Hazel Sheffield - Freelance Journalist

Nothing To See Here...

2009-10-14T04:48:00.000-07:00

I'm no longer blogging here - but you can find me at hazelsheffield.com/

Okkervil River + Wye Oak, Scala, 14/9/09

2009-09-15T03:06:00.000-07:00

It’s weird watching faces change when you pass through the same venue often. Scala’s hosted La Roux, Dirty Projectors and Okkervil River in quick succession in the last few days, and for every garish girl and word-perfect gay at La Roux, there was a skinny east-end type at Dirty Projectors – Primark pumps swapped for brogues and a pout. Okkervil River manage to pull the other one, a sold-out theatre filled with the balding, bespectacled and bearded.

They’re the kind of people that file their papers at five thirty, eat their tea and arrive on time, and so Scala is already full for support Wye Oak. The Baltimore duo is a striking listen and an ambiguous pair. There’s just so much noise from those four hands – that kit, that guitar – that the eyes wander to the pedals and to percussionist Andy Stack’s left hand, simultaneously playing bass on a keyboard, his right hand and his feet never missing a drumbeat or cymbal roll. Jenn Wasner plays her guitar like it doesn’t belong to her, like her arms are disconnected, but the sounds that emerge from the speaker switch easily between the patter of folk and the incremental build up of unexpected distortion. She knows what that guitar is, make no mistake, despite all that innocent inter-song babble and softly softly vocal. It’s subtly brilliant, varied and an all-round success. The beards like this band. The brogues just might, too.

Subtle isn’t the word for Okkervil River, oh no. Someone gave Will Sheff a guitar when he was a baby and he never let go, he liked the attention. Now responsible for the watery indie-folk of Shearwater alongside his decade-spanning career with Okkervil River, and the as the king of all the beards, it’s astounding he hasn’t yet satiated his ego. Tonight’s set presents rousing stuff for fans that threatens to collapse under technical issues early on, Sheff complaining that the problem prevents him from really getting into the songs. After a few quick repairs he gets in with two feet, pulling everyone present in, too. There’s handclapping, acoustic numbers, songs old and new and the odd petering singalong. ‘Girl In Port’ is an obvious highlight rendered well-tempered and genuine, while ‘John Allyn Smith Sails’ is overwrought, even the audience shying from the obvious collective chorus the band are trying to induce.

Okkervil River are clearly a multifaceted, musical triumph and there is craftsmanship at work in the songs they create, but it can’t detract from the idiosyncratic smugness of that frontman and his Cocker-esque swagger. That his fans are out in force at Scala tonight justifies the showmanship – there are elated faces at the close of a set nigh on ninety minutes long – but one wonders how some of Scala’s other visitors this week might have reacted to such unashamed pomp.

Richard Hawley Interview

2009-09-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

There’s a lyric on Truelove’s Gutter that ends: “blundered into the abyss”. Is that where we are, The Abyss? Two and a half million unemployed; our little island lagging behind all the bigger fishes and fatter cats in the semi-recovering global economy; clinging onto other people’s politicians and our own half-remembered glory days. If that’s where we are, then blunder we did.

Only Hawley wasn’t talking about the economy, or politics, or society. He was talking about falling in love. That’s the thing about Richard Hawley. Big things have gone to shit – Britain has forgotten what it is, where it’s going – but there are still voices of reason out there. And Hawley’s one of them. His sixth solo LP doesn’t directly reference the recession. But dashed hopes, damaged dreams and half-forgotten ambitions penetrate every weird sound and subtle lyric of its fifty-one minutes. His songs aren’t about boom and bust, but “the fall out of that, I suppose, and the way that people are affected by it. My family was deeply affected by the last major recession with the closure of the steel works. It cost my parents their marriage.”

That’s what it comes down to. Not statistics and politics, but the people you love and the streets you tread – something that Hawley has never forgotten. “My family has lived [in Sheffield] for 150 years, you know,” he says. “We live in a very transient, migratory age, but I really, really am rooted in Sheffield, and that’s important to me. Not in a stick in the mud kind of way, but because I know why I’m here.”

Hawley’s never made a secret of his love for his hometown. His Mercury-nominated fourth album, Cole’s Corner, told the story of one of the city’s famous meeting places, while Truelove’s Gutter is the ancient name of Sheffield’s Castle Street, so-called after Thomas Truelove, an inn-keeper there. “The juxtaposition of the two names seems to sum the record up perfectly,” he offers by explanation.

Hawley’s father was a steel worker, his step-father a miner, so he’s well-placed to remind people of a time when community still existed and work was anchored to identity. “It’s the people I love more than anything,” he says of the city. “When the steel works were open people lived really hard lives, but they had a right good sense of humour. Very self-deprecating, not taking yourself too seriously. And people would definitely stick together, you know?”

The people Hawley writes about on Truelove’s Gutter came unstuck, they lost themselves in the mire of modernity. They forgot where they came from. In ‘Don’t Get Hung Up In Your Soul’, Hawley recounts the story of a friend who spent a lot of time in institutions for mental problems because she found it safer in there than being out in the world. “You have to know something before you can really sing about it,” he explains. “It’s not about holding onto things for the sake of it, it’s about holding onto things because they mean something. And I think that’s the point. Because once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

He speaks of how he takes his children to see the old steel works where their grandfather, the late Dave Hawley, worked, and about the museum in Sheffield dedicated to the industry. “In twenty years’ time or even ten years’ time I can’t imagine there being a call centre museum, can you?” And then, laughing: “‘This is where I plug my modem in, this is where I charge my mobile…’ Do you know what I mean?”

Coming from anyone else, it might seem worthy: a successful rock star championing the working class. But Hawley’s done his time. His career started when he was still at school, in a band called Treebound Story; when they broke up he found success with nineties Britpop act The Longpigs, and then, seven years later, with fellow Sheffield-natives, Pulp. “The ideas for a lot of the solo stuff had kind of been fermenting in my mind for a long time,” he says. “I wasn’t frustrated or anything, I was more than happy sat at the back watching someone else singing, that was great. But it just got to the point where I was 32 years old… And now I’ve been making solo albums for a decade, that’s longer than I was ever with any of my bands…

“I was completely shocked where I ended up and it completely threw me – I never expected that at all. But the music’s mine to be made. I’m sick of music being made for commercial purposes. I think that music can serve a different purpose.” For Hawley, music is his livelihood; it’s his trade, just as much as steel was for his ancestors.

“Music is a craft,” he explains. “If you pick up an instrument to become famous and rich, more than likely you will be very sorely disappointed. But if you pick it up because you love it… I’m very clear about what I set out to do and I’ve never lost that.”

He goes on: “At a time like this it’s not great commercial sense to make an album full of ten minute strung out pieces of music. But I don’t think it’s the time, either, for creative characters just to play it safe and play the game. That’s another thing that’s important for me as well, to make a record where I stretch myself as a writer, musician and producer.”

Truelove’s Gutter still features that same molten vocal that earned Hawley a reputation as ‘the Elvis of the north’, but this time it’s soundtracked by a whole host of instruments so unusual they could almost be made up: the glass harmonica, musical saw, megabass waterphone and crystal baschet. What should sound, from this description, like some kind of hellish modernist racket, actually rumbles and glides with similar classical precision as his previous work – testament to the man’s propensity for integrating innovation and tradition.

Hawley’s a man who’ll remind you just where you came from, and why things went awry. But he’ll also tell you that now, more than ever, is the time to push on with the future. “At the time I decided that I wanted to make music as a way of making a living, things were a bit like they are now. You’re not going to say, ‘don’t do that, get a job,’ because where are the fucking jobs?! You might as well do something that you believe in.” For a working lad from Sheffield, he’s not done too badly, after all.

Leeds 2009 Day 3

2009-09-02T02:38:00.000-07:00

In a valiant effort to open a much-needed discussion with us muggles about the state of the music industry, Sunday at Leeds opened with two hours of ‘Instigate Debate’. Ten questions were distributed around the sitting audience to be put to a panel featuring the ubiquitous Jon McClure of Reverend And The Makers, Jamie Fullerton from NME, and Clint Boon of Xfm Manchester. The questions, ranging from ‘Are gig tickets too expensive?’ and ‘Would The Clash or The Libertines ever have made it in today’s industry?’ required some serious thought, resulting in several semi-drunken, semi-sensible outburst from the crowd. But it was McClure who stole the show, turning every question into a mini advert for his oh-so-worthy musical outings. Shush now, young man, and let the rest of us have a say.

It was The Horrors, later on in the afternoon, that proved substance will take you a lot further in life than a loud mouth and a few nice outfits. Their NME/Radio 1 Stage set blew doubters out the arena with new tracks like ‘A Sea Within A Sea’ and reinvented old ones, bolstered by the band’s more confident sound. The struggle with noise-laden records is often in bringing them to a live setting, but The Horrors managed admirably.

The Big Pink, by contrast, nearly fell on their arse with a lacklustre, rambling set of very little energy, failing to recreate any of the buzz surrounding new album ‘A Brief History Of Love’ in the Festival Republic tent. At one point the whole show looked set to implode as the music was replaced by a heated discussion between vocalist Robbie Furze and drummer Akiki Matsuura, presumably about the next song on the setlist. Onlookers stayed politely until the end, but those yet to be convinced by The Big Pink’s big sound are unlikely to be satiated that performance.

Jamie T entertained in a packed out set mid-afternoon, punters struggling for a space in the cavernous NME/Radio 1 tent. His set erred almost on pantomime, the south London wunderkind mustering sing-a-longs and call and responses with all his might. And then, as he drew to a close and everyone present trekked over to see Kings Of Leon on the mainstage, the carnage started. Muddy fields had prompted the organisers to make the festival one-way, and suddenly hundreds of festival-goers found themselves trapped and suffocating in a massive crush to get into the main arena. It was terrifying and frankly could have been fatal – that security were no where to be seen and KOL carried on regardless shows Leeds up as the corporately organised riot for which it has become reknown.

And for what? Kings Of Leon’s set was a disaster of wet stadium rock, a messianic Caleb Followill rambling endlessly about the band’s success and promising fans to return from the US next year with the best album the band have ever made. “Every song I wrote, I thought of England,” he gushed, before launching into the lifeless rock-by-numbers that is ‘Reverie’ and ‘Use Somebody’. Even old tracks ‘Red Morning Light’, ‘Four Kicks’ and ‘Charmer’ seemed devoid of the grit and guts that once made them so special. At the back, watching the circus, early fans felt betrayed. Yet the word on everyone’s lips was that this was the gig of the weekend, the best performance of the band’s career – just proves, if you’re going to sell out, you might as well do it properly. And if the thousand-strong crowd enraptured by this performance are anything to go by, KOL have done it very successfully indeed.

Leeds 2009 Day 2

2009-09-02T02:32:00.000-07:00

Leeds this year was blessed with one of those most British of bank holidays, where the clouds bluster past at the rate of knots and you’re one minute set for sunbathing and the next scrabbling for wellies and waterproofs.

The changing seasons were nowhere better demonstrated than on the miserable chops of one Charlie Fink, Noah And The Whale frontman, who’s suffered in the last week from a horribly embarrassingly personal interview with the Guardian in which he waxed lyrical about new album ‘The First Days Of Spring’ being all about his break up with Laura Marling. Marling isn’t there for the Leeds show, and neither is any other female backing vocalist, a conspicuous omission after their prominence on the band’s debut. Instead the set is dark and electric, Fink’s stubble and furrowed brow a constant reminder that this is no long the happy-clappy band that gave us ‘5 Years Time’.

In sharp contrast, The XX manage subdued miserablisms so restrained and self-contained that they crawl under the skin. The stark, unharmonised melodies of vocalists Oliver Sims and Romy Madley Croft whisper outwards throughout the tent and raucous, neon-faced kids stand quietly in awe at such unexpected and unusual subtlety. Meanwhile, in a triumph of street team PR, roaming promoters hand out t-shirts and badges for free, and suddenly giant white X’s brand every other torso in sight.

