeans and pac-a-macs and into doublets, trunk hose and cannions.

With Circulus, you are never quite sure what they are aiming for. For a start they’ve employed morris dancers ‘The Belles of London City’ to add their handkerchief-wielding, bells-on-toes frolicking at regular intervals during their set. Some members of the band are decked out in slightly too-tight renaissance shirts, green tights that act as a relief map of the knees and groin; or in conical hats and tunics.



Group leader Michael Tyack has stated that he “pretty much” models his look on Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy between 1419 and 1467. Others in the band, however, adopt slightly more modern, but aesthetically aligned, dress.

The awkward banter between the three vocalists betrays another slight mis-match, with Tyack’s hippie-ish wittering about spaceships and, err, flu-jabs, jarring with Holly Jane-Shears cheeky bluntness (“I’ve been for a wee…nothing else” are her opening remarks after arriving late on stage) and Antony Elvin’s fruity wit. “Think we’ve said the wrong thing again” says Shears to Elvin guiltily behind Tyack’s back on more than one occasion. Nonetheless, one cannot help but be amused by their time-filling antics, when strings break and an effects-pedal succumbs to the insidiousness of a spilt lager.



In terms of instrumentation, there are citterns, crumhorns, lutes and shawms, yet electric guitars and modern drum sets also feature. Furthermore, the words ‘progressive’ and ‘psychedelic’ are often bandied around to describe their sound. This is largely fair with regards each term, but theirs is a relatively understated take on both. Nowhere near freak-out squalling nor melodically overblown, Circulus are an entertaining folk spectacle that marries the early-music sense of harmony with an occasional gentle waft of dusty Woodstock rock.

Their final number features the titular phrase “within you is the sun” repeated as lifestyle mantra which, in a way, places them as an Anglo-Saxon Polyphonic Spree given to music hall tongue-poking silliness and historically mish-mashed minstrelling.

Circulus @ MySpace

Uneasy does it

ZU / DR SLAGGLEBERRY / DRUNKENSTEIN, 4TH OCTOBER 2009, OXFORD WHEATSHEAF

Tiresomely convoluted songs? Cursory nods to Faith No More overshadowed by gothy bluster and Chili Peppers style slap bass? A theatrical frontman who looks like the Bee Gees' Robin Gibb, who has a distressing penchant for a maniacal laugh that Dr Evil would think too contrived, and who reads some of his lyrics from crib sheets, explaining "I've just got back from Suffolk and still have the thousand yard stare"? Yes, Drunkenstein are gruesome all right - just not, I imagine, in quite the way they intended.

Far more unsettling are Dr Slaggleberry. Midway through the set my gig-going accomplice leans over to say: "I'm enjoying this, but get the feeling we might be about to get murdered". You'd call for the men in white coats - if they weren't already on stage, wearing blank face masks. "We all have court summons we're avoiding so we try to keep under the radar", they've explained in an interview - probably a joke, though I wouldn't be sure.

There are no shortage of local types for whom the adjective "mathy" is appropriate, but Dr Slaggleberry are the only ones I've yet come across who also take their cue from jazz and metal - all detuned guitars, double-bass pedal battering and odd time signatures - to impressive effect (i.e. I'm discounting Eduard Soundingblock). Unusual rhythms are probably only to be expected given that all three members started out as drummers. If they were to ditch the vocals and between-song banter, and borrow a bit of Drunkenstein's theatricality and (for instance) freeze when the riffs grind to a stop midsong, the trio really would be a frightening prospect.

Once they've packed up, the stage sits empty for a while - until the headliners stride in as if just arrived, set up and start playing, to dropped jaws. After an appearance alongside the likes of Mogwai and Fuck Buttons at Invada Invasion, the one-day festival organised by Portishead's Geoff Barrow, Zu are on a low-key tour of the country - certainly, the Wheatsheaf is rather more low-key than Bristol's Colston Hall, the reopening of which Invada Invasion was organised to mark.

Like Dr Slaggleberry before them, the Italian trio aren't exactly easy listening - needless to say, really, of a band endorsed by John Zorn who have collaborated with Can's Damo Suzuki, Fugazi's Joe Lally, Melvins' Buzz Osbourne, Nobukazu Takemura and the evening's spiritual curator Mike Patton amongst others. Tonight there are no collaborators, and not much in the way of electronics or nuance - just Massimo Pupillo's bass, ultra-deep and laden with effects; Luca Mai's sax, rigged to pack a punch more fearsome than your average distorted guitar - he plays what has been described as a "death bassoon"; and Jacopo Battaglia's extraordinary drumming, which shreds sticks and sends splinters flying.

The music is jazz-influenced, though definitely wouldn't be described as "nice" by John Thomson's Jazz Club presenter in The Fast Show. It's as dense and heavy as it is complicated - hardly surprising, given that latest album Carboniferous (their 14th, put out on Patton's Ipecac imprint) has been acclaimed as perhaps their most downright aggressive release to date. The only respite from the feeling of being simultaneously disoriented and steamrollered comes when a misfiring PA heckles with some incidental music during a quiet section, Battaglia suddenly as open-mouthed as those of us in the audience.

Link:

Another review of the gig - we may not agree on the merits of the various bands, but it's good to stumble across another local blogger who chronicles his gig-going activities

Diminishing returns

TREMBLING BELLS / THE HALCYONS / THE ROUNDHEELS / MATT WINKWORTH, 3RD OCTOBER 2009, OXFORD JERICHO TAVERN

The Rules decree that singer-songwriters should be tedious drips who believe that listlessly strumming a guitar and moaning about something or other at the same time makes them the natural and inevitable heir to Bob Dylan. Thankfully, for Matt Winkworth, the Rules are made to be broken. Your average common-or-garden singer-songwriter he is not, channelling the (melo)dramatic flourish of Rufus Wainwright into a performance that takes in a song written from the perspective of A Midsummer Night's Dream's Puck and a tribute to tragic Eurotrash star Lola Ferrari which succeeds in being as poignant as it is witty, before wrapping up with a cover of Burt Bacharach's 'Anyone Who Had A Heart'.

Also making very good use of other people's songs amongst their own are folky types The Roundheels - tonight a stripped-down twosome of guitarist and vocalist, although some additional assistance is provided on mandolin and slide guitar by members of The Marmadukes. There's a nagging feeling that they're the sort of act who could be found performing in any number of pubs on a Saturday night (indeed their next gig is at the Malmaison), but justice is nevertheless very much done to dark material including Nina Simone's version of 'Black Is The Color (Of My True Love's Hair)' and Neko Case's 'Make Your Bed'.

At least one member of The Halcyons, keyboard player Colin Mackinnon, writes for the OxfordBands.com site, so he must be used to the difficulty (if not outright impossibility) of being positive or saying at least something constructive in certain reviews. As such, he might be feeling my pain right now. His band won't be responsible for me remembering this as a halcyon evening - let's just leave it there, shall we?

Trembling Bells: the name seems to say it all. Not Howling Bells - not desperate, full of fury or anguish. No, Trembling - nervous, quaking, trepidatious. As they shuffle uncomfortably before a crowd considerably thinner than it was half an hour earlier and begin a song called 'Adieu England', I conclude that perhaps they've bid adieu to their native Glasgow rather sooner than was sensible and would have been better off honing their art at home for a while longer. Certainly their stage presence is non-existent, the drums seem too loud and obtrusive, and I'm struggling to find much to admire in their rambling folk-country (and even less to like). Worse still, two friends confess the need to escape outside to the smoking balcony before the singer's nails-down-blackboard voice drives them to murder.

So it comes as something of a major surprise to learn that not only have the quartet been talked about in excited tones by those in the know, but that two members of the band (at least) have significant form. Alex Neilson is a much-feted drummer who's played with Bonnie "Prince" Billie, Alasdair Roberts and Six Organs Of Admittance amongst others, while vocalist Lavinia Blackwall was part of his Directing Hand free jazz project.

Thing is, though, I came across Directing Hand at Greenman two years ago, accused them of "just taking the piss" and agreed with a barman that Blackwall sounded like "'cats in a bag in the river'". And, personally speaking at least, Trembling Bells are hardly any better.

She put a spell on me

BAT FOR LASHES / YEASAYER, 8TH OCTOBER 2009, OXFORD ZODIAC

You’ve heard of I’m From Barcelona, right? (In case you were wondering, they’re not – the lying buggers are Swedish.) Well, Yeasayer might as well be called I’m From Brooklyn, so brazenly do they wear their origins on their collective sleeve – and, anyway, hasn’t affirmative exclamation already been covered by Yeah Yeah Yeahs? OK, so some distance removed from Brooklyn’s current crop of C86 obsessives (see: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Crystal Stilts) Yeasayer may be, but they’ve regularly been bracketed with the likes of Vampire Weekend as Afrobeat aficionados at the cutting edge of cool.

