GIG REVIEW: Future of the Left @ Tunnels, 17/1/09

7:21pm. A well-meaning front blows in, but pressure is generally depressed.

Opening band Turning 13 aim straight for a Fugazi slink but don't quite have the meanness and drama that that sort of thing demands. The sub-Weezer vocal in particular really lets them down. When their unassuming guitarist fills in their regular between-song-tuning-intervals (think a massively embarrassed Sonic Youth) with nicey nice stage platitudes, we note something else; they're local bairns, but there's no hint of any culture or personality underneath the breathy-high Billy Corgan vox and workaday dual guitars. To malignly praise them faintly: Not disagreeable.

8:10pm. Prospects changeable, but chances of hail are good.

"It's impossible to look up while playing a Telecaster, see." So notes a friend, not unkindly, of followup support This Familiar Smile. The cultural abnegation goes on as the stalwart Glasgow lads ply their America/Nowhere-sourced disjointy posthardcore at us. Like At The Drive-In without the psychosis which was always the most compelling thing about them. The high, high nonfalsetto male vox owes as much to Pete Wentz as it does Cedric Bixler-Zavala, though. They do mean it, the voxman in particular providing a highly expressive presence, but there's nothing really to distinguish them, emocore being, even now, the most market-surplus genre.

At least they give us space from the dual-guitar flatline, doing the odd schizoid splitrhythm in service to the "experimental" thing. Some of the guitar lines are convincing, but most are intricately crashing bores. The frenetic wears thin. Then "Red Wine" adds a drop of Snow Patrol to the mix, before the set mumphs back to the hysteric-rock and leads on out.

9:08pm. Outlook humid with a chance of volcanoes.

Now. From Wales' premier iconoclasts I may have expected a bug-eyed Nick Cave-style stalk-onstage - especially since Cave's Grinderman are cousins in primality to this lot - such is singer/guitarist Andrew Falkous' reputation. Instead Future of the Left make an unpretentious entrance, and offer the barest of banter before tearing into new-album opener "Arming Eritrea."

Right! Being suddenly, obviously, children facing a war, we're evacuated, but sent the wrong way; right into the bomb corridor of the Cardiff bastards. FOTL take everything that is right about metal - the iconoclasm, the transgression, the eye on the extremes of human experience, and most of all the seething anger - and lose the posture, the Gothic nonsense and the forced immorality. Falkous' bark contains more energy, more spitefully triumphant spirit than any I've seen. He's totally redfaced from bellow #2 right through to the end of the set an hour later.

This is battering music; riffing, droning, with a truly monstrous bass transforming proper skronk cadences into a dark groove. It's exhilarating, ex nihilo. Somehow they strut through the fury, holding court above their own storming sound. Each song is choked off, as if before it was ripe; they switch between songs clinically, the next starting near-instantly after each pathetic applause peters out. This has the effect of making it seem like the band has a grudge against us, or perhaps it's nothing personal and it's everything under the sun that's at fault. You will be human, won't you?

In between being buffeted about, I play that awful game, the genre-generation game, but as usual can't come up with anything that doesn't sound like a hideous slander: What are they? Sludge-punk? Industrial classic rock? Indie-metal? No; this isn't sleaze, it isn't sludge, this isn't metal. This is what post-hardcore should have been.

The relentless crashing does begin to drag, but as soon as it does we are faced by Falkous switching to keyboard, the lecherous groove of "Manchasm." The follower, "Youneedsatanmorethanheneedsyou" is Portishead, if Portishead were to cross the wrong holiday-cottage-burning posse on a moor.