Broken Records smash all subtlety out the water with their string flanked Scottish folk. A regular at many a festival this summer, their infectious jigging and cleverly orchestrated songs gather quite a crowd. It’s a well-deserved success that can only augment as the year draws on.

Now, there was a time when Brooklyn’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs had bite and guile to spare – a rip-roaring mess of distortion and screeching, furious vocals to make your stomach turn and the whites of your eyes bulge. And while ‘It’s Blitz’ was a very lovely slice of disco – ten points for diversity, guys – where was the hacked up guitar riffs, the sawn off Zinner magic, that made earlier stuff so striking? New sources show that it may have been hiding in an amp on the mainstage at Leeds, just waiting to blow the socks off the assembled festival-goers in 2009. This was a stormer of a set including ‘Black Tongue’, ‘Rich’, ‘Cheated Hearts’ and a mesmerisingly well-executed acoustic version of ‘Maps’ alongside the new stuff. It was all perfect – vocals, pacing, guitars and, of course, delivery from the inimitable Miss O.

A Bloc Party interlude – three years on the trot at Leeds and still holding out for that headline slot – preceded the moment everyone had been waiting for: Radiohead. Well, everyone apart from the screaming hoards of girls who trotted off to see La Roux. Two hours passed in moments as Radiohead set the bar higher than ever. Their set was a proper mix of all seven of their albums, from the lesser known ‘Wolf At The Door’ and ‘Gloaming’, right through to anthems ‘Idiotheque’ and ‘Just’, finishing with the cinematic ‘Everything In Its Right Place’.

It was musicially flawless, Thom Yorke’s vocal so well-timed and glorious that it could have been pre-recorded. Depite this, Yorke revealed to a photographer straight after the gig that he wasn’t happy with his performance at all, perhaps due to his slightly squiffy banter between songs, where he once asked Johnny Greenwood for the chords to new song ‘These Are My Twisted Words’. A perfectionist, no less – the rest of us were left speechless.

Leeds 2009 Day 1

2009-09-02T02:26:00.000-07:00

Ah, Leeds. Where else would you find thousands of overdressed teenagers battling mud and queues to spend all of their pocket money on a tiny tray of chips and a paper cup of lager to the soundtrack of hundreds of crappy middling pop-punk bands?

Alright, it’s not all that bad. Those arriving early enough on Thursday and Friday morning caught a glimpse of the festival arena pre-carnage – a grassy, neon-lit circus of a festival site, all fairground rides and burger stands. Overcrowded sets from Wild Beasts and Blood Red Shoes attempted to entertain the early birds on Thursday night, but with so many people at the tiny BBC Introducing stage, it was impossible to catch a glimpse of the bands, let alone hear them properly.

Friday lunchtime heralded the start of the festival proper, just a red ribbon and a start line short of a race to narcotic oblivion. Newcastle’s Detroit Social Club did little to raise the pulse on the Festival Republic stage, sounding too much of a hotch-potch of Elbow and dad rock to make waves.

It was a special guest appearance – one of those secret gigs that everyone who wasn’t there kicks themselves for the whole weekend afterwards – that really set off Leeds 2009. Josh Homme, John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl turned up on the NME/Radio 1 Stage as Them Crooked Vultures, the QOTSA/Zepplin/Foo Fighters hybrid also featuring guitarist Alain Johannes. Homme should supposedly have played with Eagles Of Death Metal, the band he formed with guitarist Jesse Hughes, on the main stage that very day, but was apparently saving all his energy for the ‘Vultures, whose epic set finished with ‘New Fang’ and ‘Nobody Loves Me (And Neither Do I)’.

Later that day The Maccabees snatched the very same limelight for a packed out set to hundreds of punters, igniting a huge dance off with a mix of new and old material. Even Orlando looked to be enjoying himself as people jostled for a space in the massive tent.

Meanwhile things were heating up on the main stage for Friday’s headliners. Prodigy cemented themselves as undisputed kings of British rave, attracting a crowd that moshed right up to the sound desk and beyond. They mixed old classics ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ with newer material from Invaders Must Die, never once letting up on intensity.

There was much speculation as to the direction that Arctic Monkeys would take before they hit the main stage – and while sceptics were momentarily silenced as Alex Turner entered with dark glasses, leather and a swagger, the ensuing set violently divided fans. Much has been made of Turner’s drunkenness, austerity and lack of chatter on the night, but the bottom line has to be that this was a set constructed to reinvent a band bored of the relentless smalltown louts turning Arctic Monkeys gigs into hooligan affairs (many of whom found apt accommodation in the kindly branded ‘Relentless’ tent a little later).

A month in the desert has transformed this band into one of depth and distinction – so much so that even old favourites ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’ and closer ‘505’ came off darker and more accomplished than ever before. It’s unsurprising that the indie-pop plaudits were pissed off. It takes courage to slap thousands of fans in the face with the cold water of a new musical direction (no wonder Turner took to the bottle before the stage), but ultimately, it’s what’s required for a band to keep the cogs turning, the kids guessing, and their career alive. What’s more, the hoards of fans word perfect on new tracks like ‘Crying Lightning’ and ‘Propeller’ prove that there’s more than a little on ‘Humbug’ to get at, should the critics open their ears before their mouths.

The Big Pink Interview

2009-08-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

When The Jesus And Mary Chain first started recording demos in 1984, comparisons to The Ramones resulted in them adopting the feedback that would eventually come to define their sound. William Reid, one sibling half of the original line-up, said: “That’s why we started using noise and feedback. We want to make records that sound different.”

These days any band seeking distinction would be ill-advised to assume the same tactic – noisy records are everywhere, swinging back into vogue as the past is endlessly rehashed in search of something new. But what Jesus And Mary Chain did was take something simple – Beach Boys pop and Ramones punk – and confound it with fuzz. No one would listen – in the early days the band had to sneak into venues and pretend to be the support act to get gigs. Then they moved to London and got signed to Alan McGee’s Creation Records on the strength of a sound check. A few months later, one NME writer declared them the best band in the world.

In the words of Willy Wonka – strike that. Reverse it. Take a duo – Milo Cordell and Robbie Furze – who met at an underground rave and discovered a shared love of feedback – straight up white noise – and launched a record label called Hatechannel to release digital hardcore records that were, in their own words “really very aggressive”. (The clue’s in the name.) There was already an eponymous label, Digital Hardcore Recordings (DHR), at that time “but we wanted to go one better,” Milo explains. “Hatechannel is supposed to be more offensive and aggressive than Digital Hardcore. We wanted to be the loudest.”

Somewhere, in these ambitious, arcane, a-melodic origins, The Big Pink was born.

Neither Robbie nor Milo, two Jesus And Mary Chain obsessives, are new to the music industry, and it shows. Milo’s the founder of Merok records, a label that has signed bands who could barely play an instrument before their first gig and then went on to become huge: Klaxons and Crystal Castles among them. He’s well-spoken and clearly business minded, traits inherited, perhaps, from his father, Denny Cordell, the producer responsible for Procul Harem’s ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’. Milo’s brother, Tarka, famed for flings with Kate Moss and Liv Tyler, was found hanged in his house last year on the eve of his own album release.

Robbie, meanwhile, comes from less conspicuous origins. They both claim to be in their late-twenties but Robbie’s weathered features tell a different story (though the babyfaced girlfriend he brings along to the interview suggests he’s not lost his charm just yet). He’s done his time touring every squat in Europe with hardcore bands, most notably as the guitarist for the founder of the aforementioned DHR, digital pioneer Alec Empire, and also with his own hardcore outing Panic DHH. No, Robbie’s no stranger to the notion of noise. But pop – the kind of scuzzed out, hook-laden pop that The Big Pink purport – is a new direction for him.

“When we first started we didn’t have any manifesto, really. We didn’t know what The Big Pink was going to be,” says Robbie. “It was something that we just did at home – twenty minute soundscapes of pure noise. At that point we were like ‘ah, man, we want to sound like the digital Velvet Underground.’”

“And then,” Milo interjects, “we added beats.” It isn’t just beats that make The Big Pink what they are today, although the fact that their music belongs on the dance floor as much as in bedrooms is undoubtedly part of their appeal. Where The Jesus And Mary Chain needed that feedback, The Big Pink needed the very opposite: melodies.

“The thing with the stuff that we were doing before is that there was no song structure,” Robbie explains. “We’d have seven or eight minute songs and we’d go off into six minutes of white noise. To try and do and three and a half minute song is a lot harder, but it’s more fun, it’s more interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever woken up humming a noise track. A good melody is everything about music.”

Melody is everything? Coming from two men obsessed with amp fuzz? “With the record label I signed loads of pop music,” justifies Milo. “Alec Empire writes pop songs as well. It’s just pop music hidden behind distortion. Other people decide that it’s pop music, not us. I want people to decide for themselves what it is.”

And people will. With their debut, A Brief History Of Love, now out on 4AD, six months after NME gave them the Philip Hall Radar Award for best new act, there’s a lot to be decided in the coming months. Top of the list will be whether they can shake off the scenester tag that’s dogged them ever since a drug-fuelled interview with Vice man Andy Cappa and a few homoerotic photos preceded the mainstream release of any of their music.

“All this other bullshit’s so boring to be honest,” Robbie says of the media interest in their social lives. “I think we’ve made a really great record, whether we take drugs or party is irrelevant.”

“We write really good songs. Of course it’s the songs,” says a slightly paranoid-looking Milo when asked why people are so interested in this band. He’s right in some respects. There’s substance here – there’s a label man and seasoned musician, there’s obsession for music, and there’s the time spent distilling noise into songs. They’ve got plenty of ambition. But like Jesus And Mary Chain before them, who struggled in the early days to shake off the hype and get people to actually listen to the music, there’s still a lot to prove.

The XX Interview

2009-08-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

For The Quietus

The shock of the new? A new sticky label on the same old tin of beans, more like. The NME’s future fifty recently proclaimed that our best hope for tomorrow is Animal Collective, a group of visionary 30-somethings who’ve been making music for a decade. They beat dormant Swedes The Knife to the top spot, the compilers momentarily overlooking the fact that the latter haven’t released a record in over three years. The rest of the list is so futuristic it can’t be mentioned here for fear of ripping a hole in the space-time continuum and transporting us all to a parallel universe that exists only in Chris Cunningham’s nightmares.

Chances are, those looking for something new to feed their insatiable ears will end up frantically clicking round the murky corners of the blogosphere before passing out cold in a pool of their own drool after reading some blethering pansy twit’s ‘creative’ review of an unheard of Brooklynite with an 8-track. The predictions and promises of your favourite garish magazine/blog/zine are so often redundant, self-serving and contrived. Good music, the kind that doesn’t need force-feeding down desperate open gullets, creeps up on you and demands attention, like an audio-tug on the sleeve that arrests unintentionally from the off.

One of the few acts to really merit their place in the future fifty, a veritable sleeve-tugger themselves, are south London quartet The XX. Theirs is an album of claustrophobic beauty and measured sentiment so strikingly self-restrained that it has, rather ironically, inspired some of the internet’s more excessively poetic reactions.

While the verbose reviews will grate, it’s true that there is something unquantifiably refreshing about hearing this band for the first time, though it’s for a far simpler reason than the word-botherers would have you believe. What sets The XX apart is the vision of four south-London teenagers, discovered two years ago and then quietly cultivated, keenly supported but unrushed and un-meddled with, until the time that they were ready to break. Budget cuts, media edacity and attention deficit in the information age have nigh-on made this kind of approach to new music obsolete: The XX are a reminder of what can surface when bands are given the opportunity to mature on their own terms.

“We started working with [Young Turks] when we had just turned 18,” Oliver Sims of The XX explains. “They just turned up at our shows and offered us a place to rehearse, got us gigs, got us chances to work with some amazing producers. That’s all it was for about a year – playing shows, writing songs. It’s only in the last year that we’ve started working towards an album. When they first started working with us we only had about six songs – now we have an album.”

Young Turks, the subsidiary of XL Records responsible for Wavves, Kid Harpoon, and (less fortunately) Jack Penate, were quick to realise the quality of their newest associates, offering the band the chance to work with some stellar producers including Diplo and Kwes.