On this evidence at least, all I can say to those who hailed Yeasayer’s debut album All Hour Cymbals as a musical milestone is that they really should know better than to endorse the kind of future where an MGMT sans hooks are king. If a postmodern, artily mangled mess of Fleetwood Mac and Hall & Oates and a vomit-splattered boilersuit with the sleeves rolled up and set off with a power balladeer’s mullet are where’s it at, then I for one would rather not be there.

Frontman Chris Keating attempts flattery, venturing that because this is Oxford we must be a "smart" crowd and thereby implying that we might get what they do. Not me, I’m afraid. Just say nay, kids.

Bat For Lashes should by rights be equally preposterous. Natasha Khan’s first album, 2006’s Mercury-nominated Fur And Gold, suggested someone for whom recording music was a rude interruption from wheeling around in crop circles barefoot, flower-garlanded and dressed in chiffon like a medieval waif or sylvan sprite, partaking in the odd pagan ritual to reaffirm her oneness with her Earth Mother.

But guffaws were stifled by the sheer power of the music: rich, emotive, captivating. Otherworldly, yes, but inclusive and enveloping too. It seemed impossible to look on disinterestedly from the outside - you couldn’t help but be drawn in. Tonight, everything from that period resonates with a dark sensuousness: ‘Horse And I’, ‘Tahiti’, ‘The Wizard’, ‘Prescilla’ and especially the single ‘Trophy’, its sinister edge sharpened by Charlotte Hatherley’s guitar and its omission from the Glastonbury set even more of a mystery.

So, how does Fur And Gold’s no less extraordinary successor Two Suns compare? Well, it’s a meditation on dualism and cosmology and Khan still sounds as though she spends too much money on healing crystals and too much time prostrating herself beneath the moon. But the difference, in the words of the Ting Tings, is largely the drums, the drums, the drums: the inventive percussion of ‘Glass’ and the tribal pounding of ‘Two Planets’ in particular, courtesy of New Young Pony Club’s Sarah Jones. Though that’s not to mention the encroaching presence of synths and electronics, most noteably on chart-bothering single ‘Daniel’.

In these respects, the fact that much of the album owes its conception and genesis to a period during which Khan spent living in Brooklyn is evident. It’s as much a surprise that her collaborators in Yeasayer don’t join her onstage at any point, as it isn’t that the infamously reclusive Scott Walker fails to show up for ‘The Big Sleep’, the duet-of-sorts that closes Two Suns, Hatherley instead providing his vocals.

One of the most affecting and intoxicating new tracks is called ‘Siren Song’, but in truth they could all be given that name. Khan is an enchantress and, quite simply, one of the few truly original stars in the pop firmament.

Johnny be good

JOHNNY FOREIGNER / TELLISON / JAPANESE VOYEURS, 6TH OCTOBER 2009, OXFORD JERICHO TAVERN

Japanese Voyeurs, eh? Well, that would make us English Rubberneckers at a particularly gruesome car crash. But then, as cliche would have it, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and in the eye of Johnny Foreigner this thrashily vapid charisma-free Hole - old enough to be able to grow facial hair and drink beer, but young enough to make a bit of a show of it - would appear to be pulchritudinousness personified. Me, I'm struggling to get past Romily Alice's wail and have to pronounce them less arousing peep show and more grim horror show.

Stephen H Davidson's at pains to point out that his band are called Tellison, and not Television. Not that there's much chance of confusing this bunch of modest Get Up Kids devotees from the south of England with the louche New York art-punks behind Marquee Moon. When he says that the last time they played in Oxford, at the Exeter Hall, they broke everything, I strongly suspect what he actually means is that everything broke - they would probably still be apologising now if it was the other way around.

Studious and conscientious observers of the punk pop rule book, Tellison know that the way to be taken seriously (not to mention the way to a girl's heart) is through bookish lyrics - and you can't get much more bookish than a song called 'Edith Wharton'. In a set heavy on new material, there are the odd diversions from the established template, when multi-instrumentalist Matt Roberts is called into providing electronic beats, additional percussion or even sax (such as on 'Thebes'). But they're actually at their best when not trying too hard and instead sticking to what they know, the Jimmy Eat World-echoing 'Henry Went To Paris' being a case in point.

Twenty minutes later and I'm not sure what the burly brute of a guy to my left made of Tellison, but by the disbelieving shake of his head can well imagine how he feels about having been dragged by his girlfriend to see the headliners: "Johnny Foreigner? Coming over here [all the way from Birmingham]? In a van? Seducing our women? Subjecting our English eardrums to assault by all manner of foul foreign noise? Well, I tell you - we won't stand for it..." And the truth is that for the first three songs - an unbelievably sloppy stew, an unrelenting blizzard of sound - I can kind of see his point.

But then the fourth song starts (perhaps it's no coincidence that it's a new one) and suddenly, as if cured by a fast-working hypnotherapist, they're no longer tune-phobic or afraid to give the music time to breathe. And by the time we're into 'Eyes Wide Terrified', arguably the most dynamic single on debut album Waited Up Til It Was Light, they appear to have made the evolutionary leap it took Idlewild the best part of a year to manage (from Captain to Hope Is Important) in the space of just five minutes.

Now don't get me wrong - there's nothing much enlightened or revolutionary about sounding like Los Campesinos! with your fingers jammed in live sockets and firecrackers rammed up your arse. The longer of tooth amongst tonight's crowd (that'd be me, then) remember back to a time when Urusei Yatsura ploughed a similar furrow and when the aforementioned Idlewild weren't just an REM tribute band.

But still the electrified racket and yelping boy-girl duetting of new single 'Criminals' and other tracks from forthcoming second record Grace And The Bigger Picture (they evidently share a fierce work ethic with Los Campesinos! as well as inspirations and friendship) can't fail to stir me to paroxysms of excitement. And you have to doff your hat to an outfit who choose to recognise Spinderella's lamentably oft-ignored contribution to Salt 'N' Pepa's musical output by immortalising her in a song title.

Bassist Kelly Southern asks what we make of her dress (she's wearing it because she thinks "it's the sort of thing girls in bands should wear"); vocalist/guitarist Alexei Berrow claims that the tour's purpose is to encourage fans up and down the country to urge pocket-size Bright Eyes Sam Isaac not to quit music; and neither of them nor drummer Junior Laidley knows when the new album's out. Apologising for stinking, Alexei declares: "We had a choice between washing and playing a show." A round of applause for the right decision.

Flaming marvellous

THE FIERY FURNACES / TALK IN CODE, 20TH SEPTEMBER 2009, OXFORD ZODIAC

Forgive me, for I am about to shoot some large and helpless fish in a very small barrel. With a bazooka.

"The world of Talk In Code", their MySpace blurb advises us, "is a world to be involved in". A sentiment I can heartily endorse - if, that is, you like your worlds soundtracked by plodding faux-profound corporate indie anthemicists from Swindon who set their sights on REM and late period Idlewild but end up coming across like the sort of tedious worship band that would have the Big Fella Upstairs, if he existed, cursing his own creation.

The spectacle of them crashing headlong into a wall of silence but remaining optimistically convinced that we're here to see them and not the headliners is even more excruciating than that fist-gnawingly awful bio (another choice line: "They are a band in demand and a band on the rise!" There's a free CD available, apparently - still a bit too pricey for me.

The kindest thing I can say is that they'd probably be lapped up by a different audience - a VERY different audience - and you have to point the finger at whoever chucked together such a horribly mismatched bill (even if it was done so at short notice) and threw Talk In Code to the lions rather than to people who think Keane are an edgy alternative rock outfit.

"I don't think we've ever played with a band whose name is in the lyrics to one of our songs", says Eleanor Friedberger, who it suddenly occurs to me bears a remarkable resemblance to our neighbour. The song in question - a blitzed rendition of 'Chris Michaels' from Blueberry Boat - couldn't be a sharper counterpoint to what has preceded and, even at around seven minutes long, is as succinct a precis as you'll get as to what The Fiery Furnaces are all about: oblique and frequently bizarre sung-spoken lyrics wound up with fragments of melody into a monument to idiosyncratic imagination that is all tangent, flitting ADHD-like between genres and styles while also laughing long and loud in the face of coherence and consistency of tempo.

That's not quite true, though - the indications from last album Widow City and the new material from I'm Going Away (in comparison with 'Chris Michaels', at least) are that they might perhaps be gravitating a little closer towards the straight and the narrow. But everything's relative, of course - 'Keep Me In The Dark', for instance, has a genuine chorus, but it still sounds like an experimental band doing the truly experimental thing and having a stab at a pop song.