The trio channel more mordant power, more size than three men ought be able. I try to remind myself that this is only three men hitting bits against bits, but this doesn't help me, doesn't detract from the sheer arrest, affront of them. Kelson Matthias' continental bass chords, and drummer Jack Eggleston ("The 300 Spartan who went to Gregg's for four months instead of Thermopylae") are maybe the basis. But Falkous alone has the singleminded, licentious power that Henry Rollins used to have, underscored by his deeply odd sense of humour. Who else could spout things like "Suddenly these ostriches / do not seem so interesting" or "She's got a lot of pickled onions. / Hanging from her thighs" without a hint of being twee or puerile; who can be this nasal and screeching without being petulant; or tote this potency, lacking arrogance? We're not even being lectured here.

Towards the end, Falkous intros "Adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood", with a surprised air as "This one is...a song?" After a lowkey acapella intro, the damn thing erupts into a massive glorious White Stripes/Pantera riff, and since those two bands broke (presumably under the weight of their owns riffs) there's been little to match it. Anyone who can carry off the chords to "Adeadenemy" while still making it dance music can have no fear or beast nor man nor sounds.

We are warned, in a tone brooking no contradiction (ie. enthusiasm), that we have reached the last two songs, and that the last one will take months - we will in fact age during the course of it, and that if we want encores, we should go away and play them in our heads. "In an alternate world not much like our own, this is the single", this said of "The House That Hope Built", a deceptive, almost folksy thing with much of their venom retracted, like those sea snakes that feign death to attract prey.

Then begins that most mythical rock show phenomenon; the actually enthralling 10min jam, their "Cloak The Dagger". Falkous grows more and more disillusioned with his guitar as the thing progresses, torturing the poor thing, parading it before him, shoving a drumstick under the bridge and producing merciless wails that'd break the Geneva Convention if Gibson SGs were creatures. Eggleston is trance-fast, mutative, desparate to get rid of the beats in his arms. Matthias spirals into his own bassline, complementing nothing but human nature. After a psychotic stint on keyboard again, Falkous begins to steal Eggleston's kit piece by piece in the anner of a parent removing an overused toy. He waves it around him, proferring, teasing with a hihat. The drumline doesn't falter or slow at all, the flow on the remaining pieces instead intensifying.

With a light conductor's flourish, Falkous cut off the "song" in sync and they go.



SETLIST

1. Arming Eritrea
2. Chin Music
3. Wrigley Scott
4. Plague of Onces
5. Small Bones Small bodies
6. Manchasm
7. Youneedsatanmorethanheneedsyou
8. Stand By Your Manatee
9. Land of My Formers
10. Fingers Become Thumbs
11. Yin/Post-Yin
12. My Gymnastic Past
13. Adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood
14. The House That Hope Built
15. Cloak The Dagger

"Journalism" isn't exactly an exclusive sort of category. However.

NOTE FROM 23/11/09



Nick Griffin's face is everywhere. I can see him a bit even with my eyes closed. Every shop has a newstand with many-copies, many-angles, many different bulges of his many dead eyes on each front page.And I can feel his physics at work. He is creating magnetic poles* on a plane figure, this country. We are divided by their action-at-a-distance, their atavism in suits. Though their rhetoric is no creative force. Their impulse only politicises and stokes a sick reaction, a culture-fire that was already entrenched. In this sense too he is a mere buboe, a feedback symptom....

Except of course, the Daily Sport! Today more than ever, it is wonderfully evident that it simply occupies an entirely different reality, one which we might dub "Pornspace".

Pornspace is a lurid, politically indeterminate land, as oblivious to world events as are we all at the plateau of masturbation,** which it doesn't seem unfair to assume the staff are maddeningly stuck at when they fabricate The Sport, our window on this realm, each and every day.

All entities of this state are either wankobjects or perpetually taking a spot kick, the same spot kick, over and over and bending and over...It is an innocent place , if you equate innocence with ignorance as it's too easy to do. Pornspace knows about our tawdry, sordid timespace, and wants none of it. All that chitchat, all those words, all those CLOTHES!

* Yes, this does sound like a particularly absurdist method the BNP might choose to enact when "repatriating" central Europeans.