“We worked with some producers beforehand just to get some experience, and maybe if we liked it to have them produce the album. But everything we did ended up sounding more like them than us,” says young producer-programmer Jamie Smith. “I was producing before I was in The XX, so during those recordings I kind of realised I was a control freak, and that I had to do it all myself to be satisfied with it.”

Jamie joined The XX when the band started working with Young Turks, adding to the original line-up of childhood friends Oliver and Romy Madley Croft, and keyboardist/guitarist Baria Qureshi, who joined to help the original duo recreate their ideas live. Baria explains: “Everyone else we worked with over-produced it. We wanted to stick to our original sound, and Jamie knows what it is that we want. It was important for us to be able to play the record live, and so it’s better to have someone who’s more involved with us.”

“Jamie’s work’s really good,” Oliver adds quietly. He’s spot on. Jamie is arguably The XX’s secret weapon. A shy, curly-haired computer-aficionado who barely looks up from his equipment on-stage and admits to terrible nerves before gigs, Jamie speaks keenly about his MPC – Media Production Centre. The technology, which has existed since the late eighties, allows him to programme the sounds he requires on his computer and then provide all percussion live on electronic pads, with his finger-tips, in a miniature imitation of a drummer.

“I did drum lessons for about two years. I’m okay at drums, but I’m not good enough to be technically innovative,” says Jamie. “There are so many bands with amazing drummers who sound the same, and I’m not good enough to make the drums sound different, and I wanted it to sound different. With an MPC I can make it sound exactly as I want, so I can create all the sounds that we need.” Not only does the technology add a dimension and facilitate experimentation, it’s also fairly unique. “Some bands use an MPC to trigger a long sample that plays round a couple of times, but I don’t think anyone uses it as much as I do, except maybe a couple of producers,” Jamie explains, citing American producer RJD2 as his major influence.

Of course, it’s not just Jamie’s production that makes this band. They talk openly of their ‘sound’ with rare precision for an act so young. “I don’t think it’s been an intentional decision to make this kind of music,” Oliver says when pressed to explain how their music came about. “I don’t know, Romy just got a new amp that had reverb and it kind of just came from that, and I’m not a very loud singer, so it didn’t make sense to make loud music that I couldn’t compete with vocally. I wouldn’t describe it as an accident, but it was quite natural rather than intentional.”

The unusual closeness between Romy and Oliver permeates this record. Their cool, antiphonal vocals, the lyrics addressed always to another ‘you’, manage to seem at once isolated and conjoined. Oliver explains that they each write their own lyrics, in their own time. For words written in solitude, they match astonishingly well. A testament to their friendship, perhaps? “I suppose so,” Oliver replies, with habitual vagueness. So many of his answers are punctuated with ‘dunno’ and the word ‘nice’. “I find it weird,” he goes on, “[the lyrics] seems to match up quite well. Romy’s like a sister to me, so all the songs are addressed to something outside of us.”

Music aside, it becomes quickly obvious that The XX are genuinely a product of this decade – a true, bonafide band of our time, for better or for worse. Romy and Oliver thought that ‘Teardrops’, arguably their finest cover, was originally garage remix rather than a hit for Womack And Womack in the eighties. (“It’s quite shameful, really,” Oliver admits now.) The two of them swap lyrics and write songs over iChat rather than face to face. Their understated pop-focus has its bottom flattened out at intervals with the unexpected squelch of a massive sub. They have rewritten classic pop and made it their own – listen to the parallels between ‘Infinity’ and Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’. (“I don’t think it was planned, but I think he is deeply engraved in my mind,” Oliver counters at the suggestion of plagiarism.) They have toured with Micachu and The Big Pink, and they have support slots planned with Florence and the Machine and Friendly Fires; four bands engraved indelibly on the musical landscape of 2009.

Yes, The XX are a band that belong in that future fifty, if ever a future fifty is worth the paper it’s written on. But more than that, they’re a lightyear ahead of the rehashed, branded and contrived indie and pop that has dominated this decade, simply because they had clarity of vision and were given the resources to explore their ideas, undisturbed. “We don’t know what to expect, we’re just taking it as it comes,” Baria says of the future. But then, no one’s qualified to say what lies ahead. For now, it suffices to have discovered a band that make you glad to live in the present.

Observer Review Festival Watch: Leicester Summer Sundae

2009-08-23T03:15:00.000-07:00

See original article here

Just big enough to entice campers, yet nestled conveniently in the city centre, Leicester's Summer Sundae attracts an untypical festival crowd - from the too young for Glasto to the too old for discomfort. This was reflected in the lineup, a hotchpotch of the nostalgic (St Etienne, the Charlatans) and the innocuous (Frank Turner, múm), all of whom took to the stage before it got too dark, with acts finishing well clear of midnight so as not to upset noise restrictions.

The result was part-festival, part-village fete. For a small event, Summer Sundae does well on diversity, offering an eclectic variety of luxury festival food, with side portions of comedy, spoken word and film. That said, discerning music fans were catered for too. Wild Beasts capitalised on their newfound acclaim, while Broken Records, Port O'Brien and First Aid Kit remoulded traditional folk into various new guises. Indoors, the impressively well-equipped De Montfort Hall played host to 65daysofstatic and Micachu and the Shapes, both of whom used the venue's capacity for visuals to maximum effect.

With swine flu keeping the Streets and Fanfarlo from attending, and Bon Iver's set strangely overlooked, it was the Beatles-covering Easy Star All-Stars who took most of the plaudits. The reggae troupe's perfectly timed Sunday afternoon slot had everyone up and dancing, can in hand, in the spectacular weather. This was the great British staycation in festival format - and just a carnival queen short of a summer fair.

Best performance Micachu and the Shapes.

Overheard [of Bon Iver] "I think he's some American folky dude."

Best discovery Broken Records.

The Big Chill 2009 - Day 3

2009-08-12T02:02:00.000-07:00

By Sunday, everyone’s lobster-pink, a bit grimy and dog-tired from excesses of heat and hedonism. But not to fear! The Big Chill programmers lay on a day of comedy and culture for the day of rest to help everyone recuperate enough to spend another night in a tent. The Guardian tent sells papers with free goodies (fudge and babywipes: a triumph of their targeted marketing strategy) and The Coop provides a whole day’s worth of stellar comedians.

As such festival-goers settle themselves onto hessian mats in this cavernous disco marquee looking like refugee-fallout from some humanitarian crisis: weary and ready to be entertained. First up, Mock The Week baby Russell Howard mixes material old and new in an hour and a quarter set that goes down a treat. His is a style that skews the humdrum into the extraordinary, re-imagining the world with a childlike wonder. It’s evident, for all the comedians, that the festival crowd is a very different creature to their usual audience, with Howard at one point exclaiming, “That was a great punchline, but don’t worry about it!” after a joke passes, collectively unnoticed.

Noel Fielding of Boosh fame fails miserably to carry the baton through the following hour. “I don’t have any punchlines in my set,” he proudly announces, before proceeding with dull fantastical skits and floundering audience banter, prompting the conclusion that he maybe should get some. Where Fielding excels is as the camp, cross-dressing zombie king of the videoed zombie rave, shown later on, on the screens of the Main Stage. The film, shot on site on the preceeding Thursday with the participation of early festival-arrivals, broke the record for the number of zombies caught on camera, managing to get over 4000 people mocked up and baring their teeth for a Warp Film and Film4 co-production entitled ‘I Spit On Your Rave’.

Zombies of a very different kind greet Dylan Moran as he takes to The Coop stage after Fielding late-afternoon on Sunday. A deadpan, cynical master-of-his-art, Moran holds the audience on a string, keeping momentum through a relaxed set that cements his inimitable prowess in the realm of disgruntled Irishman.

There’s plenty in the Sunday music stakes to keep punters at the Big Chill, despite what the city-types might tell you as they pack up and head off to work before the night begins. Broken Records perform a set of string-flanked, Scottish indie-folk brilliance at sundown that pulls an encouraging crowd ahead of a support-slot with The National in London the following week. Meanwhile, David Byrne rounds off a year of touring with his headline set, his band dressed head-to-toe in white, including a gaggle of contemporary dancers that could come straight out of Flashdance. His music is similarly anachronistic, the original in eighties pop at a time when countless new artists are re-imagining the decade.

The weekend draws to a close with the homebred charm of Riot Jazz, a fleet of mesmerisingly talented brass-players who take rock’n’roll, jazz, reggae and even dubstep into their own hands; and Big Chill originals Hexstatic, whose mash up of audio and visuals is the last dancing gasp of the mutating festival beast that is The Big Chill. Everyone’s left tired, but not totally frazzled – true to its name, this is one weekender that strikes the balance between rave and retreat with rare precision.

The Big Chill 2009 - Day 2

2009-08-12T01:56:00.000-07:00

It’s a little known fact that God likes The Big Chill. As proof, the big man set about bestowing three days of uninterrupted, skin-sizzling sunshine upon the lesser-trod hills of Herefordshire. Coupled with which, the whole weekend retains a hard-to-come-by sense of laidback, communal magnanimity true to its name, from the sanctioned Big Issue vendors selling programmes to the hoards of children chasing bright balloons, bare-footed, around the site. It’s a festival you’d take your mum to, and then pop her in a tent in the quiet area after sundown and embrace the night with your mates. The line-up isn’t bursting with the cream of currently touring bands, but there’s so much more to this weekender than music, from gourmet foodstalls to big name comedians, to endless pockets of lesser-known entertainers, that there’s hardly time to notice.

There are a few artists that demand recognition, however, and Emmy The Great sits firmly in that box alongside the best of them, her mid-afternoon Castle Stage set bringing together a hillside’s worth of lazing sunbathers ripe for a little good-humoured folk. She plays the best of 2009 album ‘First Love’, alongside some excavated ‘new-to-you’ songs that have just been released on the Edward EP. The audience swells as the set advances, and Emmy’s cheered back for an encore (a rare occurrence at festivals, constrained as they are by time restrictions), performing the dreamy ‘Everything Reminds Me Of You’.

Who can predict the collective mind of the festival mass? Mercury Prize nominees The Invisible are scheduled for the Main Stage on Saturday, but fail to even really draw enough people to fill a tent. It’s a mad state of affairs, especially considering that the band have such an industry buzz about them and have been blowing people’s socks off with their eponymous debut album. Clearly this doesn’t immediately translate into popular recognition – a great shame given that their swirling, jazz punctured sound is one of the best to emanate from the Big Chill this year.

There is a heavy emphasis on nostalgia on Saturday night, as Orbital officially reform to snatch the headline slot at midnight. The swelling crowd barely squeezes into the huge field before the stage, where they are treated to a visual-audio treat of astounding proportions. Countless people are overheard reminiscing about the duo’s legendary Glastonbury performances 1994/2004 as lasers, bubbles, lanterns and lights punctuate the cloudless night sky late into the night. The Hartnoll brothers appeared humbled by their reception – there can be no doubt that this is a gig worth reforming for.

Saturday night is conventionally ‘the big one’ at any festival; post-Orbital, most are primed for a messy night of raving. Horse Meat Disco in The Coop serves up a side of nu-disco, having garnered increasingly impressive reviews for their south London residency over the last couple of years. Though heavy on the cheese, the set goes down swimmingly as the huge tent filled with movers and shakers under the spangled lights of a giant disco ball.

Meanwhile, for those that like their afters heavy on the bass, Annie Nightingale mashes toxic levels of the stuff at the Frisky Bison, playing with the wide-eyed punters like puppets on strings, at the every whim of her prolonged intros and sliced up tempo changes. She might be sixty-something and have the appearance to prove it, but Nightingale stomps all over the BBC’s ageist policies by playing to the kids better than most of their peers.

After sound restrictions put paid to late night fun around 4am, the Crap Stage becomes the central spot for those who can’t face their sleeping bag. A wee DJ box positioned at the top of the Big Chill hill, its location makes dancing near logistically impossible thanks to the gradient, but that doesn’t seem to matter to most of those present, who likely lost touch with the ground several hours ago. The dancing continues until the rising sun threatens an end to proceedings, and as a chill hits the air festivallers stumble back, thoroughly entertained, even if not yet sleepy.