Not that they haven't attempted something similar before, but none of their most accessible pre-I'm Going Away tracks are included in the setlist - there's no 'Tropical Ice-Land', 'Single Again' or 'My Dog Was Lost But Now He's Found', and Widow City is represented by 'Duplexes Of The Dead', 'The Old Hag Is Sleeping', 'Ex-Guru' and 'Japanese Slippers' rather than 'My Egyptian Grammar'. This may largely be because, unlike on the two previous occasions I've seen them, Matthew Friedberger eschews the keyboard in favour of a guitar, with the result that the likes of 'Staring At The Steeple' pack a surprising punch to the ears.

Integral to this new full-on rock incarnation is the inventive drumming of the guppy-mouthed Bob D'Amico and the distorted bass of a cheery Jason Loewenstein, best known for his alliance with Lou Barlow in Sebadoh (is my Dinosaur Jr T-shirt an insensitive choice, I wonder, given that it's their reformation that's standing in the way of a possible Sebadoh reunion?).

Eleanor is as intense as usual, unable to decide whether to have her coat on or off and staring into the distance as if in a trance - but then just to remember all those hundreds of words must demand serious focus and concentration. Matthew, meanwhile, is enjoying himself, sharing jokes with the others and sarcastically telling some chatterers that they like the interruption because "it's like extra lyrics - and they're probably better than ours".

It seems somehow wrong that an evening in the company of such a resolutely non-linear band should have to reach a definite conclusion, but Matthew softens the blow: "Hopefully we'll be back again soon", he says, grinning, "probably playing different instruments". We hope so too - theirs truly is "a world to be involved in".

Blood, sugar, sex ... er, existential angst

I'm probably the thousandth person to have cracked the gag, but presumably Thom Yorke's been sleeping with dogs to have got a Flea. Seriously, WTF?!

In other less surprising news, Nathan Williams of Wavves has found himself at the centre of trouble recently, with Jared Swilley of The Black Lips vowing to do him and his associates some serious mischief when his tour rolls into Atlanta following a fracas in Williamsburg. I'm just hoping he makes it to Oxford for the gig on 18th November without either being maimed or doing himself some damage (as at Primavera)...

Nautical but nice

SOUTHSEA FEST, 19TH SEPTEMBER 2009

And there I was thinking piracy was supposed to be a bad thing for music. Not today.

For shiver me timbers if it isn't the annual Southsea Fest - a whole day of music courtesy of local and not-so-local acts at venues mere stumbling distance apart the length of Albert Road - which, by virtue of taking place in close proximity to the sea and on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, this year has a distinctly piratical theme.

So, there are three burning questions:

1. Who will lay claim to the day's bounteous though sadly metaphorical rich stuff?

2. Who will deserve to be flogged by the cat o' nine tails before being forced to walk the plank (again sadly metaphorical)?

3. Which intrepid reviewer is likely to hit the grog to the point of sickness that has nothing whatsoever to do with the sea?

Well, OK, so there are two burning questions...

We start at the Edge Of The Wedge with an assault that is airborne rather than aquatic. I've been led to believe that AEROPLANE ATTACK model themselves on My Bloody Valentine, but today at least they sound less like Kevin Shields and company and more like Helmet. Despite the inspirational presence of 2-D Cat perched on the amp, though, their heavy instrumental churnings never quite achieve take-off. The set over, Rusty Sheriff - a hip-hop DJ/producer when not behind the drumkit - is unsure whether to spew or have a large gin. It's barely 1.30pm.

FINAL ROUND ... FIGHT!'s appalling screamo - a billion times worse than song titles like 'If I'm As Good At Wrestling As I Am At Scrabble You're All Fucked' would suggest - prompts a very swift exit and it's off to the Fat Fox for THE LEVELS. Within thirty seconds of their first song, exactly the same thought has word-for-word popped into my head and that of my companion: the world doesn't really need another Reef. The Levels are cocks of the walk (or should that be swagger?), self-proclaimed "retro riffmongers" who aim at being Led Zeppelin (powerhouse drummer Sean Kenneally's John Bonham T-shirt makes an early claim to be the most redundant statement of the day) fronted by AC/DC's gravel-gargler Brian Johnson and who smell of testosterone and casual sexism. But, y'know, it's early, I'm feeling charitable and they remind me of The Datsuns marginally more than of Jet.

And I'm feeling even more charitable towards them as soon as I clap ears on their successor on the Fat Fox stage, GEORGE KING. King is a singer-songwriter who seems to believe that lyrics detailing more drugs, parties, booze and teenage bedroom fumblings than your average Skins script, if set to acoustic pluckings, make him a sensitive and edgy poet for the post-Doherty era and not a tedious whiny cretin. Give the man a girlfriend - or a good shoeing.

Their Southsea Fest stage in the Loft is local promoters Hong Kong Gardeners Club's swansong, so it's a shame we can't share their enthusiasm for VILLIERS TERRACE. That the name is taken from an Echo And The Bunnymen track should give some indication as to where the teenagers are coming from (or trying to) - the North, circa 1984 - and The Young Knives and The Futureheads are also evidently touchstones. But they're out of time and all over the shop - hopelessly so, even by the standards of music which makes no pretence of precision - and despite frontman Olic Asanovic spraying blood liberally over his white guitar for the cause, I can't help but speculate that Villiers Terrace must be a cul-de-sac.

Next comes proof that Oxford is considerably more pervasive and wide-ranging in terms of musical influence than a city of its size ought to be. To all intents and purposes, MINNAARS ARE Foals, just with inferior songs. But while it's difficult to imagine anyone wanting the likes of 'Are Lovers' when they could have 'Red Socks Pugie' and 'The French Open', there's no denying the quintet's energy, enthusiasm and self-belief. They and their de rigeur assymetrical fringes have come further than any other band we've seen so far (all the way from Leicester), and, judging by their selection for the BBC Introducing Stage at this year's Reading and Leeds Festivals, are destined to go significantly further too.

After all that frantic lurching to and fro, it's high time for HOLD FAST over the road in a rammed Little Johnny Russells, but local rag the News's Best Rock/Pop Band of 2008 aren't on long enough (translation: we're not there quick enough) for me to be able to comment on whether their Depeche Modish electro-noir really is as gripping as the moniker suggests.

A brief lull, during which a girl in a porkpie hat tries her darndest to knock my pint off a table, and then THE B OF THE BANG. Named after the the ill-fated and near-lethal sculpture erected in Manchester to mark the 2002 Commonwealth Games, they're a collective centred around one man, Wit, who also happens to have booked all the bands for this stage. Initial impressions are mixed - he's plainly a good lyricist, but musically the first song drags with the unwelcome lethargic anthemicism of Snow Patrol. There's a marked improvement, though, with the arrival of extra members, and we're suddenly transported into the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink psych-folk holler-along territory occupied by the likes of Oxford types Jonquil. All the same, as far as the bang goes, we don't get much further than the B.

Back at the Loft, it's one in one out. Thankfully there are a couple of punters on hand to assist our swift re-entry, both escorted off the premises by security when one decides to resolve a dispute with the doorman by distracting him and planting a smacker of a kiss on his cheek.

And why's it one in one out? That would be because arguably Pompey's most successful exports of the last couple of years (tour with the Manics; release through Fantastic Plastic; NME album review; festival appearances at Latitude, Greenman and Primavera) have entered the building. THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND owe their name to a book and their sound to The Arcade Fire. Keys, xylophone and brass are all called upon, but that additional instrumentation generally feels like a simple supplement rather than a constructive complement, and there's neither the fierce passion nor the fascinating idiosyncracy of, say, My Latest Novel to carry them through. Maybe I'm missing something, but the reason for their flirtation with the big time largely escapes me.

That said, TSDOLE are certainly more interesting than Brighton's JUMPING SHIPS, who soon have us, er, jumping ships to the One Eyed Dog. Immediately we're cursing ourselves for tardiness, as BRONTIDE are already well into their mission to command and conquer. They say "Pink Floyd for the scenesters", I say a maths class as taught by Shellac. Bare chests: two. Sinuous bass and tidy guitar patterns with a brutal thwacking follow-through: lots. Niceties: none - except between songs, when frontman Tim Hancock enthuses about the festival and their predecessors at the One Eyed Dog, Tall Ships (not just on the bill for the nautical theme, it seems). Little wonder Holy Roar - sometime label for Dananananaykroyd, Gallows and Rolo Tomassi amongst others - have taken rather a shine to them.

Next up here, on the stage curated by Meat Pie Promotions (which explains the bloke we saw earlier wandering about in a pie costume - unless it was a local with a very odd fetish) - is Malvern's answer to Bright Eyes, SAM ISAAC. He and his band have been holed up writing new songs, all of which impress, but then he already has a 2009 album (Bears) and neatly formed tracks like 'Sticker, Star And Tape' to call upon. On another day (perhaps had we seen all of Brontide's set, or had the Cider Of Doom not brought on a bout of sentimentalism), the politeness and slick professionalism of his cute emo-indie might have been offensive - and indeed the fact that someone in the crowd is quietly singing the "These problems matter" song from the Dawson's Creek parody episode of Family Guy makes me chuckle - but all the same I find myself easily won over.