** A mountain range to the north of Pornspace.

GIG REVIEW: Pixies at the SECC, Glasgow
Date: October 4, 2009

The gig kicks off and heads south with the distinctive-enough pop goth stylings of Glasgow’s Sons and Daughters. I suppose I should stress: the songs are great; slinky, crafted, Phrygian things. Hell, in places it’s almost rock music.

In particular, the opener, 'Gilt Complex' is a tasty Cramps-meets-Siouxsie blast. But they’re so apologetic for being onstage - so hesitant, perhaps, to be getting in the way of the Pixies - that they don’t convince us, and fail to exploit the sexy potency they have on record. This, coupled to singer Adele Bethel’s breathless, bland-nothings banter, means that all they get out of the crowd is a sense of polite observation and patient foot-tapping.

A couple of nice tribute songs – one to the infamous Glasgow lech Bible John, one for Johnny Cash - arouse some passion by the end, and they slink gratefully off, duty discharged.

A beat.

An eerie ambient backing track begins to play. “Un chien Andalou” by Luis Buñuel rolls on the big screen. And, one by silhouetted one, the Pixies take the stage, motionlessly watching the film, as no doubt we are meant to.

It takes about fifty seconds of this for what I suppose is Glasgow’s natural aversion to pretension to kick in, with a big mon directly behind me bellowing, “What is this, Depeche Mode? Get the fuckin Pixies oan!”

Well, aye. If you’re looking for someone to blame for art-rock, officer, I’d inform on these guys in an instant. The tape continues for five or six minutes, mostly to fidgeting and light-hearted heckles. Sure, it’s obtuse, but is it art?

Maybe. The pretence to art. A dance around art. That’s maybe all the Pixies ever really were. The namedrops, the airs and the mystery of it all, which is all that most art-rock ever accomplishes.

But you can forgive them all that – the conceit, the pondering, even that Minotaur boxset monstrosity – when they’re this tight, this fractious and ingenious, this much the morbid Latino art-punks sporting a set of Dali’s eyes. No one in rock has matched their resolved dischords – see “Dead” for a glorious, cresting example – or the masking of potent melody inside barbs.
I'll confess here that I went to the gig imagining decay, signs of cash-in or of strain. And, while Frank Black looks disturbingly like a shaven John Goodman, his voice remains as demented, as high – higher in the most part than Kim Deal’s lines go – as ever. Screeching into his middle age.
Bassist Kim Deal carries the banter – none of the others speak a word to us – doling out B-side info and presenting a deep-set permanent grin.

They get b-sides out of the way before stalking their way through 1989’s Doolittle, in order, in full. It’s an eclectic thing, and they’re unafraid to actually play the songs rather than repeat them by rote, so 'Mr Grieves' takes on a touch of morbid ska and the parody “La La Love You” more of a leer than is canon.

The first encore is the other two period b-sides, one a wonderful, understated version of the album track “Wave of Mutilation” and the other the incandescent space-punk of “Into The White”.

It’s not thirty seconds before they return. Hopping out for another encore, and as delighted as she’s been all night, Kim Deal tells us: “We played here in ’91 but the stage buckled. Tell your mom and dad we finished the set, yeah?”

A breakneck selection from Surfer Rosa and Come on Pilgrim follows, displaying their earlier, fiercer, Spanish legacy. It’s an intense parade; seven songs hurtled through in 15mins, before Kim flips a coin to choose… and announces with a wink the last, courtesy number, “Where Is My Mind?” to general euphoria.

A group bow closes the faux-theatre they’ve laboured on. It is a beery kind of intelligentsia that stumble gleefully to the exits.