The Big Chill 2009 - Day 1

2009-08-12T01:50:00.000-07:00

Festivals in the middle of nowhere are a yin-yang equation of lengthy journey-times and unprecedented access to some of the most beautiful countryside dear Albion has to offer. It’s no different at this year’s Big Chill, which suffers from train malfunctions to the quaint Great Malvern station (some Londoners endure a four hour journey with the same number of bus-train connections), but on arrival, proves itself to be one of the most spectacularly located outdoor events on the roster. Ledbury is lush, green and full of furry wildlife, though the latter make themselves scarce in the face of having their natural habitat overrun with noisy revellers. The festival site is set into the bottom of a huge trough in the landscape. The uphill trek over the hill reveals this jewel of a festival in its full glory – from the peak of the hill, the whole site spreads into the circular dip of the land, lit up by lanterns and stage lights.

Most punters arrive on Friday, in time for Friendly Fires on the main stage at sundown. Theirs is one of those clichéd, meteoric trajectories of success that bursts from obscurity to mainstream acclaim in the space of one album, but they carry the mantel well. Fresh from a Mercury Prize nomination, they pull a huge crowd all dancing in pale imitation of frontman Ed Macfarlane, whose high-energy funk dance fills the big screens just as his impressive vocal fills the air. Continued performances of this calibre have rendered Friendly Fires the festival band of 2009 – they’re everywhere, magnificently polished in sound and image, and well deserving of the recognition they’ve garnered of late, even for those that aren’t huge fans of the music.

From unbridled brassy joy to the depths of video hell, Warp-associate Chris Cunningham unleashes a ferocious visual assault just next door on the Castle Stage a few hours later. Set to remixes of other artists and his own, more recent, musical outings, Cunningham’s artwork remains perhaps the grimmest, most obscenely magnificent exploration of digital craftsmanship available in the UK today – from that famously ominous Aphex Twin grin and the wide-set eyes of the alien-girl in his Playstation advert, to even more obscure and shocking looping images of swollen, tortured aliens and fleeting forays into porn. The industrial din draws a massive audience, who are, without exception, left open mouthed by such a spectacle.

We’re left gaping by Basement Jaxx too, though for sadly opposite reasons. A swill of hacked together commercialism fronted by voluminous black women and including a painful snippet of Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’ does nothing but wound the eardrums. Thankfully Sheffield-native Toddla T has some audio-healing up his sleeve at the Frisky Bison cocktail lounge. His is another kind of hackmanship, drawing upon a plethora of different styles and genres. Eschewing expectation at every turn, the South-Yorkshire wunderkind mashes breaks with techno coated with a gloriously tongue-in-cheek delivery that assuages ravers into the small hours. Tom Bell, we salute you.

Al Green Interview

2009-07-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

For The Quietus

The sleeve notes to Al Green's 1969 album, the seminal Green Is Blues, introduced him as "a young man who is a red hot rhythm and blues singer with a difference that is gonna be greatly dug by all who tune an ear to the variegated tones and shades of this album".

And so it came to pass: by the time Al Green became the Reverend Al Green in 1976, half a decade of prolific album-releasing and hit-making had established him as the father of a new breed of soul music. Combining Memphis label Stax-Volt's brassy arrangements with the caramel vocal of Motown, Green, abetted by producer and friend Willie Mitchell, seduced soul fans and the pop charts, peppering the top 40 with his effortlessly sexy falsetto throughout the early seventies.

Now 63, Green is as effusive as your archetypal evangelical, barely getting through his sentences without breaking into song and then dissolving into laughter. These days he's back into soul, touring compulsively and preaching that same old kind of stay-together love from way back when, while the record labels and agents tot up the royalty fees on his behalf.

As can be the case with interviews with artists of Al Green's stature, it can take a while to actually get a hold of the man. By the time we speak, there's already been two cancellations and, this time, we make sure we listen to the preconditions. We're advised that Green is unaware Demon Digital are repackaging Green Is Blues for a reissue to celebrate its 40 years this June, let alone that there's an accompanying Most Sampled CD collating, um, his most sampled tracks – a fact that will be all too apparent when we finally get to speak to him.

We think we've been stood up for a third time then, just as interview notes are going the way of the paper bin, the phone rings. Michael Jackson's 'The Way You Make Me Feel' is playing. It could be morbidly appropriate hold music – except for there's a preacher man singing along in the background – and then suddenly Reverend Al comes on the line.

Does it feel like 40 years since Green Is Blues was released?
Oh god, no, it seems like it was just yesterday, remember?

Well, I don’t, no…
That was when Michael [Jackson] was playing the Wizard Of Oz.

Do you feel like a different person now to the person who released that album?
I guess so… I guess I’ve grown up in the meantime and I’m a lot stronger now, but I’m still Al, it’s just that I know more and therefore I don’t know anything, if you can make any sense of that.

I wondered about your return to secular music, which you’d kind of departed from by the eighties, and then this decade you came back to making ‘sexy’ songs again – why did you come back to it now?
Oh… oh, I don’t know, that was just what came to pass, I’m just following what was laid out, I’m not the author of anything. The big man upstairs is the author of everything, and you know what else, I got a whole record label named Demon! That’s right! When I go to heaven they’re going to be like ‘huh?’ [laughs] But they’ve really been a great company for me in the European and I guess international areas, so I can’t complain, they’ve been really good.

Okay, so you don’t think there’s any contradiction between making sexy music and being a reverend?
Jeez… you wanna ask the tough questions, huh?! Well, no, I don’t think so, I think there’s a tonne of difference between, say, secular, natural secular, or spiritual, now that’s the dividing line, that’s the difference. Like the ‘Belle’ album, “It’s you that I want but it’s him that I need,” so we can’t go further than that unless you have that element to go further, which is dealing in spiritual things right, right, right, right, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT! [laughs] Now what about this album they’re putting out, what do you think about that?

The reissue?
Yeah.

Well I love it, but it’s been about for a long time now.
Did you guys remix it?

[Demon man comes on the line]: No, we didn’t remix it, we’ve released it in its original form with some bonus tracks on it.

Well, now, that’s just… you gotta send me a complimentary copy. [laughs]

No problem.

Now, Hazel you’re a witness to that right?

Oh I’ve got it all here, don’t worry. Speaking of the Green Is Blues album, you covered the Beatles on that right?
Yeah, the Beatles, that’s right, and I was just 22 or something, going into the studio with Willie Mitchell, um, it was the beginning beginning. So I feel like really it’s the beginning beginning of the ‘One Woman’ song that opens up the album that you know, going into the ‘Give Me A Ticket For An Aeroplane’, the Boxtops, and the Beatles, and ‘Get Back’… I don’t know! We were just cutting a lot of stuff! You know, we were cutting a lot of stuff! We were just flowing! [sings] “Ain’t no love like my baby’s love…” Whatever! [laughs] We didn’t have a direction back then, we didn’t know what Al was, what is Al? You know, Willie kept telling me, “Sing Al Green,” and I was like, “What’s that supposed to sound like?” I didn’t know.

Do you think you know now?
Oh yeah, oh yeah! We know now! We just played the Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana to 60,000 people… I think we just about know now.

So is it better now that you know who Al Green is and you don’t have to keep striving for that?
Well, I’m never satisfied with him, I always want to push him further and further and further and further, it’s like a line or a track – because I know the hill’s over here, you don’t try to… uh, try to interpret it before it comes, you just finish the journey. Don’t worry about the hills or the valleys, just finish the journey, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Okay, so you never really feel like you’ve achieved what you set out to do?
Well, you say Creations, Al Green and the Creations, when you start saying Creations you start saying Green Is Blues because that was what he created in himself.

And you’re still striving to create something new every time?
Well, yeah, there’s this guy in the band, and he says to me after the show, “Why do you sing so hard? You already cut this song, this song’s already perfect,” and I go, “Well, I keep trying to make it better. In my head, I keep trying to make it better.” That’s right.

Do you think that’s why you’ve lasted so long when so many of your contemporaries have fallen by the wayside?
I guess so. I think you’ve got to find maybe one thing or two things you can do, and do those real well. And that’s kind of the philosophy of our National Anthem, ‘Let’s Stay Together’, you know. That’s what we do, and everybody comes in on the [sings] “I’m,” – it kills me! – “so in love with you!” Yes yes, okay, great, sit down! [laughs]

Did you ever hear what the Beatles thought of your cover of ‘Get Back’?
It’s like the Roy Orbison song, ‘Pretty Woman’, it’s like the same thing… those guys are so fantastic, so far advanced it what they wrote, it’s just incredible. And people were asking me “how do you sing it?” But I didn’t know – Willie wouldn’t let me hear the song! He said, “Sing what’s inside!” But I’d only heard it on the radio! So he said, “Just sing that!” But he wouldn’t let me hear it! So I had to kinda just improvise… but I think it turned out alright.

What about all the artists, hip hop artists especially, that sample you – Kanye West, Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G – do you mind?
Their stuff is incredible.

Do you listen to it?
Yeah, I have to because I’m in the music business. And whether it’s rap, or whatever, I have to listen to it because I have to share in the vocation I’m in.

Okay, sure. So you don’t feel protective over your music when someone is cutting it up and reusing it?
No, I think they do good – Talking Heads ‘Take Me To The River’, that’s just fantastic; Tina Turner ‘Let’s Stay Together’, I said “Hey, man, that’s another interpretation – why didn’t I think of that?!” [laughs]

Have you ever heard your music used in a way that you really didn’t like?
I don’t really know because they send me from Los Angeles only what they want me to hear! [laughs] So I don’t know, I guess it’s a screening process or something! I probably should cut through that, but I don’t know, I guess they’re like “The man is a Reverend, he’s been in the church for 30 years, and now he’s been doing this here for 40 years and we kinda wanna protect the whole career…” the ‘Tired Of Being Alone’, the whole career, you know, ‘God Blessed Our Love’, fine fine fine. The whole thing is illustrated here on the wall with these gold records – but I can’t take these boys with me! Can’t take the money, can’t take the car.

Your music’s got a reputation for being really sexy…
Sexy?

Yeah, really seductive, but why is that?
You’re making an old man nervous! [laughs] Sexy, sexy… well when a man is 22 he’s got hips and a nice BO, he’s got that stance… I mean, Otis Reading didn’t try to be sexy, but he turned out to be sexy anyway – you know, 6’6’’ tall, young, handsome… come on man, I couldn’t help it!

It’s still hard to explain why some music can be so seductive…
I guess it’s kind of seductive if you’re playing it in the car on the way to work or something, and you’re thinking, “I should turn right here…”

What about your music, do you listen to stuff that’s in the charts or when you go home do you have your favourite records that you’re still listening to?
Well, I mean, with the tragedy of Michael they sent me all of Michael’s records, and I’ve played 1, 2, 3, 4 of Michael’s records so far, just incredible to listen to the talent of the man. I met Michael, and I hugged him, I gave him one of those boy hugs, type of thing, because we were over at Tito’s house, and they was having like a pool party with little crackers and champagne or something, and we were all out around the pool when Michael came in, with Germaine and, oh I don’t know man, it was a long time ago. And he says “Oh, I like your music,” and I said “Thanks, I like yours!” He’d been singing longer than me. It’s kind of hard to realise the fact that’s taken place for me. It’s just that everything ain’t right. A wonderful talent – a super-talent!

Yeah I know, but we kind of watched his decline over the last few years, that’s why I was talking about you still having the drive to get out there and do it – that takes a special kind of person.
Yeah, I mean, we’re doing like 100 dates, more than 100 shows a year, so you’ve got to be committed to it, you’ve got to love it to stay in it that long, to do that. Because if you don’t love it you get out of it real fast.

And who knows whether Jackson wanted to do it in the end or whether he just wanted out, you know.
Yeah, it’s kind of a question of whether he wanted to do it, and if he did want to do it, the people were saying he only weighed 112pounds! That he had anorexia! 112pounds! For 50 shows! I don’t know if he could’ve done the 50 shows. But he was a great talent, anyway.