Walking back past the Loft we spot our over-amorous bouncer-kissing punter being pinned to the pavement just as his taxi announces its arrival with a blue flashing light. Can't tell you much about THE RAMBLINGS (Fat Fox) or DAN SMITH (Wedgewood Rooms), as we catch barely two minutes of either - but, based on those two minutes, the former walk a bluesy walk but with the lolling gait of the Happy Mondays, and the latter is a solo loopmeister and multi-instrumentalist in need of a stage name.

In need of an identity of their own are Cambridge outfit THE TUPOLEV GHOST (Edge Of The Wedge), whose unremarkable post-hardcore wears its influences on its sleeve (or, in the case of the frontman's Black Flag T-shirt, on its chest) and rarely suggests it has either the brawn or brains to step out from the shadow of the likes of Bluetip and Sparta. But I'm prepared to cut them some slack for three reasons: firstly, they're just finding their feet again after losing two band members; secondly, the single 'Diagrams' has a corking chorus; and thirdly, their mini-album, released on Oxford label Big Scary Monsters, features a track called 'Giant Fucking Haystacks'. I'm assuming the "Fucking" is an adjective and not a verb - otherwise that would just be weird.

Now HERE's something: a rabble with a double-bassist and an extraordinarily barnetted showman called Lou Vainglorious who look like Dexys Midnight Runners lost in Shoreditch and whose secret weapon is a bizarrely effective cover of MIA's 'Paper Planes'. A cynic might venture that Southend's HOODLUMS (Wedgewood Rooms) are at least three years too late for the Thamesbeat scene, which in any case only really spawned Mystery Jets in terms of bands with any longevity. But nevertheless, the likes of 'Estuary Boys' and the glam-gone-gypsy-with-terrace-shouting single 'The Beat Bop' (released on Nude) intimates that they've definitely got a certain something about them.

I've repeatedly missed THIS TOWN NEED GUNS (Edge Of The Wedge) when they've played in their native Oxford, so gawd bless the Southsea Fest organisers for putting them on tonight. Labelmates of The Tupolev Ghost on Big Scary Monsters until recently, they're math rock flavoured with a little early emo (think Cap'n Jazz, The Promise Ring - ie back when emo meant thick-rimmed glasses, rucksacks and Smiths-loving US punks, not black clothes, self-harm and My Chemical Toilet) - which makes me just a little nervous that their song 'Wanna Come Back To My Room And Listen To Some Belle & Sebastian' might not be satirical after all. Judging by the handclapping of an excited crowd, their popularity with the locals is well established - but, while I can admire how busy and tight they are, I can't say I genuinely love it.

Strolling back through the main room en route for the exit I note that PEGGY SUE have dropped the "& The Pirates" since I saw them supporting Blood Red Shoes (well, since gaining a drummer, to be precise) - rather inappropriately, really, given the context.

Back at the Loft, it's cooler and quieter than earlier in the day - almost as if people don't realise that one of the festival's highlights are about to hit the stage. Not that IT HUGS BACK could really be described as "hitting the stage" - these four fresh-faced youngsters are far too polite and restrained for that, and it's hard to believe that they call legendary label 4AD home. But debut album Inside Your Guitar actually makes a virtue of being largely devoid of visceral impact; instead, it's the subtlety that seduces. Live is no different: 'Q' is a gorgeous wash of fuzz, and when they do work themselves up into a bit of lather (relatively speaking), on 'Don't Know' and set closer 'Now + Again' (which has my companion jigging around with the keyboard player's mum and sister - it's that time in the evening...), it feels organic and natural not like a forced teenage temper tantrum.

And so to the headliners. And So I Watch You From Afar, Band Of Skulls, Tubelord, James Yuill and Official Secrets Act are all playing elsewhere along Albert Road, but we opt to stay put for THE JOY FORMIDABLE. My first impressions were far from favourable - will time, another viewing and copious quantities of alcohol change my perspective? Not really, is the answer. They're certainly looser and not quite so buttoned up as they were supporting Howling Bells (Ritzy Bryan actually turns off the icy stare on a few occasions long enough to crack a smile or two), and coo-pop-in-a-hurricane single 'Cradle' has won me over. But I'm left unconvinced generally, not least because the rest of their material (presumably taken from the debut LP given the comically awful name A Balloon Called Moaning) is rarely up to scratch. All the same, it's pleasing to see speaker stacks shaking and feel the floor vibrating at the end of the night, as Hong Kong Gardeners Club goes out with a flourish.

The music over, there's nothing left but for two deafened inebriates to dissect the day's entertainment - all for the bargainous price of £12 - over a curry, awarding the rich stuff to It Hugs Back and the flogging and plank-walking to George King.

My guess is that Southsea Fest could become an annual fixture in my calendar as well as that of Portsmouth. I wonder whether the organisers will realise the potential in making it an all-weekend event to coincide with Love Albert Road Day, which this year takes place the following weekend?

Anyway, a sneak preview of next year's bill: Oceansize, Wavves and Fish from Marillion. Perhaps.

So much for your highbrow Marxist ways…

White Town, Arthur & Martha.
Brixton Jamm. 24sep09.

Adam Cresswell and Alice Hubley line up behind their Moog and Korg synths as Arthur and Martha, with the confidence that comes with knowing they’ve got a triumphantly strong opening three. They put the same three at the start of their album Navigation so their ability to hook-in for the look-in comes as no accident. This is tried and tested sequencing.

Autovia, announced tonight as “I’ve Been Driving In My Car”, is a sauntering daydreamscape that evokes the open road; of late night journeys in icy climes. Musicforhairproducts, which follows, has a similarly reflective swish like, say, Kraftwerk’s Spacelab or Saloon’s Girls Are The New Boys. Cresswell’s vocals aren’t quite as successful in the live environment as Hubley’s, who often brings to mind Amelia Fletcher with her melodic cadence.



Third tune Kasparov is introduced by Cresswell by his asking “Has anyone been watching the chess? How’s Kasparov getting on? … seamless link there” which flags up Arthur & Martha’s innate sense of fun, yet doesn’t detract from the grandeur of their music.

There is also something beautiful about White Town’s sound as well, not that it immediately reveals itself, but there is something plaintive within Jyoti Mishra’s voice that give his songs an extra, subtle hook. Admittedly he looks quite incongruous as a perfomer, a long winter jacket worn on stage over a plaid shirt that billows over his paunch, whilst his face often breaks into a toothy grin as wide as all space.

Yet, and let’s not beat around the bush here, this man has had a bone-fide #1 hit which, in the old money anyway, makes him a pop-star. Not just any old hit either, Jyoti having taken bedroom indie-pop, the kind that usually got no further than the pages of a badly photo-copied fanzine, to the tip of the tip-top pop charse back in 1997 in the weeks between the Tori Amos Professional Widow remix and Blur’s Beetlebum.



You could argue that Baby Bird came from similar roots but he had stalled at #3 with You’re Gorgeous three months prior. White Town’ s Your Woman seemed to come from so far out of nowhere that copies of the single had snow on them. I grant you, it couldn’t have happened without Mark Radcliffe’s eager patronage (back in the great ‘Graveyard Shift’ days with the Boy Lard) or the work of Chrysalis records but the air brush wasn’t taken to it – no Fatboy Slim remix was required to seal the deal.

For many, it will be a long-forgotten one-hit wonder, for others the best #1 of the 1990’s, and what a treat it is to hear it again tonight, sung beautifully and greeted with the kind of cheer that goes beyond nostalgia, revealing a genuine and keenly felt affection for a significant moment in indie-pop history. I won’t crank up the hyperbole to say it’s the most significant #1 ever (to my mind that would be Ghost Town, anyway) but the Your Woman video being played out on TOTP? Thems were good times for the fanzine-writers, tape-compilers and charity-shop threads wearers of my vintage.

Frankly, it’s a treat to hear anything by Jyoti live, considering this is, apparently, his first live performance in London in White Town’s twenty-year history, and appearances anywhere are quite rare. Most of the other material tonight is taken from his most recent album Don’t Mention The War, and considering the live set-up is just Jyoti and his acoustic guitar along with a backing track, they remain compelling, especially Make The World Go Away and Whenever I Say Hello.

These are not the songs of a man chasing the zeitgeist, desperately trying for the burning attention of the spotlight once more. Instead, they show a man happy with his work and to appear at the fringe of the fringes as and when it suits.