ALBUM REVIEW
"I Told You I Was Freaky" by Flight of the Conchords
http://www.musicvice.com/reviews/flight-of-the-conchords_i-told-you-i-was-freaky.html

There is a special hell for those who analyse comedy as if it added anything to the joke, but with musical comedy I think I’ll risk it - there’s enough few factors flying about: the lyrical (puns, incongruous content), the musical (parody and allusion, timing), the characters (the narrator’s voice, usually the butt of the tale) and then the visual (Tim Minchin’s stare, Bill Bailey’s hair, Jemaine’s pout) which this and their debut – effectively just soundtrack albums – obviously don’t convey. The Conchords have buckets of each element, but the audio-only version isn’t the place to start. (For those of you not yet hooked to the series, in it the songs tend to breakup the fantastic deadpan tension that the awful protagonists generate just by being themselves, and without the visual cues the songs were written to, some of the songs fall short.)

Anyway, it opens incredibly well – the note-perfect “Hurt Feelings” is as great as the first album’s “Rhymenoceros;” each takes thug-rap and points it in a wonderfully inappropriate direction, a spot-on back-and-forth flow about being a sensitive gangsta.

Then there’s “Fashion Is Danger”’s callouts to Thatcher and Reagan. Holla, girl.

The second series and its songs have been accused of unoriginality, which is something of a dense accusation to make of any form of parody. The set is perhaps overladen with cheap RnB or hiphop send-ups – are there any easier targets in music than the Black Eyed Peas? It’s also not hard to see that they have narrowed, going from their earlier encapsulation of whole styles and genres to more straight-up Weird Al spoofs of specific songs – “You Don’t Have To Be A Prostitute” from the Police’s “Roxanne”, “Sugalumps” from the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps”, “We Both In Love With A Sexy Lady” from the R Kelly/Usher duet “Same Girl” and the Dark 80s Bowie mash-up of “Fashion Is Danger.” The quasi-covers aren’t bad songs in any sense – “Sugalumps” in fact gets transcendent when it moves through a Fresh Prince bridge into a fantastic Motown movement – but they are lazier, closer to novelty pieces. And we relisten to musical comedy – if at all – when it manages to get beyond novelty and into tiny universal truths, here best represented by a rare reprieve from the hard backbeat, “Rambling Through the Avenues of Time”:

‘Yes, the girl I described,
she’s as real as the wind,
It’s true, I saw her today,
The other details are inventions
Because I prefer her that way.’

and the glorious choir of Jemaine’s exes, “Carol Brown.”

Each of the duo has an incredible voice, but the loveably-awful characters they don often bind them to a slightly incompetent delivery; the musical part of the gag seems to rely on their being a bit flat even when they're in giddy falsetto. This is most clear on the numbers which flop in the other areas – particularly “Demon Woman”, Slavic shanty “Petrov, Yelyena And Me”, the limp “Friends” and even the title track.

They're still best-in-class – especially if you're taking the likes of the turgid Lonely Planet as comparison – still funny at their worst. But unless you’re really jonesing for a portable fix of digibongo acapella-rap-funk, you should just spend an extra fiver and get the second series boxset; the magical pokerfaced awkwardness of that renders even the thin moments on this admirable.

GIG REVIEW:
Idlewild @ The Warehouse, Aberdeen, 6th November 2009

SUPPORT: Sparrow and the Workshop.

Now here’s an anomalous thing: a wobbleboard in the drum kit; a high, sweet country vocal; a folky milieu and a self-conscious (literally shoegaze) look. Support act Sparrow and the Workshop come on all shyly, all potentially-twee…and we walk right into the trick. This is folk with machineguns; this is country with a groove, or else surf with a grimace. Singer Jill O’Sullivan is the first jolt, toting a voice something like PJ Harvey meets Dolly Parton; a real fierceness which haunts or pierces equally well, set in a tender lilt. The change in her between quiet, sweet compere and cresting, sweeping Southern Diva is entrancing. But perhaps that’s just me.The blends of sound they produce are quietly impressive, inventive - they’re unafraid of unfashionable things like a’cappella and sudden fermata. “I Will Break You”, a threat in beatific alt-country form, is sweetly introduced with the caveat ‘No, not you guys!’ The alternately soothing, storming “Into the Wild” is topped with a solid minute of bludgeoning rock outro. Overall, it’s charming and unexpectable; get on it.