For you personally, was there ever any one moment when you really thought ‘I’ve done it’?
Well, I keep pushing Al, I hug him and tell him how good he is, like at the Superdome, I keep telling him, ‘fantastic, fantastic, now come on, move of further, come on,’ But I don’t know how to tell him he’s done a good job, I just tell him to move on further to the next ladder.

Do you think hip hop and r’n’b has taken over from where soul music left off?
How can Monday be Tuesday? You gotta have your Mondays and you gotta have your Tuesdays. So why don’t Monday stay over in Monday’s slot and Tuesday stay over in Tuesdays slot, Wednesday will be in his slot, Thursday stay where he belongs, and everything will be fine!

Jamie T Interview

2009-06-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Billy Bragg once said, “I don’t mind being labelled a political songwriter – what upsets me is being dismissed as a political songwriter.”

Bragg had politics to write about. He musically came of age when Thatcher was doing one over on every working man that moved, Russia was giving off the nuclear farts of the decomposing Cold War, and people still believed in protest. These days British democracy means being governed by a slack-jawed mushroom who was neither elected nor validated by the public before he gained the authority to place the burden of billions of pounds of debt on its shoulders, nationalise the banks and remain in office while his entire cabinet – and the entire government – rot away around him in scandal.

Thus apathy has replaced activism in the universal attitude to the regime. Jamie T might carry the punk ethic and street serialising of Bragg into this century, but he point blank refuses to be directly political, in songs or in conversation. “I don’t talk about politics because I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he says, blue eyes flashing defensively on a pub terrace in Wimbledon. Presumably then, this is a one-dimensional view of suburbia – all beer, fights, fag and girls? “It’s sad to think that people think that’s all it is – beer, fights… I’ve got a wider perspective than that. I think it’s more important to know how you feel about a situation than to know what you’re fucking talking about. Your daily life comes from a lot of things, a lot of things can affect you, and I don’t think my life is just about beer, fights and cigarettes.”

A little riled, he slurps on his Kronenburg and leans back to light up, in illustration. This is Bragg in reverse: this is politics for the attention-deficient solipsists of a disenfranchised generation – and the only politics they know.

“If I find myself in two years in a mansion having a chat with Mariah Carey then I’ll write about that,” says Jamie of his consistency, “but until that happens I’ll write about the things around me. And no, it hasn’t changed all that much. I think you’d probably know if it had – you’d hear it.”

What you will hear on the Sticks ‘n’ Stones EP on June 29 and forthcoming album Kings and Queens is the same soundbitten street-life, wrapped up in cling-film choruses to sing along to. Jamie’s muses still scuff their shoes on suburban pavements and find mischief in their safe, symmetrical confines. His personal vaudeville is a stage for many players, guest starring, for this series, the gun-toting Emily, the cocky counsel of Joey, and the usual chorus of nameless mates with drug habits and attitude problems.

Four years since Panic Prevention’s schizophrenic mix of beats, punk and raw acoustics and the chain-smoking 23-year-old is still, by his own admission “a cheeky little git,” only now he’s got a top ten album, Mercury nomination, and Best Solo Artist award from the NME, no less. “I suppose it’s difficult when you have to deal with so many people’s opinions and people asking you who you are and what the fuck you think you’re doing,” he comments in a voice that implies he never gave it a second thought. “But once I came to the agreement with myself – early on – that I was going to do whatever I wanted, I didn’t worry about any of that. I didn’t feel particularly part of the limelight in any kind of manner, you know. I feel really part of being in a dark room for seven hours a day and writing music.”

Don’t let the south London accent and wide boy affectations fool you - Jamie Treays is a good boy come good. Raised by supportive parents and educated at private schools, he describes feeling like a ‘Vietnam veteran’ when he came back from touring Panic Prevention and wasn’t supplied nightly with a rider of carrots, hummus and pitta bread – hardly the diet of lager and snuff you might expect. He still lives in his hometown of Wimbledon, twenty minutes from his parents’, with his mate and the big brother who can be held responsible for his first musical outing. “My brother wanted to play the drums and I fucking hated my brother, so that’s when I decided I was going to play the drums to piss him off. He had a little cry about it,” says Jamie, “and after that it becomes your identity as a kid if you start doing something – it becomes what you do.”

What Jamie did was listen to a lot of records – a lot of ska and punk, and then a lot of garage and UK hip hop. But it started with ska. “Back then I was into a lot of Desmond Dekker and stuff like that, constantly trying to work out how it sounded so good – I still haven’t worked it out. So I spent a lot of time locked away, to some extent, having a lot of fun and going [he puts on a Dick Dastardly voice] “shut up, go away, I don’t like you! I like Desmond much more, you’re an idiot!””

Plenty of clean little white boys have appropriated music in their bedrooms. Few sign five-album deals with Virgin. Even fewer stop snivelling over acoustic guitars and write songs that become biting social commentaries better than any government white paper.

“I’ve always known I wanted to do music,” Jamie says, matter-of-fact. “I like doing graphics and a lot of that arty kind of shit. I’ve always been into that stuff, and that goes with doing it your own way. It’s better to do it your own way because if it’s not good then you’ve only got yourself to blame, and that’s what you want. Fuck pointing fingers.”

It seems Jamie T always left the finger-pointing and fisticuffs – political and otherwise – to others. Doesn’t he ever plan to turn his hand to the bigger picture? “We’ll have to see, won’t we? We’ll have to see. I’d rather talk about what’s going on at the moment than think about writing iconic epic songs that have world meaning. Leave that to Bono.”

Funny thing is, for all his apolitical posturing, Jamie T speaks for the streets better than any politician. Just don’t tell him that.

Tori Amos Interview

2009-06-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

There’s something terrifying about pop music. All the smoke and mirrors of unrealism clogging the pores – the promise of the impossible sugared by sinister painted-on smiles. Pop music was invented to distil escapism into three minutes; to make us believe that there exists a place where sex-starved, gorgeous women are ten a penny and money comes for free and you can have what you want. Ultimately, pop music is about deceit.

And then there’s Tori Amos. A weird, writhing creature of many faces, she became an icon for the unconventional back in 1992 with her first solo album, Little Earthquakes. It was a deeply personal debut, perhaps best remembered now for ‘A Man And A Gun’, describing Amos’s own experience of rape. At first, Atlantic, her record label, rejected the album, fearing piano pop – the first of its kind – wouldn’t sell in an alternative climate of early nineties hip hop, trance and grunge. Amos fought a four-year battle to have the album released as she wanted it, fending off the ideas of an A-list producer who tried to replace all the pianos with rock guitars. Finally, Atlantic complied. The record was an immediate success.

“I had confrontations with record people at certain times that I don’t think would be my way now,” Amos tells Pigeon, curled up in black in the armchair of a Kensington hotel suite. She’s physically tiny, softly-spoken, and tired – but there’s a steeliness to her manner that can only have come from years navigating the choppy waters of the press. “You don’t even realise you’re agreeing to things, because the industry has so many tentacles. It’s not only the record company, that’s just one little facet. There’s the commercialised media, and then there’s the public – there are a lot of players in this story.”

Tori Amos’s story wasn’t ever conventional – and her pop music was about deceit, but of a different kind. Hers was the kind where fucked up people get fucked – and come out the other side.

It was carried by the enigma that is Amos herself. An odd-looking ‘moonchild’ with a static frizz of red hair, she used to rub herself suggestively against the leather of her piano stool during performances, falling across its keys with total abandon. The spectacle fascinated and enchanted onlookers, as much as the rawness of her material. Endlessly strange and ethereal, that talented pixie-pianist quickly divided listeners, winning legions of fans who stood with her on the outskirts of convention, and felt liberated by her openness and eccentricity.

Twenty years since she signed to Atlantic, and it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not with Tori Amos anymore. She’s mastered the art of disguise, transforming from brazen and bare-faced into quite the smooth professional. Any direct questioning is bound to send her off on rambling tangents about spirituality, mythology and the psyche, while the front that she presents to the world is a polished veneer of thick, ageless make-up and stiff fake hair. She keeps Pigeon waiting half an hour while being minutely groomed by her stylist, who hovers, readjusting things intermittently, during the photoshoot. Has age made Amos vain? Or is this self-defence?

“I realise that I’m 45 and that this is my tenth album,” she says. “But time marches on, and so I guess I’m at that age where you either become someone about whom people say ‘wow, she’s carved a trail’ or you become a tragic figure.”

Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive: surprisingly often it’s the pioneers who burn out under the pressure of their own innovation. The Amos whose first album ushered in a new generation of frank and forthright female singer-songwriters, including Beth Gibbons, Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, and Regina Spektor, has spent the ten years since trying to escape from the clutches of the aforementioned ‘players’, becoming ever more surreal in appearance in the process. It smacks of escapism, her way of coping with the industry that lays claim to her, and it’s rooted in an early struggle for control.

“I’d say in the nineties there were those moments when I got in trouble because I let the woman walk out the room and the teenage girl step back in. But that was more in the early nineties – mid-nineties – and then you learn that being a woman is such a powerful thing. That doesn’t mean I can do everything, but you have to be an expert at choosing experts, and it’s taken me a while to understand that. When you hand over too much power you have to ask yourself why you’re handing it over.”

And then, suddenly proud: “These are all little things that you learn in order to be making your tenth album, and sitting where I am – it’s not because it was handed to me. And the challenges I face all the time are just in a different arena from an artist on their first album, they’re just different issues in 2009 to those that I faced in 1991.”

Power struggles punctuate Amos’s biography. She was born in 1963 – the same year that The Beatles’ first album introduced the world to pop music, and the death of Kennedy signified the end of a democratic era. At the age of five she was awarded a scholarship to study classical piano at the prestigious Peabody Institute in Baltimore; by eleven she’d been thrown out for insisting on playing her own pop compositions in exams. At 21 she moved to Los Angeles, where she formed a rock band by the name of Y Kant Tori Read, the line up of which included future Guns ‘N Roses drummer Matt Sorum. In the same year she suffered the sexual assault that would later be relived in ‘A Man With A Gun’. Her band signed to Atlantic and released one album in 1988, which flopped, but the six-album contract meant that Amos was legally bound to continue producing music for the label: Little Earthquakes was the result.

“I wouldn’t choose a pissing match with a big cheese, I’d sooner drink champagne!” she laughs, but there are chinks of fragility under the bold exterior. “They never set out to be there, nobody sets out to be there, they don’t seem to be in control of their life, but sometimes you’re busy, and sometimes there’s so much coming up that they hand everything over and then you don’t know how to take it back. It’s very easy to hand it over but it’s very hard to start taking responsibility of your life.”

Is Amos talking about herself? Her longheld tendency to deconstruct the female psyche and deflect personal enquiry was best demonstrated on 2007’s American Girl Posse, which saw her adopt various guises to depict five alter egos, both in the artwork and her performances. “I don’t think that one female archetype is totally and completely any woman I’ve ever met,” she explains, aware of the dangers of taking certain character-types to the extreme. “Sometimes someone will show me something and I’ll seem a bit scary, and I think that’s got its context, but… That’s the thing, I’m strong when I need to be strong, but a strong woman can also be very supportive and nurturing and loving, and very feminine.”

Does she think of herself as feminine? “I do! My husband does, my daughter does, they think I’m really warm – southern American and warm – like my mother. But if I’m battling the big boys, in whatever structure I’m having to deal with, it’s a different tone.”

Repeated battles with the big boys at Atlantic Records eventually fuelled Amos’s decision to construct a physical retreat from label pressure. In 1995, while in Ireland to record third album Boys for Pele with sound engineers Mark Hawley and Marcel van Limbeek, Peter Gabriel advised Amos to build a private studio. Two years later, in a collaborative venture with Van Limbeek and Hawley, Amos founded Martian Studios – and a year after that Amos and Hawley were married. Her studio was constructed in Cornwall to escape the pressures of LA, London and New York, and when, in 1997, Amos suffered the first of three miscarriages, the importance of Martian studios to her career can barely be overestimated. It gave her freedom to work independently and respite from industry pressure, allowing for room to experiment. Today, with the ordeal of those troubled years well behind her, Amos has a much more flippant view of Cornwall, saying “my husband lets me crash there, and my daughter goes to school there, but so much of my life happens in the states…”

Her daughter, Natashya, was born in 2000. Afterwards Amos revealed that Atlantic had only allowed her two days to recuperate from the third miscarriage before pushing her back into a gruelling promotional schedule. It was the final straw, provoking her split from the label in 2002, and although she found a home with Epic for several years, last year Amos announced that she’ll be operating independently of all major labels from now on.