White Town @ MySpace
Arthur & Martha @ MySpace

Feisty night

Future Islands, Ear Pwr, Shield Your Eyes.
Brighton Freebutt. 15sep09.

Judging by their opening couple of numbers it might be easy to cast Shield Your Eyes as just another run-of-the-mill post-punk/hardcore band. However, little bits of Hendrix-like magic squeeze out amidst the only-vaguely-in-control scream of vocalist/guitarist Stef Ketteringham. The guitar work and the bass are lithe and intense, but it is drummer Henri George that is in charge here. Usually all eyes are on whoever has got their mouth to the mic but this evening it is the man with the sticks that demands the attention with his percussive dexterity. He raises the bar and Ketteringham and bassist Tobias Hayes come to meet his challenge.



A solid foundation for the evening having been laid, Ear Pwr then come on and immediately own the dance floor, if for no other reason than they set up their table-top operation in the middle of it. Devin Booze flails around the arc of punters to the point where the stale sweat of the sleeping-in-the-van-and-travelling-light-clothing-wise US-band-on-tour becomes all too evident. He ensnares several front-rowers with the loop of the mic cord, whilst Sarah J. Reynolds hops up onto the stage for a short visit, before collapsing to the commandeered dance-floor singing into her partner’s mic now dangling down by her face. The songs such as I Like Waterslide and Future Eyes swirl around, all echo and pulsating electro, morphing together into one long, chaotically exhilarating performance.



Baltimore’s Future Islands are returning to the UK not long after their long-stint travelling around as part of the Wham City collective with Dan Deacon, and continue to offer more bounce and durability than an inflatable castle at Fat Camp. A Future Islands show is all about the fling, both in terms of Sam Herring’s infectious physicality, and the way the playschool chirp of J. Gerrit Welmers’ synth lines and William Cashion’s bass collide with Herring’s lyrical melancholy and arresting vocal performance that veers from a Rex Harrison-like waspishness to a Joe Cocker-esque dry growl.



Welmers and Cashion are studious behind their instruments whilst Herring bounds around like an uncaged ape, a ball of energy dripping with a quota of sweat usually attributable to a nelson of wrestlers after a particularly rigorous battle royale. They require two attempts at single Pinocchio after the bass amp switches off mid-way through take one, Herring quipping, “if it doesn’t happen next time, that’s it for Pinocchio. That song will be dead to me.” Happily, the amp plays ball when the eventually return to it, as it is, along with Tin Man, a clear highlight of their set.

They finish with their haunting ballad, Little Dreamer but are then requested to return for “one more…and make it a feisty one” from a particularly demanding audience member. Clearly a giving band, Future Islands were more than happy to oblige.

More gig pictures at SongKick
Future Islands @ MySpace
Ear Pwr @ MySpace
Shield Your Eyes @ MySpace

Repeat to defeat

EINSTELLUNG / ONE UNIQUE SIGNAL / FROM HERE WE RUN, 27TH AUGUST 2009, OXFORD CELLAR

Oh the perils of a lack of prior research. You'd have thought that by this stage in my gig-going career I might have appreciated its merits - whether that's so as to familiarise myself with the bands' latest releases or simply to be able to know who the hell's on stage.

But no, here I am puzzling at a bunch of kids playing overly fiddly mathy guitar pop with only a rudimentary grasp of the importance of being in sync, fronted by a girl who belongs to another type of band altogether, and thinking they don't sound much like I imagined they might. Only later do I realise that I've been watching From Here We Run and not fellow Oxford types and local post-rock supergroup From Light To Sound. Doh. Well, if they will both choose four-word-long monikers beginning with "From"...

And next, I suppose, are the headliners. Not so - the foursome (they must have recently shed a member) before us are actually One Unique Signal. The name is rather misleading in implying originality - they're clearly deeply familiar with the works of Spacemen 3, Mogwai and My Bloody Valentine amongst others - but the suggestion of a singularity of focus does ring true.

It turns out my companion and I aren't alone in being transported to pedal heaven by their narcotic and massively amped instrumental rock (well, it might as well be instrumental, the vocals being as lost amidst the chords as a small child in a dark forest) - their three-track LP Villains To A Man was recently selected as Album Of The Month on the Unsung site by someone who certainly knows his psychedelic onions, Julian Cope.

The arch drude's review finds him enthusiastically and in characteristic fashion extolling the virtues of repetition: "Many modern albums that contain almost all of the required elements for Inner Travel are let down simply by the brevity of the songs, and the indiscriminate manner in which half-hour jams stop dead, projecting the unsuspecting listener into a gargantuan (and highly useless) silence." I suspect, then, that Einstellung - yes, it's definitely them - might receive an even greater seal of approval than One Unique Signal.

To describe them as "interminable" would be to suggest negativity and criticism, but quite the contrary. Over the course of their three-song, near-hour-long set I find myself drifting from being impressed to being bored to being seriously amazed by what is a distinctively Brummie take on the Krautrock of Neu! and the like in that it's seen through the Sabbath-tinted glasses of a band who unashamedly hail from the Home of Metal. Of course, it's not to everyone's tastes or patience - my gig-going accomplice, for instance, votes with his feet and leaves mid-set - but for me there's something captivating about the way they shift ever so gradually from sounding like Yo La Tengo gently working themselves up a head of steam to resembling a stuck record round at Steve Albini's house.

It's readily apparent why they've been talked up by friends and acquaintances (Brum blogger RussL and Cardiff's Lesson No. 1 promoter Noel Gardner, who reviewed their latest record Wings Of Desire for Drowned In Sound, to name but two) and found a home on the label set up by Capsule, esteemed promoters of the Second City's annual Supersonic shindig.

(Incidentally, to say they've got a bit of an obsession with Wings Of Desire would be a gross understatement - not only is that the name of the aforementioned recent release, the Wim Wenders film is also where they take their name from and what's being projected, complete with subtitles, onto the bass drum for the duration of the set.)

When the set ends, I track down to the guy who was wandering about before the set trying to sell Einstellung merchandise. "What's on this one?", I ask, fingering a CD entitled 'Sleep Easy Mr Parker'. "That's one half-hour-long song - it's a tribute to the guitarist's father", comes the reply. "Ah, so it's the song they finished with." "Er, no, actually - that's a different half-hour-long song, but this one's just as good..." And so it proves.

A little bit of prehistory repeating

DINOSAUR JR / DEAD CONFEDERATE, WEDNESDAY 19TH AUGUST, OXFORD ZODIAC

Last time I was here, the choice of support act was unfathomable. Tonight, it most definitely is not. Dead Confederate boast a guitarist called Walker Howle and a sound that could only possibly be made by hairy men.

The Athens, Georgia outfit are currently enjoying the patronage not only of tonight's headliners but also fellow early 90s luminaries Meat Puppets, with whom they're about to tour the US, but their dense stew of grungey riffage - largely instrumental, as the vocals seem deliberately obscured - is a tad too mild-mannered and pedestrian to really excite, the moment at which critical mass would be achieved never quite arriving.

While the scientific debate over how the dinosaurs died out rages on, what caused the extinction of the original Dinosaur Jr line-up is well known and well documented: a sharp cooling-off of relations between bassist Lou Barlow and dictatorial songwriting genius J Mascis. So the announcement in 2005, sixteen long years later after Barlow got the boot, that the ice age was over and that the pair and drummer Murph were back from the dead was met with surprise as well as cries of "Jurassic Park!".

Four years on, and they've chosen Oxford to open their European tour in support of second comeback album Farm - a decision they might be forgiven for regretting early on. It seems rather churlish to complain about Dinosaur Jr sounding sludgy - it's like complaining about a bear having a dump in the woods - but the Academy's set-up is doing them no favours whatsoever. The crowd - overwhelmingly male, wider of waist and thinner of hair than in the band's heyday, filling the sweltering venue with a thick fug of stale sweat and farts - shuffles uncomfortably.

A few songs in, though, and things improve, it all starting to come together with 'I Want You To Know' from the new record. The bespectacled Lou - shirt sleeves rolled up and a little hesitant like a nervy supply teacher - begins to relax, while Murph appears as untroubled by the perpetual loss of drumsticks as he is by the loss of his hair. Meanwhile J - who a couple of hours earlier wandered into Cycloanalysts to enquire about fold-up bikes in that voice that never seems to be able to bear dragging itself out of bed - stands to the left of the stage flanked by an imposing trio of Marshall stacks resembling no-necked bouncers, a plump wizard widdling his way through the herculean solo of 'I Don't Wanna Go There' as his long straight grey hair is buffeted by a fan.