IDLEWILD

It's a while before the evergreen indie lot slouch on. Roddy Woomble is in his Unabomber aspect; and moreover this is suddenly a hairy band, visually indistinguishable from, say, the Biffy Clyros of the world. Their songs are encoded things; stories one way or other, but told with contradiction: simple sophistication, raw detachment. They're tales told in a dialect of thought that is not quite our own. Which is a funny thing to find oneself saying of power-pop.

The set doesn’t quite catch me at first, working as it does through a Warnings/Promises number and two slightly formulaic new songs before matching the old dramatic urgency with...a song from 2000, “Listen to What You’ve Got”. Still. An inspired, stop-start rendition of “Idea Track” cements a hold on the crowd which lasts throughout. In fact, the setlist is generally heavy on the earlier albums, when they were posthardcore-with-a-heart-of-gold. The audience only really flex when picks from “Hope Is Important” or “100 Broken Windows” are brought out, and I'm no dissenter.

“Readers and Writers”, the new single, is a surprise; the clearest token yet of the band allowing themselves to be Scottish (something which has up to now been an incidental feature of them). It’s party stuff – there’s almost a silent bagpipe part begged.

Even so, there's devotion in this room. Every banal utterance in between songs is greeted with a bit of a roar, which given Woomble’s general reticence is a strange occurrence. It’s an interesting thing, the self-consciousness of Woomble. He’s an agitated, diffident man (tonight). Whenever an instrumental break of more than 20 seconds hits, he retreats into the wings of the stage so that he’s not left stranded with nothing to do. Keen to be behind beard, stand, and a pogoing pair of guitarists, perhaps.

The set is topped off with a blend of new pathos and old fire (“American English”, “In Remote Part” and “A Modern Way Of Letting Go” respectively, with “Roseability” a lovely midpoint.) This is, then, not one band. How many are they? Well.

They began with a chaotic strain. They occasionally fall into mawkishness - as in the earlier albums wherever they slow down long enough. They later began to sweep with Editors and cram songs full of hooks like REM.

If genre’s your thing then you’ll tread through post-hardcore and grungey indie and power-pop and indie-folk and college rock and on and on into real nonsense. It’s only the close-harmony of Woomble and guitarist Rod Jones that really unites the iterations, though maybe that’s just me.

There’s probably no stopping me going as far as to say that this voice, this urbane harmony from Woomble and Jones was actually an escape route in Modern Scottish identity, an alternative ethos set in timbre. Against the bellowing, bellyed, dead-eyed, ruddy-faced Lion-Rampant-where-a-mind-ought-be nationalist and the mordant, empty quasinihilist of Irvine Welsh’s fiction…was this. Cryptic. Critical. Not so much subtle as just unknown. This child saw lights at the end of an interminable plaid tunnel. But that’s almost certainly just me.

In the encore we’re given a new song, the title track off “Post-Electric Blues”. This kind of introduction is a bold thing for any band to do, but somehow it slides, the fervour of the audience acting into it.

The second encore is the clearest relapse of all; three songs from “Captain”, their debut minialbum. It’s furious, messy stuff, and I wonder whether the teen Idlewild who scrawled and howled these would even recognise themselves in the “Post-Electric” Idlewild. Which is not to bemoan what might be called the band’s progress. But “Last Night I Missed All The Fireworks”? Played on the 6th November? As both guitarists spin and flex and lurch violently with enactment? There’s few gigs ever been ended with such explosive punning.

But perhaps that’s just me. But perhaps that’s just me. But perhaps that’s just me.



ALBUM REVIEW: Elliot Minor, "Solaris"

Hahahahahaha!

Once I was afraid

Well.

Here it stands, everything around it dismays you so.

Did have a decent, energetic run of my picayunes up on facebook, which I think i'll instate again on here in the nearfuture.

Apart from that, consider this your last warning: there will be poetry, there will be whimsy, there will be cud.