Label independence seems hard-won, but not unexpected. Amos has solitarily crafted every album since the completion of Martian Studios in its quiet confines, preventing any major label meddling with her masters. And her output is staggering considering the traumas of her personal life over the last ten years. Typically, however, she attributes her productivity to something else entirely: “I serve the muse. I do, I serve the creative force. I have to do it, when it takes over,” she says. “It can be when I’m taking a shower, sitting having a coffee somewhere, and she walks in, in a dream in the middle of the night – a lot of the time when I’m travelling, because your senses are heightened and you’re out of it. I just resolve myself to the muse being in control.”

And of her latest album, Abnormally Attracted To Sin, “I didn’t think I was going to do it, I thought I was going to take a break, but it took over…”

Why can’t Amos take credit for her own talent – for her own proven ability to withstand the multifarious pressures of producing records and media enquiry? It’s a contradiction that’s dogged her all her life – and a subject that finds a home on her latest release – “I’m fascinated by the idea of erotic spirituality,” she says, oblique as ever. But then: “there’s this idea of being attracted to something that once we’re into we’re not attracted to any more; once we realise what it is, it doesn’t seem very sensual, it seems disgusting to your spirit.”

The struggle between her compulsion to write and release records and the baggage that goes with the whole process is perhaps the reason that she’d now rather let imaginary friends take credit for her achievements. Amos has learned to deal with public and professional scrutiny by invoking eccentricity, and coating it with the lacquer of a contrived ‘public’ face. This deceit – this deflection of reality in favour of a more exciting alternative – is the very definition of pop. But talk to the woman long enough and it’s very clear that there’s a shrewd mind at work behind it all: “I’m a woman who carries my own weight: I hunt,” she says, blue eyes burning behind that distracting red wig. “So if you don’t hunt and you need help, that’s different, but if you’re a good hunter and you’re just sitting on your ass, I’m gonna kick your ass: you can come out and hunt with me.”

Great Escape Festival Day 3

2009-05-21T03:15:00.000-07:00

What better way to start a Saturday than with a secret fans-only gig by Ben Kweller, in a tent? Gigwise, like most other punters at The Great Escape, heard about this and seemingly hundreds of other gigs throughout the weekend by signing up to an invaluable texting service (though the text-a-minute tip-offs did begin to grate a little towards the end). Never one to disappoint, Kweller took requests from the crowd, encouraging sing-a-long renditions of ‘Penny On A Train Track’ and ‘On My Way’, before trying to flog his new album for a tenner at the end of the set, in true troubadour style. Maccabees brothers-in-arms Felix and Hugo were spotted singing along, word-perfect. “The only person I wanted to see was Ben Kweller!” an overexcited Felix told Gigwise at the end of the set.

Saturday’s big news was the not-so-secret Babyshambles gig, which saw Pete Doherty and co. play a six-songs to hundreds of festival-goers at Audio. Those who wanted to attend had to apply for separate tickets, but even that didn’t stop the waiting crowds from queuing round the block hours before the venue even opened. Pete seemed in reasonably good form considering he’d come straight from an impromptu Libertines reunion in London the night before, even managing to head a football kicked up to him by the crowd mid-set.

That night, in Audio’s basement, Fight Like Apes unleashed ferocious sweaty screamy-pop on an unsuspecting, beer-swilling audience. The programme described them as having spent ‘the majority of the past 12 months ram-raiding their don’t-take-no-for-an-answer songs in people’s ears’, and the ram-raiding continued unabated in Brighton. A short while later, on the same stage, San Diego garage rockers The Soft Pack played their second gig of the weekend. The soundsystem didn’t do them justice, but they impressed nonetheless, imparting fuzzily distorted riffs and disaffected obscured vocals to a rowdy crowd that threatened to erupt into full-on rioting – the gig was a definite Escape highlight.

Night-time revellers were low on the ground for the grand finale, perhaps the result of it being the third night of wind-beaten city trudging, but the cosy upstairs of Ocean Rooms busied slightly with the friendly fans of Post War Years, and their polished, punctuating, bleepy indie. Scheduled entertainment was equally thin on the ground after the midnight hour, but those with the stamina graced a marquee dance tent for Queens Of Noize’s very own cocktail of eighties pop and rock, that veered towards the bland as the night drew to a close. No bother – Great Escape had already re-instated itself as the best of the inner-city festivals. As the Camden Crawl with added seaside and cider, it’s pretty hard to beat.

Great Escape Festival Day 2

2009-05-20T03:07:00.000-07:00

There were plenty of hungover gig-goers as grizzly as the weather when Friday came around. Daytime shows at Above Audio were sparsely attended, but that didn’t stop San Franciscan fourpiece, Love Like Fire, from playing a full-volume set of grinding guitar riffs and shouty vocals courtesy of frontwoman Ann Yu. James Yuill followed with his own especially enticing brand of bedroom laptop-pop, still managing to look incongruously the nerd even when surrounded by carefully styled Brighton geek-chic. By the time cheery Norwegians Casiokids took to the stage at 3pm the bar was full of the slow-to-emerge Escapers all hoping that some uber-happy Scando-pop could sooth aching heads. Entertaining haircuts aside, blissed-out saccharine songs were just too sweet for our ears, so we headed for one of Brighton’s many punter-filled pubs to find shelter from the storm in large pints of the best southern cider.

Evening entertainment kicked off at the Sallis Benney theatre, where the student cafe served fruit by the piece and cheap tea with portion packets of digestive biscuits, just like a student canteen should. Veils positively tumbled onstage at 6pm – frontman Finn Andrews breathlessly explained that they were “a little disorganised.” The New Zealanders are currently mid-tour promoting album Sun Gangs, and there was an urgency about the performance that Fin later put down to his being used to a ninety-minute touring set, rather than the standard festival thirty. “I kept thinking that thirty minutes is the length of an episode of The Simpsons, which actually seems quite long,” he mused to Gigwise backstage.

Micachu And The Shapes seemed much more comfortable with the rather stuffy industry crowd, chatting amicably with the audience between songs of meticulous pop chaos. One punter was overheard groaning “This music makes me feel so old!” To the contrary, it was very easy to see why Micachu has garnered such a high profile this year – who else could make catchy pop out of vacuum-cleaner samples and a battered, strung up acoustic?

Twilight settled into Brighton’s colourful lanes as Vivian Girls rattled the walls of the Pavillion Theatre with the kind of ballsy bitch rock that could incite impromtu violence against bras. Their set ended with a slick manoeuvre involving them each exchanging instruments without stopping playing – testament to their hefty use of distortion and pedals if nothing else.

Next door in the enormous school-sports-hall of a Corn Exchange, Club NME played host to a considerably younger crowd, who sat cross-legged in clusters on the laminated floor, waiting for neo-folk fourpiece Mumford & Sons. The effects of a day of free-flowing lager were becoming more apparent by the time the wholesome-looking band graced the stage at 11pm – and despite the fact that most of Mumford & Sons’ songs embrace subject-matter that tends towards indulgently melancholy, the venue erupted into zealous jigging and uncontainable grinning. It must have been the banjo (or maybe banjo-player Winston Marshall’s hilarious chicken-like dancing). They claimed it was the biggest gig they’ve ever played, and with an album on the way later this year, things are looking increasingly rosy for Mumford and his progeny.

Metronomy rounded off the night in their usual, infectious electro-vein, but with the added extra-excitement of a completely new line-up including Gbenga Adelekan on bass and one-time Lightspeed Champion drummer Anna Prior. Oscar Cash, on keys, was still affecting the robotic dancing and stylised pouting of Metronomy’s trio days, which made him look like a bit of a twerp, but the new band line-up was an resounding success, giving tired songs from album ‘Nights Out’ an unexpected vitality. If only the same could be said of the drunken punters who wobbled out into the night as the gig finished.

Great Escape Festival Day 1

2009-05-19T02:56:00.000-07:00

Part punters’s piss up by the sea, part industry conference, Brighton’s Great Escape festival has established itself as one of the UK’s leading searchlights in the hunt for new talent. True to British seaside tradition, festival-goers can divide their time between arcade games on the pier, ice creams on the pavilion and fish and chips on the beach, or over thirty venues hosting live entertainment from undiscovered and established artists from all over the world. And while the city’s pretty well infested with those carrying ‘delegate’ passes pushing in all the queues (30% of those in attendance are in the business), there’s so much going on that you’d be hard pressed not to discover something special, even if you didn’t quite manage to get into Kasabian.

Brighton welcomes everyone with bad weather on the Thursday, which puts a damper on the trudge between venues. Brighton town proper is relatively small, however, and endowed with a huge number of gig venues all marked on a dummy-proof map, so it’s still fairly simple finding something to suit. Deadpan Londonite Emmy The Great kicks off proceedings at Digital with her delicate mix of acoustics and understatement. While Emmy is as enchanting as ever, the venue is ill-suited to her sound, and songs dissipate in the beery chatter of the crowd, loosing their poignancy somewhat.

Meanwhile down at Concorde 2 youngsters Bombay Bicycle Club have caused a bit of a ruckus in the rain – their gig is heavily oversubscribed and most of the hopeful fans are turned away at the door, left to trudge back down to town and see what else is on offer. A few early gatherers at the Corn Exchange catch noisy Brooklyn duo The Hundred In The Hands, who’ve begun to build a solid reputation from their raucous live performances. Tonight, however, a large proportion of the audience is still sitting in wait for Thursday’s big gig: The Maccabees.

Fresh from a UK tour in which they launched much anticipated new album ‘Wall Of Arms’, Brighton boys The Maccabees are on happiest on home soil, and their set plays out like a huge sweaty homecoming party. There’s the usual favourites from debut ‘Colour It In’, but some of the best received material comes fresh from their more recent release, including a joyous ‘Kiss And Revolve’ that threatens to see the riotous crowd lift off from the floor entirely. It’s a fitting welcome to Brighton – and judging by this reception no one present would be rather be anywhere else.

Madness Interview

2009-05-11T02:49:00.000-07:00

So you’re skint, right? And everyone’s talking about how they’ve got no money, and the TV keeps telling us we’re all going to die of swine flu, and the fleeting sunshine has been replaced by those familiar black clouds. God love England.

Some things can be relied on though – Domino’s pizza is doing alright. Lager’s still on tap. And Madness are making a comeback ten years after their last album, with a record about London, no less.

Crafted with an Oliver Twist narrative borne of history, mystery and spectacle, The Liberty Of Norton Folgate explores London’s dirty little corners, sweeping out the oddities for inspection, and putting the city’s story to the tune of a full-scale orchestra. It’s as gleeful as ‘Our House’ was back in 1983. If the hoards of fans screaming every word in the backstreets of Camden at this year’s Camden Crawl are anything to by, it doesn’t matter one bit whether you fell for Madness back in seventies, or you didn’t hear ‘It Must Be Love’ until its rerelease in 1991. Madness are a band of the people, for the people, and they’re back to put a bit of cheer into our downtrodden, recession-filled lives, as Chas recently told Gigwise…

It’s been a decade since you last wrote an album. Why the comeback?
We began in a recession, in a difficult time for the country. It was a wave, so there was something being expressed by The Specials, Madness, The Beat. Then we reformed, again in an economic recession, almost because people wanted us to. And now we’re back in a recession again, and this album is the third energy bubble. I like to think of Madness as a bright shining bit of joy.