No snoozy proggy noodling here, though - not for a band who are perfectly equal parts Black Sabbath, Neil Young and hardcore punk. That the tensions of the past are behind them seems clear from the fact that, to our delight, they not only mix classic early singles 'Freak Scene' and encore-closing Cure cover 'Just Like Heaven' in with recent highlights like the snarling rifferama of 'It's Me' from 2007's Beyond, but also a clutch of fantastic tracks from the non-Lou period including 'The Wagon', 'Out There' and (best of all) 'Feel The Pain'.

Sure they aren't winning many new fans - I'd bet those rushing to the merch stall at the end are mostly buying the iconic cow T-shirt to replace one that's been through the wash so many times it looks leprous, like mine - and sure Farm suggests that evolution is beyond them. But bollocks to that - having come back from extinction is enough.

Messin’ about on the river

Lisa Knapp & Leafcutter John
London Canal Museum. 09sep09.

The programme for the evening’s entertainment describes tonight’s performance as a world premiere which, whilst undoubtedly true, seems a bit hyperbolical given this tour neither plans, nor often will be able, to stray far from the banks of the Grand Union Canal.

So, this is ‘Canal Music’, a collaboration between folk singer and instrumentalist Lisa Knapp, folktronic laptop hero Leafcutter John and a narrow boat called ‘The Chiswick’. It begins here tonight on the first floor of the London Canal Museum, situated on the Battlebridge basin near King’s Cross. It is certainly appropriate for them to begin surrounded by all these artefacts of history given that the two artists have saturated their recent lives with canal water.

This has involved listening to oral history recordings of ‘bargies’, meeting with surviving horse drivers from the early 50’s, truffling for canal songs in the Vaughan Williams folk song library at Cecil Sharp House (albeit largely fruitlessly) and sampling the sounds of the watery thoroughfares of today.



Tonight’s hour long performance is, as world premiere might have suggested to you, the first airing of their combined work which combines live sampling, improvisation and sonic manipulation with folk sung in a traditional style but with a contemporary edge, a kind of spoken word scat being played out by both performers at times. Vocal and sound loops are created live and cycled via pedals and the computer.

They blow air into a tank of water sat at the front of the stage, to loop the bubbles, trickle, clicks and dribbles. The sounds are recorded using a submersed hydrophone which was made by Leafcutter John from a discarded can of chick peas [see how to make your own here]. “Is that actual canal water?” shouts one audience member, dryly given the transparency of the H2Oand the fact that both performers are willing to dip into it. “Its actual drinking water” deadpans the Leafcutter in response.

There are great crashes as they accidentally touch the sides of the tank which are quickly edited out, and this opening gambit has rather the effect of sounding like an orchestra tuning up, only in full-view and as part of the performance.

Aside from manipulating these sounds on the lap-top, John often uses one hand to tap out some percussion or strap on a squeeze-box, whilst Knapp picks and bows at violin, banjo and autoharp. The pieces are gradually built layer-upon-layer, cool and metallic elements such as a sound like motors revving mixing with a fresh, flowing swish. Knapp’s ethereal voice adds at once both barrenness and a world-is-our-oyster troubadour calmness. Later in the set, singing wine glasses are also incorporated into a tune inspired by the ice pit within the museum building that was built in 1860 to store ice imported from Norway. Particularly haunting when fed through a subtle echo filter.

The performers and the Chiswick now move on, in probably the slowest tour since Moses led a Wallace Arnold package group around the Midian desert. The boat will essentially be a floating stage from here on in, pitching up bankside in Berkhamsted, Milton Keynes, Stoke Bruere, Hatton Locks and finally Birmingham.

That open-air bank-side setting will bring the best from this project I think, as I’m not sure what hardcore folkies turning up will make of it given the very modern, experimental approach to the concept which is sometimes unengaging, but often enrapturing. Indeed, this show is less about folk tradition and more of evoking an atmosphere of place, both geographically and historically, and the performers achieve that with some aplomb.

Leafcutter John website
Leafcutter John @ MySpace
Lisa Knapp @ MySpace

Rockin' all over the world UK

OK, so I went to a couple of festivals this summer and then wrote about them. Extensively. Here are the links:

Breeders-curated ATP (15th-17th May)
Friday (Giant Sand / The Bronx / Throwing Muses / Yann Tiersen / Bon Iver)
Saturday (CSS / Wire / Shellac / The Breeders / Tricky / Mariachi El Bronx / Holy Fuck)
Sunday (Times New Viking / The Soft Pack / Melt-Banana / Deerhunter / Gang Of Four / Shellac / Foals / Distortion Felix / X / DJ J. Rocc & Madlib)

Glastonbury (24th-29th June)
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday (Bjorn Again / Gabriella Cilmi / The Rumble Strips / Fucked Up / The Virgins / N.E.R.D. / Fleet Foxes / Lily Allen / The Specials / Neil Young / Animal Collective)
Saturday (Peter Bjorn And John / Eagles Of Death Metal / Spinal Tap / Broken Records / Dizzee Rascal / Crosby, Stills & Nash / Maximo Park / Bruce Springsteen / Jarvis Cocker / 2 Many DJs)
Sunday (Micachu & The Shapes / Status Quo / Brand New / Enter Shikari / Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Bat For Lashes / Tony Christie / Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds / Blur / The Prodigy)
Monday

All hail the partystarters

HOLY FUCK / IT HUGS BACK, 8TH MAY 2009, OXFORD ZODIAC

The last time Torontonian firewall-botherers Holy Fuck played in Oxford, back in October, watching the support band Kelpe was like being served a starter-sized portion of the main course before the main course proper arrived. By contrast, It Hugs Back are a bewildering choice, having very little in common with the headliners - except, that is, for the fact that they're really rather good.

Fans of Yo La Tengo circa Electr-O-Pura in particular will find much to love in the way songs like 'Q' unfold like a languid late Sunday morning stretch beneath a comfortingly snug duvet of fuzz, jangle and drone. Even when they get a bit louder, they could hardly be described as in-your-face - more tickle-you-under-the-chin.

The unassuming foursome look as though they might blush with shame at the mere mention of Holy Fuck's name, and afterwards, when I approach the merch stall and ask bassist Paul Michael for a copy of the album, he automatically assumes I'm referring to the headliners' LP, looking quite bewildered when I insist it's his band's debut Inside Your Guitar I'm after. Aww bless etc.

Kent isn't often associated with musical wondrousness, but 4AD is, and with the label also currently boasting the likes of Deerhunter, TV On The Radio, The National and Bon Iver, It Hugs Back are in good company - but company in which they can quietly hold their own.

This is a Friday night, though, and it's time for the band Friday nights were invented for.

Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh aka Holy Fuck are experimental and innovative but high-brow only in the sense that your brows are guaranteed to be raised skywards for the duration of their set. They should market themselves as an alternative to plastic surgery - not to mention ecstasy and Viagra.

Avant-garde electronica, funk, rave, Krautrock and punk are all grist to the mill of an outfit equally comfortable touring with Do Make Say Think and MIA, the disparate styles fashioned into aural smartbombs that target your pleasure centres and detonate to maximum effect. There are casualties all around me - a bloke in a panama hat, another in a pair of horizontally-barred red Klaxons glasses, a curly-haired first-time pillhead - leaping around unself-consciously, all self-control joyously offered up and surrendered to the band on stage. Getting an Oxford crowd to respond (let alone to dance) is so often like getting blood from a stone, but Holy Fuck appear capable of slashing open a vein.

While the majority of the material is drawn from LP - the pick being 'Super Inuit' and 'Lovely Allen' (their "ballad", they claim, not entirely disingenuously) which close the main set and a whiplash-fast 'Safari' which brings the curtain down - there are also a handful of unfamiliar, presumably new songs that up the funk, particularly via groovesome disco basslines and drums that suggest the rhythm section is becoming ever more integral to their sound.

A week later Holy Fuck will be playing the Breeders-curated ATP. To refer to tonight's show as a warm-up would be to imply that they can be anything other than positively molten. And that, frankly, would be very wrong indeed.

Chasing the running order

1234 Shoreditch Festival.
Shoreditch Park. 26jul09.

These smaller festivals are made for serendipity, a chance to wander about and find something new. That is increasingly so today as it soon becomes clear that the times given in the programme bear so scant relation to what’s actually going on on-stage that a printed listing of the contestants in the Hartley Wintney village-fete under-8’s fancy dress would have served just as well.

Still, it’s only a £15 in, I have no rigid agenda as to who to see and, well, I like a challenge. I’m not sure if my fellow mug-punters feel the same and certainly the bands on the second stage appeared a little disgruntled as they were forced to hammer through 15 minute sets due to the over-running.

Brevity is the soul of wit though, as well as being the key to not out-staying one’s welcome. KASMs (below) are a vibrant, jagged soul-punk outfit, but Rachel Mary Callaghan’s yelped vocals grate rather than pummel, so a quick in-and-out means there isn’t time to get too hacked off with it. Scott R Walker’s guitar work does the job though.