Where did the idea for the album initially come from?
Because we’ve been together for so long, it’s difficult to say who said what, when, and we’re it begins. It came from an interest in London, it came from wanting to express that interest, it came from Patrick O’Brien mentioning the Liberties [Norton Folgate is pocket of land in London excluded from the normal legal system of the UK], it came from Sugs reading Peter Ackroyd, it came from me reading Ian Sinclair – it also came from that side of us that likes to be a bit theatrical, you know? There’s elements of Beckett in there, there’s elements of Oliver Twist – when we’re touring we listen to Snow White & The Seven Dwarves and Tommy Cooper, because we get a buzz off that, that’s what we do. I think Madness has got a joyous thing about it – we’re more post-war than we contemporary – we were born around the fifties and early sixties.

What about Madstock, why are you bringing that back?
Madstock is a brand – I want us to be building that live. I don’t really care much about records and recording, I like the live experience. It’s financially sensible because you get 85% instead of 20% on a record.

Speaking of financial incentives – is that why you’re making a comeback?
No, not at all, it’s not like that at all. In fact I get bored with this – you don’t ask an actor if they’re acting in a film because they need the money. I’m an artist, you know.

You feel like you have things to say?
Absolutely, I think it’s a credible album and I think it’s worthy of being released. Someone like James Brown goes on for thirty years playing the same set – but for us it’s not about the same set, it’s about delivering something that people expect and want.

So you feel the pressure to deliver something of a certain quality?
No, not at all. Selfishly, we write for us.

But there is an element of trying to cheer everyone up a bit.
Sure, we play old songs, and when we play new songs we slowly introduce them over time. We’ve got such an extensive back-catalogue that it’s really easy – we can choose between our original songs, a ska-set, and a whole Liberty Of Norton Folgate set – so we change the sets depending on the territory and who we’re playing to.

What about The Specials, are they going to be appearing at Madstock?
Hmm, how can I put this – not if I can help it. I believe that Jerry Dammers started The Specials, I believe he’s a genius, and I think it’s very sad that the band can’t reconcile their differences. [Dammers hasn’t played with The Specials since the 1980s] Music should be a unifying thing, you know, and it just doesn’t feel right to me, to be honest. I know that I’m not meant to be saying these things, and that it’s political but I can’t be arsed with all that – it’s not the real deal.

You don’t want them to play?
I don’t want to stop anyone from what they’re doing, it’s their choice, but do I want them to play? I would feel like I was betraying Jerry in some way, and I wouldn’t betray someone as a matter of principle.

So that’s a no.
That’s a definite, resounding fuck off! [uncomfortable pause] I didn’t mean you! It’s difficult, it’s difficult because they’re a fucking great band. But the fact is that they can’t play original songs due to this rift. I want to mediate and have a little chat with all of them, you know. One thing that Madness is good at is sticking together and being truly friendly. The trouble with The Specials is that they weren’t friends before they were a band, you know. But I love them all individually, seriously, they’re good people.

Do you stay in touch with what’s going on in music at the minute?
I’m listening to Lily Allen’s album, to Elbow’s latest album, I’m listening to The Cinematic Orchestra…

But do you care what’s going on, in terms of what you actually do?
I like to see what cuts the ground a bit, you know – if it’s been in print for fifty years then I’ll read it. I’ve run a record label before, but now, I feel like I don’t need to know what’s going on. I’ve stopped reading newspapers, I’ve stopped watching television, and I don’t want 57 megahertz in my mind, I want 8 megahertz and a fireplace. My truthfulness to my voice is all that matters.

Is this the start of a new chapter for Madness?
I totally see it that way, I see this as the third cherry bomb – boom!

Observer Music Monthly Pop Reviews

2009-04-23T03:53:00.000-07:00

Conor Oberst - Outer South (Merge)
The days when musicians would release several albums a year are mostly over – just not as far as Conor Oberst, aka Bright Eyes, is concerned. Only months after his solo album, he returns with the Mystic Valley Band for more sacrilegious alt-country and the odd acoustic ballad. The band's contributions are low points on this 16-track epic, but Oberst proves as iconoclastic as ever.

The Maccabees - Wall Of Arms (Fiction)
Enjoying the widescreen production that Markus Drav once brought to Arcade Fire and Coldplay, this time round the vocal quiver and inimitable art-pop hooks that distinguished the Maccabees' 2007 debut are offset by darker undercurrents. Wall of Arms is the meticulously evolved sound of a band aiming to bid to breathe life into British indie.

School Of Seven Bells and Bat For Lashes @ Shepherds Bush Empire 19/4/09

2009-04-20T03:42:00.000-07:00

Fashion and music are fickle bedfellows – at the best of times mutually affirming; at others making fools of those whose musical substance fails to match their stylistic pretensions.

School Of Seven Bells are fairly recent navigators of the volatilities of musical whimsy. Williamsburg origins and quasi-supernatural themes, not to mention the visually striking nature of twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, have rendered them a genuinely intriguing trio and won them much critical and cultural praise with the recent release of debut LP Alpinisms.

Their recorded sound, self-professed “music to dance to”, enchants with left-field pop propulsions – but tonight this is somewhat lost in translation. The diminutive twins, surrounded by the stage-clutter of Bat For Lashes ephemera, are missing their usual radiating glow. And while the venue is packed, those in attendance observe passively, mustering appreciative nods and polite applause to the familiar looping refrains of ‘My Cabal’ and ‘iamundernodisguise’. It is an incredibly difficult gig to support due to the singular allurement of Khan’s iconic persona, and the inanimate ‘weird-folk’ advocates of her audience. While School Of Seven Bells demonstrate their usual aptitude for markedly inventive mystical pop, it seems lost, even wasted, on the crowd present.

The icon in question, Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes, has long been the darling of the higher echelons of credible fashion magazines – as evidenced by recent shoots for Spin, Dazed & Confused and Fact magazine where she features as the paragon of smouldering musical vogue. Her music, however, has always sounded faintly derivative, conjouring mysterious etherealities from eighties synths, tribal percussion and neo-folk inflections, rendering Khan the hotpotch progeny of Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks and Bjork.

It is these preconceptions of nostalgia that make her performance tonight even more astounding – Khan is an artist who must be seen to be believed, her live shows hypnotically captivating. That same audience passivity that School Of Seven Bells struggled seems to annoy Khan equally: she tries to encourage dancing in more upbeat numbers, but everyone’s just staring, visually enthralled by her presence. Her tiny, leaping form is encased in a pink-silk jumpsuit and clown-ruff, her aura is as big as a stadium and her voice unexpectedly magnificent, reaching through octaves with furious power and soulful wispiness in equal measure.

Instrumentally, the diverse talents of Khan’s three-piece band transform esoteric pop-songs into panopticons of sound with a plethora of equipment, from keys and electronic drum kits to bells and an autoharp. In a set that spans an hour and a half and includes two encores, Bat For Lashes leave no doubt that Khan is one effigy of the fashion world wholly substantiated by her musical origins.

Album Review: King Creosote Flick The Vs (Domino)

2009-04-19T03:47:00.000-07:00

SUPERSWEET

Prolific Fence Collective progeny King Creosote returns to Domino for the release of Flick The Vs, his own little fuck you to those who’ve wasted his time over the last few years. The man behind the moniker, Kenny Anderson, has had plenty to kick back against, from the demise of his long term relationship with fellow songwriter Jenny Gordon, to his failed stint with Warner imprint 679 records, who dropped him in 2007 following their takeover by Atlantic. Ever one to translate his troubles into albums, Anderson’s latest offering mines these emotional and professional troughs for darker material, whilst managing some remarkable ebullience that arrests with the familiar optimism of this first man of Fence.

Lead single ‘Coast On By’, a collaboration with The Beta Band’s Steve Mason, sees Anderson bemoaning the transience of the life of a musician in a clattering, heavy-handed number of pop-sensible simplicity – but this is hardly representative of an album that oscillates between the lure of electro-hooks and organic acoustic/orchestral elements. Opener ‘No One Had It Better’ showcases Anderson’s ability to switch from dislocated, experimental electronica to the most sublime, looping guitar hooks, and meld the two into an oddly plaintive, propulsive break-up ballad. Meanwhile ‘No Way She Exists’ appears to open with the sound of a creaking door, before exploding into the jangle and honk of a baritone saxophone and a thousand pots and pans.

It is in the quieter moments of Flick The Vs that Anderson’s constantly evolving approach to song writing and arranging is best demonstrated. Though almost always favouring the melodic security of three-chords in verse-chorus form, he nonetheless transforms such simplicity with undistinguishable sound effects and samples. In ‘Fell An Ox’, Flick The Vs’s finest moment, it is only Anderson’s vocal that anchors the opening of an otherwise drifting three minutes of forlorn ephemera, both musical and lyrical.

While by no means definitive of King Creosote, Flick The Vs is nonetheless representative of the constant metamorphosis of one of Scotland’s greatest musical exports. It manages to be at once experimental and diverse without sounding completely disparate and confused, and encompasses both extremes of Anderson’s preoccupations with commercial pop and left-field contemporary folk. A promising addition to the Creosote repertoire.

Live Review: Trailer Trash Tracys, It Hugs Back, Papercuts @ The Legion, 16/4/09

2009-04-17T03:19:00.000-07:00

Band names, like it or not, pigeonhole the groups that possess them. You could almost envisage the staid blonde pout of Trailer Trash Tracys’s Suzanne Aztoria before it appeared onstage at Sonic Cathedral. Empowered by all the frosty charisma it is possible to muster over woozy, drifting pop, Suzanne nonetheless draws the eye in what could otherwise be described as a band in the springtime of their career. All that Cocteau Twins-sounding lo-fi noise is convincing, but samey, and it’ll take more than a pretty frontwoman to set them apart as the year advances.

Meanwhile, It Hugs Back manage to so perfectly convey the wet geekery their name suggests, that everyone here feels instantly satisfied. Well, almost. This awkward four-piece appear to have been spat from the bowels of darkest Kent, etiolated and shifty-looking, all elbows and furtive glances. Their set comprises largely of material from their recently released ‘Inside Your Guitar’ LP, their first on 4AD, although there’s a good few songs here, notably ‘Other Cars Go’, that have been doing the setlist circuit for a good while longer. It’s difficult to sit either side of the fence with It Hugs Back – they are clearly an informed and innovative musical outfit with no sickening image-preoccupations, yet there’s just something about them so infuriatingly pathetic, it’s difficult to fully grasp their angle. Are we supposed to feel sorry for them?

After these humble British offerings, San Franciscan outfit Papercuts take to the stage with a kind of marked professionalism. The four-piece headed by full-time recording engineer Jason Quever are older and wiser than their line-up predecessors, and they purvey music of a markedly different class. Imbued with heady organ that pushes melodically through each track, Quever’s achievement is in rendering sixties pop songs of succinct and simple elements raw and richly-hued. He looks like a more timid Jack Black, and sings in a kind of pitch-perfect, high whine, but it all works, and the reason for this is that it comes back to solid, pop-sensible constructions and sharp, polished musical components.

The set comprises of the best of recent album ‘You Can Have What You Want’, and goes down a storm with the sparse onlookers. The rest of his band scarpers after some panicked conversation over the rapturous applause at the end – they clearly haven’t planned the encore the audience want. Eventually, Quever stands in alone, singing a rich, confident guitar-ballad that captivates all present. Their chosen name, Papercuts, might suggest the tiniest of imprints in a swamped musical pond, but it’s precisely this kind of acutely fascinating pop that makes a lasting impression among a swill of mediocrity, as tonight suggests.

Art Preview in The Stool Pigeon - Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix

2009-04-08T03:13:00.000-07:00

Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and KIT (Germany) until 10 May 2009
Malmö Konsthal (Sweden) 29 May to 20 September 2009
www.sonicyouth.com

Sonic Youth have never been just about the music. In a career that has spanned nearly three decades, their success is rooted in a ruthless artistic idiosyncrasy that includes poetry, design, art and, of course, music.

Initially, Sonic Youth’s reputation was conceived and established underground in a pre-internet era, through tours and the micro-distribution of independents. Most bands today wouldn’t stand a chance under like conditions. If in the eighties they lurched between genres, labels and line-ups, 1990’s //Goo//, their first on a major, and subsequent tour with Nirvana, raised the bar in terms of the band’s aspirations. It was at this point that Sonic Youth were almost alone in ushering in a new era of alternative rock, when the supremacy of American hip hop threatened to suffocate guitar-based noise entirely. Then in 1994 //Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star// became their highest charting US release.