An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (below) have been reviewed here before, and only did 15 minutes of their pencilled-in 30 then anyway. So, everything remains in place, and is even a little more thrilling this time, what with their cataclysmic drum beat; their incessant fuzzcore; and their primal soul holler coming in three different shades as each member takes the lead mic.

LR Rockets were first on when I arrived (you can thank their valedictory remark of “Oh, and by the way, we’re LR Rockets” for me being able to identify them for you) rolling out some sweaty and dishevelled Parkinsons’-like art-punk, vocalist Le Bomb prowling the empty grass arc in front of the safety barriers in lieu of a dancing crowd.



Out on the main stage, the unfeasibly young looking Lion Club were playing half an hour earlier than billed. With crowds still only trickling in, and many picnicking outside due to food being confiscated on the way in (I found myself two apples light after picking up my wristband), the Club didn’t appear to be overjoyed with their rescheduling, singer Lewis Henry Rainsbury misanthropically announcing “luckily for you, this is our last song.” Far as I could tell, people were quite receptive to the big expansive keyboard sweeps in their arch pop-rock endeavours, but Lion Club seemed happy to do the off anyhow.

Back inside the second stage’s tent flaps, Wild Palms (thanks to the good people at MySpace for the ID on this occasion) were chopping about, drums nibbling around; their singer Lou Hill looking like Zammo MacGuire, the vein on his neck popping as he prowled. He’d come in an 80’s shirt of many misguided colours running together, but at least this made a change from the uniform black on show thus far.

Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man brought the sartorially monochrome back to the fore for their main stage set, but at least Frederick Blood-Royale had the decency to put a suit on for the occasion. Arguably he took it a little far on returning after a lengthy instrumental break in a lengthy grey coat with a pointy hood. Still, their Birthday Party-esque rumbling punk blues was agreeable enough.



After ...Air Pump in the tent came the duo Banjo Or Freakout. Alessio Natalizia sings and manipulates guitar, sampler and snare drum, often all at once, whilst his colleague Daniel Boyle rat-a-tat’s away behind him. Their second tune sounded like an electric train hurtling towards the inner ear as the two player’s clattered together in an attempt to beat it back. Ploughing a similarly defiant vein later, Factory Floor brought into unison a crackling electro-beat, brooding PJ Harvey vocals and a guitar being bowed like a carving knife attacking stubborn duct tape. They climaxed with an aggressive tumult of screaming feedback, then wandered off.

As a contrast back outside, Polly Scattergood was playing her cutesy and twee summery electro-pop under a sky that was refusing to play ball. Later on, Patrick Wolf would alter his set to be in keeping with the elements, respecting Mother Nature, but disrespecting whoever it was that threw their drinks can at him. “Go back to the dole queue, motherfucker” was the end of long ranted riposte. Still, Patrick is always likely to be provocative to audiences that are not his own, being that he is the most ostentatiously dressed pop hero since David Bowie packed his Ziggy Stardust costume up in the loft next to his old Beano’s. Yet for all the make-up and clothing unbuttoned to the navel, young Patrick makes a wonderfully ambitious classic pop sound that follows in the lineage of Bowie, Scott Walker and ABC. Nowt wrong with a little flamboyance or even, as in Patrick’s case, a lot.



Aside from the serendipity, festivals can also act as a point of reconciliation. I can only ever remember walking out on bands twice for reasons other than transport home. The two bands were Mega City Four and The Warlocks, both of whom bored me to the point of anger. The Four got a second chance at a small festival gig in Gosport, and failed to win me back. Now, six years on, Warlocks got their chance, and whilst their records will continue to be thumbed past in record shops, I can happily say we have reached a point of partial reconciliation, even if Bobby Hecksher’s voice continues to detract more than it adds. Yet, I liked the fact that they all looked a little silly in their war-paint (each face sporting a different tiny coat of arms) and I am much more receptive than I was to getting locked into a peering-at-me-tootsies post-rock groove. Others do it better, but I reckon even more do it a lot worse. This is about as faint praise as you can get, but its progress nonetheless.

After all this came the final two acts of the day on the second stage. S.C.U.M.’s psychedelic, Joy Division-with-more-showmanship kinda thing was just starting to grab me when the power was cut on them for over-running. Those plugged in could only raise their arms in an incredulous ‘WTF??!?!?’, however drummer Melissa Rigby gamely clattered through to their end of the tune with a ridiculously wide grin on her face. Every drummer wants their Cozy Powell moment, it would appear.



Getting Chrome Hoof’s many instruments sound-checked was proving problematic, the soundman having to speak to the band through the house-speakers rather than the monitors to get his message across. His message containing many heavy sighs and a final exasperated “let’s just get on with it, I’ll sort it as we go along, this PA is a fucking joke.” Not that this appeared to affect the band, but then you can pack up any troubles in a uniform set of silver robes, I guess. Also, chants of “Hoof, Hoof, Hoof” would suggest a less than 100% ideal sound mix isn’t going to affect the on looking punters too much.

Besides, the ‘Oof are arresting in every sense so only the real nerds would notice. They work through, free-noise, shimmering glam jazz and freak-soul. Not only that but when bassist and co-founder Leo Smee (formerly of Cathedral) has a barbute-like helmet shoved on his head, this gives him the threat and energy to deliver death metal to a disco-pants crowd. The Rakes are still playing the main stage as we file out after this, but checking their progress would seem a bit post-Lord Mayor’s Show after Chrome Hoof’s captivating display.

More photographs at SongKick

Short cameo innings, flashing the bat

The Duckworth Lewis Method.
Spitalfields Rough Trade East. 13jul09.

If you were to compile a list of subjects on which an album of concept pop might be sold, it is likely ‘cricket’ would not feature high upon the list. In fact, I’d go further, I’d imagine it’d be somewhere near the bottom, between ‘Oswald Mosley’s sock drawer’ and ‘Budget Meals for the Committed Nosepicker’.

Undeterred, Thomas Walsh, formerly of Pugwash, and The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, have plumped for the cricket option and, if you’ve gone that far, you might as well name the project after the mathematical algorithm used to sort out rain-affected matches (much, I imagine, to the chagrin of the Welsh language minimalist electro artist of the same name). Furthermore, if you’ve found the whole thing perfectly logical up to this point, then you’d meet the notion of them writing a song about a single Test match delivery with a shrugged “yeah, fair enough.”

Mind you, it was a good delivery, it’s not like the song in question (Jiggery Pokery) relates to a Phil DeFreitas dot ball, ably defended on the front foot by Ravi Shastri. Instead it is a Flanders & Swann-like rag that replays, several times, Shane Warne’s first ever delivery in Ashes cricket, from the perspective of bamboozled, but hungry, England batsman Mike Gatting.



It’s not a comedy album, although it is certainly a novelty, and the spirit of music hall softly ‘I say I say’s throughout. That’s not to say it’s myopic though as Sweet Spot provides a glam stomp, whilst Gentlemen & Players comes straight outta the parlour.

Perhaps the whole thing is a little too cutesy and I defy anyone to get through it without cringing at one line at least (I’ll nominate “Now we’re driving Bentley’s, playing Twenty20” from The Age Of Revolution as mine). Yet, as with all Hannon’s material, it remains utterly charming and the interplay between him and Walsh here tonight is equally so. Mind you, I think they thrive on the stubbornly unfashionable nature of it, Hannon announcing Gentlemen & Players by saying “Here’s another song about cricket”, emphasising the final word and following it with a cackle that some might cast as malevolent.

Matt Berry’s treacly-voiced-rakish-cad-for-hire shtick appears not only in cameo on the record but, impressively for a free nine-song set, here in-store at Rough Trade, although his monologue gets a bit lost through a PA which fails to do real justice to any of the songs.

Perhaps to emphasise the music hall element, if Hannon’s striped grey blazer and the arm-less spectacles teetering at the top of his nose aren’t achieving that on their own, they try to get an on-stage game going. However, given the space limitations, Hannon swings and misses several times, before Walsh takes up the bat and proceeds to smack the spongy ball into a front row punter’s mush.

Which is about as ‘in-yer-face’ as the Duckworth Lewis Method get, their songs being so cosy and warm, children could wear them as winter hats and pet dogs would immediately curl up and sleep in front of them.

The Duckworth Lewis Method @ MySpace

Blueswater

Thomas Truax, Boycott Coca Cola Experience, Thee Intolerable Kidd.
Tamesis Dock. 01jul09.

Outside, the nation’s most famous river is reduced to the status of a lurking bystander. The Thames, a body of water for which they had to build a barrier to forestall its latent temper, is tonight but a murky, brownish window licker. Tonight, by hook or by crook, we will rock. Thankfully, due to a secure mooring, there will be no roll.

Indeed, during the Boycott Coca Cola Experience’s dry, DaDaist set, the wonky guitar repetitions become all the more disorientating playing against the ebb and flow of the waters beneath. Tim Siddall’s deadpan vocal is a little more re-assuring, even if the tie around his neck, seemingly made from cheap plastic bunting, really isn’t.



His is essentially, guitar (and brief kazoo) aside, a speaking part, very reminiscent of One More Grain’s Daniel Patrick Quinn, with punning, surrealism and wry satire it’s focus. “Camper van/sales pitch/hesitation” goes one chorus, whilst he makes use of the fact that the world beneath the waterline is sometimes visible through the windows by dedicating a song to the watching fish. Sadly for them, the ducks who wobble past seconds later are not as generously bestowed.

What links the bands tonight is the blues, but with all three acts coming at it from vastly different angles. BC-CE go sardonically psychedelic, whilst Nathaniel Kidd (a.k.a. Thee Intolerable Kidd) adopts a more traditional approach. Got up like a prospective councilman in 1930’s Oklahoma about to sag armchair-wards after a hard day on the stump, his music sounds jarringly pained, adopting a similar vocal tone to Conor Oberst. Early in his set he harmonises with Victoria Yeulet, similarly period dressed and seemingly having come straight from behind a village fete cake stall. It feels pretty noirish all told, perhaps because Kidd, throughout, emotes vocally yet is oddly expressionless beneath his severe side parting and loose braces, staring blankly into the crowd from time to time. Arresting stuff, regardless.



Comedian Rich Hall used to say that there is a thin line between madness and genius; Bob Dylan played a guitar and a harmonica at the same time and people said “wow, he’s a genius!” Yet if he’d gone to the effort of strapping a set of cymbals to his knees…

Thomas Truax deals with this balancing act by taking his one man band shtick off the scale completely. Aside from his guitar, Truax is physically uncluttered, yet the stage around him looks like a more-hope-than-expectation, things-we-found-spinning-out-of-a-crashed-Luton-van yard sale. Thomas Truax, essentially, is the Wilf Lunn of garage blues, abrasive mechanical folk and flight-of-fancy alt.pop, building his own instruments to meet the needs of the modern rail-riding rock n’roll troubadour.



‘Mother Superior’ supplies any required beats, being a collection of pram wheels, levers and long needles working to the same principle as a musical box as it whirrs around. You half expect a cage to gently lower itself on someone at some point as the rest of us all shout “Mousetrap!” Elsewhere there is the ‘Stringaling’ (a drum attached to a length of drier tubing and a number of small instruments and levers), and the Backbeater, which swirls whilst srapped to his shoulders like a percussive roulette wheel. That he plays the Stringaling’s tube as though it were an inhaler is perhaps appropriate given that he is currently touting an album of covers of songs from David Lynch films as the look of it is visually reminiscent of the perversions of Dennis Hopper’s character in Blue Velvet.

Most famously amongst the custom instrumentation though is the Hornicator, an adapted Gramophone horn that performs a number of functions, being tapped at for percussion, as well as being sung into. Truax builds these sounds up into loops which he then accompanies himself.



“We may not have had a machine, but we had a contraption” said Martin Bell after winning the Tatton seat from Neil Hamilton in 1997. Thomas Truax has a number of them and, after a while, it kind of distracts from the quality of the songs, as you stare fascinated at the clockworkings of the instruments, and not giving the actual compositions their due.

Truax copes with this by leaving the stage at one point and performing amongst the dangling feet up on the mezzanine of the narrow room, off mic and sans ‘bits’, thereby stealing back the focus from his creations. Why Dogs Howl At The Moon part 1 as a response to a request is also memorable, and not just for the fact we all add our own yowls into the general direction of the brandished Horn.

Links
Songkick - more of my photos from the gig
Thomas Truax @ Myspace
Boycott Coca Cola Experience @ MySpace
Thee Intolerable Kidd @ MySpace

All night party!

Dan Deacon & The Wham City Ensemble, Future Islands, Adventure, Teeth Mountain
University of London Union. 05jun09.

This four act Hubbubalooza has been touring around the US, Australia and Europe for three months now, the three support acts doing their shtick prior to linking up with Dan Deacon to flesh out his gonzo-electro party sound. One sensed no weariness either, when it was announced that one of the players was having to leave the tour tonight, he was spirited to the back of the room on audience hands, then back to the stage, as was another player celebrating their birthday.

It was that kind of night, Dan Deacon being not only a manipulator of sound, his own voice and light (the bureau in front of him used, amongst other things, to control a number of small spotlights across the stage, not to mention the glow of a neon green skull) but also of audience. The ensemble comes largely from Baltimore’s Wham City collective that has precious little agenda aside from, it appears, to create and encourage further creation in others. Tonight that collective gets a few hundred extra members, as the band are as much a stage turn for us, as we are a live floor show for them.



The start of the show was a protracted thing; Dan requested that we all grab the back of the head of a nearby person, stare into their eyes and repeat after him. Several hundred people thus delivered a mantra into the eyes of their friends, a mantra that began “Fuck you!”, weaved through vengeance, bloodshed and the acquisition of the Austin Powers box-set, and appeared to be an affirmation of fraternity and love.

We were then required to countdown from 40, although we were allowed to miss out numbers 39-14, building up our voices so that by the end they were a formless caterwaul of noise. This provided the perfect crackle and buzz for the band to step their great leap forwards and into the start proper. It was a euphoric moment, a festival moment, only in a sweaty room. Which is better.

Dan Deacon is an unlikely looking figure to be in command of all this. Whilst setting up the stage he appeared in his massive 80’s breakfast telly specs, balding pate, insubstantial beard, rather more substantial tub of a belly, hole-ridden t-shirt and baggy cardigan. Yet come show-time he, along with the rest of his players, were transformed into white jumpsuits and looking like a kind of experimental showbiz army. Certainly the four guys around the massive table of synths looked like generals in a war-room; generals able to cut a little rug anyway. Behind Dan there was also a three-strong percussive attack, and two xylophones on the go, amongst other things.



The show continually broke off into what can be only described as Butlins camp games at verbal gunpoint. We were asked to form a circle in the centre of the room [see above], in which a couple of folks were pulled out to lead the room in interpretive movement, like ad-hoc Lizzie Webbs. Dan then split the room in two for what became a tag-team barn-dance-cum-break-dance face-off. All the rooms a stage. Not just the room either. Later we were required to form an ever growing guard of honour that snaked out of the room, down the stairs, out the building and round the corner (despite the rain) before curving in on itself.

The result of these clusterfuck parlour games means that curfew was broken by a good half an hour, a situation celebrated with a song that flashed up the slogan “All Night Party” on the back wall accompanied by Dan’s manipulated uber-Chipmunk squeak suggesting the same. Good times had.

What of the supporting players though? Teeth Mountain played a drone that was both glottal and reedy, like throat singing, only reached with violins, autoharp, saxophone and laptops. Over the top of this was a spirited tribal thwack from the two percussive rumblers. Their second piece featured more conventional instrumentation (albeit with a 3rd lap-top added along with a guitar) and twinkled like a solitary wind chime in an otherwise foreboding Un Chien Andalou wind-tunnel. They took the whine of guitar and the stage whisper of distorted voices and build it up into a wall of intense noise.



Before placing eyes on him, Adventure (aka Benny Boeldt) sounded a lot like Kraftwerk if they were fat guys in Hawaiian shirts playing high-octane Tetris. The loud garmenting was in place once I took up a spot with a view, but there was certainly no Teutonic discipline in Boeldt’s carry. Boeldt often played his synths seemingly one handed like a snooker pro feigning nonchalance and fond of a behind-the-back trick shot. As he came to a conclusion, the projection behind him shouted in five foot capitals “FUCK YES” which is probably a better summary than I’ll manage if I keep writing all day.

The most beguiling of the supports though were North Carolina’s Future Islands [see pic above]. Gerrit Welmers was make his synths talk in hi-energy electro-pop, William Cashion, with a dream catcher hanging off the end of his bass and a polite moustache on his friendly round face, was supplying a post-punk-funk bounce whilst up front squat vocalist Sam Herring was owning the stage like AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, yet supplying a energetic take on Joe Cocker’s phlegmy croon. It made for a peculiar mix, but not an incompatible one.

“Looks like I may have had a pants malfunction” said Herring early in the set, but this didn’t cause him to reign it in any, gripping onto his belt as he threw his swarthy and chunky frame around the stage. They often talk of football coaches who “head every ball.” Herring, by the same token, manages to drag in the charming sweep of each synth hook with his relentlessly hammy stage-prowl. Joy unconfined, in short.

Dan Deacon @ MySpace
Future Islands @ MySpace
Adventure @ MySpace
Teeth Mountain @ MySpace