Since, Sonic Youth have eschewed both limelight and categorisation through a process of constant sonic shapeshifting and artistic diversification that has continued to this day, a feat celebrated in //Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix//. The exhibition features artwork by influential and directly connected New York artists including Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and Tony Oursler, displayed alongside the creative work of their West coast contemporaries, from Mike Kelley to Todd Haynes. The Beat poets feature, as does seminal photography by James Welling, Sofia Coppola, and Richard Kern, among others.

Finally, in a pavilion especially designed for the exhibition by Dan Graham, Sonic Youthʼs complete audio output, including rare videos and live shows, are presented. The exhibition takes place in Dusseldorf, Germany, until May 10, before moving to Malmö, Sweden, where it stays until September.

Those unable to make the cross-continental trek can now purchase a condensed, published version, edited by Roland Groenenboom. which features interviews, catalogue texts and archival material for a bedroom fix of the Sonic Youth phenomenon.

Art Project Press Release

2009-04-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

The following was used by a local artist as a press release for an exhibition in Hackney.

195 Mare St. Refuge
open for one evening only by Ella Medley-Whitfield
and the women of the Elizabeth Fry Hostel

Mid-afternoon in a greasy Hackney café, and five or six women sit around a table, hungrily awaiting fried breakfasts and chips. The women range in age, appearance and temperament, but there is one thing that binds them: all of them have recently been released from prison.

“When you go into prison everything is taken away from you,” explains Sarah over steaming plate of lasagne. “Even down to what your children wear. It takes a very long time to get used to that feeling of not having any control.” At forty, she’s the eldest of the group, her long grey hair tied back from smiling eyes that have not properly seen the outside world, or her children, for over a decade. Sarah says it takes at least a year to acclimatise inside – to let go and let the system take control. Recently she’s be awarded ROTL (Release On Temporary Licence), which means that four days a month she stays in a half-way house in Reading called the Elizabeth Fry Hostel, where she is allowed a little more freedom. In this way, she is slowly rehabilitated into a society that, many years ago, excluded her.

Two hundred years ago, women like Sarah would have been shunned for life, kept in appalling conditions for ‘crimes’ like littering and disobedience, some of them locked up without trial. It was only when Elizabeth Fry, a female pioneer familiar to all of us from the back of the five-pound note, began to campaign for fairer treatment in the nineteenth century, that these conditions began to improve.

Today, it is one of Fry’s greatest achievements that the residents of the modern-day hostel are here to visit – the now derelict Refuge for Women on Mare Street. A huge, barren construction of broken floorboards and peeling wallpaper, this neglected monument of hope is seeing the return of a new generation of women prisoners. Under the guidance of local artist Ella Medley-Whitfield, modern-day female convicts are hard at work conceiving of an art project that will revive the broken remains of the refuge.

“We are all governed by rules,” Ella explains, “but for some, every waking moment, every move, is dictated by others. This project allows women who have experienced that extreme to recreate elements of it for the rest of us – perhaps shedding light on the constraints of our own lives in the process.” Ella’s work habitually concentrates on human systems, both psychological and societal. Often, this involves undergoing lengthy research periods – for this project she has spent days working with the residents of the Elizabeth Fry hostel in Reading, and weeks studying the tumbledown remains of the derelict refuge in Hackney that would have once been their home.

On 7th April she invites us all to this monumental listed building to experience the culmination of a groundbreaking project. Bridging the divide between the past and the present, the liberated and the imprisoned, the imagined and reality, Ella and the women of the Elizabeth Fry hostel are offering a unique opportunity to see life through the eyes of stranger – or perhaps our own lives, reflected in the faces of those who have lived behind bars.
Hazel Sheffield

The Stool Pigeon Interview: Papercuts

2009-04-06T03:27:00.000-07:00

“You can have what you want,” Papercuts’ Jason Quever sings on the title track of his third album. Only what he means is, you can’t.

“You grow up hearing that you can have whatever you want, but there are so few people who are actually at peace. I think it’s just the limitations of humanity: why happiness is so elusive, when it seems so simple.”

Papercuts’ album is drenched in this discernable longing. “I like dreamy pop music – I like the mystery. Anybody can buy a computer and make a pristine recording, but it’s just not as exciting as leaving in these strange artefacts in which give it character and definition,” Jason explains over his morning coffee. Recorded onto tape, each shimmering three-minute gasp of pop on his new album is immersed in layers of extra noise – reverb, distortion, drums, and organs with weird frequencies.

Obscured melodies and hidden meanings speak volumes of Quever’s personal humility. Though his last album, 2007’s ‘Can’t Go Back’, was critically praised, Quever himself immediately reviled the album for the way people picked up on its more retro elements. “I honestly wish the last record didn’t exist,” he says quietly, that soft vocal falsetto audible in each word. “I used to have to get really drunk to play the last record live – a lot of the old songs were only recording tricks, that band doesn’t exist.”

This time Quever is trying a new approach. He’s currently recording Port O’Brien at his home studio, and explains: “[Port O’Brien] were reading the comments on their Youtube video and laughing about them. That would have had me in bed with a bottle of whiskey! But I try and learn how not to get hurt by things, because some people have thick skin, so I should just, uh, be more like them, the people that don’t care, you know?”

Maybe that’s what Quever wants. But his music, saturated in a humanistic frustration and fear of the unknown, could never come from someone that doesn’t care. On some level, he’s aware of that, and better prepared for it, too: “at least if people don’t like this record I can think ‘fuck you, I know this is good.’” And he’ll be right.

Alela Diane @ St Giles Church 30/3/09

2009-04-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

Gigs in churches are strange creatures, far removed from their bar-dwelling cousins. At times, live secular music in such an antiquated, unfamiliar setting can seem wilfully sacrilegious – at others, overly reverent. This evening, Alela Diane creeps onto the stage in St Giles so softly that it is only when she begins singing that the audience realises that it’s started, and a palpable hush descends immediately as her voice reverberates around the vaults. To say the acoustics in a place like this are unforgiving is an understatement: every minute mis-tuning and finger-stumble on the picked acoustic pierces the air, and no one talks in a church gig, so there is no disguising mistakes. Alela’s voice takes a little while to warm up, though she shows no physical signs of nervousness.

Her father, Tom Menig, joins her for ‘Age Old Blue’, and together they turn a simple double acoustic sound into something utterly spellbinding. Alela’s vocals verge on yodelling, both plaintive and oddly powerful. During her folkier moments that arresting voice could be the howling of a wolf, but in the delicate country twang of ‘Lady Divine’ or ‘To Be Still’ she sounds like the bluest whistle of a steam-train on a damp morning. So much of Alela’s music is cinematic, conjouring landscapes of pre-colonial America, when people lived in the valleys and trees. She looks almost like a Native American, too, and there’s no doubt that this otherworldliness goes some way to explaining her popularity in grimy central London at a time like this.

But of course it’s that voice that really steals the show, over and above her propensity for escapist musings. The set is organised crescendo-like, with a female vocalist, bassist and drummer joining her onstage for the bulk of it, and then disappearing off to let her close alone. ‘White As Diamonds’, the big single, comes off perhaps the weakest of the whole set – both hurried and clumsily executed, it bears the hallmarks of overplaying. Meanwhile a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Gold Dust Woman’ really works, and provides welcome respite in an hour-long performance that consists mostly of very similar folk and country arrangements.

Some material from her first album, The Pirate Gospel, is included. ‘Tired Feet’ seems especially appropriate this evening, Alela tells us, because it was written in Europe’s churches on her solitary travels. She also tells us that she’s that hers is the last gig to take place in St Giles. It seems like a fitting valedictory gesture for live music here, if that is the case. Both inadvertently jubilant and respectfully hymnal, Alela Diane’s music complements these majestic surroundings perfectly.

Animal Collective @ Kentish Town Forum 24/3/09

2009-03-27T13:10:00.001-07:00

Animal Collective have experienced an unexpected rise to widespread acclaim in recent months. Ninth studio album ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’, released in January, cemented their position at the forefront of a noise-pop avant-garde. True experimentalists in sound, the Baltimore natives have somehow carved a pathway from the periphery of musical innovation to the hype-driven core of ‘cool’.

So long spent underground means that, habitually, Animal Collective play gigs to a hardcore fanbase who know their ‘Sung Tongs’ from their ‘Campfire Songs’, and who, no messing, come to live shows expecting the atmospheric, ear-deafening wig-out that inevitably ensues.

But not tonight. Since the hype surrounding their January release, every alterna-twit in skinny jeans clutching a dog-eared copy of NME has been name-checking Animal Collective as though they’re the passport to a higher plane of societal existence, and the demographic in the Forum tonight makes this all too painfully obvious. Obnoxious indie-brats chat incessantly, take photos on camera phones, josh onlookers on their way to the bar for more orangeade, and generally gawp in bored, ignorant wonderment at a band who, beyond barely recognising the audience’s presence, are almost invisible onstage for the smoke-screened visuals that accompany their set.

The atmosphere suffers as a result, massively detracting from the protracted sonic evolution that Animal Collective apply to each track. There are moments of distended anticipation where Geologist’s bobbing headlamp signals a rhythm-driven detour – when a familiar hook breaks the surface a palpable ecstasy ripples through the crowd, as with the bubbling ‘Brothersport’. The ticker-ticker intro to ‘Fireworks’ seems unending, testing even those of us who know what’s coming, and when that familiar falsetto wail emerges it is quickly absorbed in waves of audio-cacophony that should ignite an all-out rave – and surely would, were the venue and turn-out not so inept.

Meriweather’s big hits, ‘My Girls’ and ‘Summertime Clothes’, are doled out at the very opening of nigh-on two hours, making it clear that this is a show, as ever, raw with artistic intelligence and integrity, rather than one to satiate those whose trend-driven curiosity piqued about a month ago. In short, it’s not a gig for the kids – which is why their dilution of an otherwise superlative performance damages the overall effect to such a degree.

The Kills – Black Balloon EP

2009-03-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

Lately Jamie Hince has been getting more tabloid attention as Kate Moss’s accessory than you’d think his habitually elusive nature would sustain, and Allison Mosshart’s been musically flirting with ex-tour mates Jack White and other members of the American-rock elite in hybrid side-project Dead Weather. You’d be forgiven for thinking they’ve been neglecting one another.

With this in mind, the Black Balloon EP comes as a shot of familiar filth in the arm, dispelling any notion that Hince and Mosshart aren’t still at the height of their combined creative powers. Acting as a heavyweight single release rather than genuinely presenting a mini-album of new material, the EP combines a re-release of its title track, taken from last year’s Midnight Boom LP, alternate versions of ‘Kissy Kissy’ and ‘Sour Cherry’, and off pat ingenuity in an acoustic cover of Willy Nelson’s country classic, ‘Crazy’.

Its four tracks linger with an organic undercurrent that sits easy after ‘Crazy’. ‘Kissy Kissy’, which originally appeared on 2003’s ‘Keep On Your Mean Side’, is cleaned out, stripped back to a chugging acoustic blues that makes its forlorn lyric, ‘Lord, I’m not satisfied’, more plaintive than ever. Meanwhile ‘Sour Cherry’ does away with the digitally rendered, hi-fi rhythmic pulse of the album version for the rumble of amplified guitar distortion, becoming infinitely more menacing.

But it’s the cover, ‘Crazy’, that cuts the divide between The Kills and their contemporaries deeper than ever. VV doesn’t make a habit of the sentimental, and when she does it’s in a wilfully abstract haze of drugs and nonsense as in ‘Goodnight, Bad Morning’ or ‘Ticket Man’. ‘Crazy’ is weirdly soulful – disarmingly faithful to genuine romantic misery in a way that the duo rarely embrace. It’s also light-years, stylistically, from The Kills’ profuse preoccupation with dirty garage rock. Essentially, it’s these kinds of detours, and not their personal lives and side-projects, which will define The Kills as a seminal musical pairing given time.

Twisted Licks Presents: My Toys Like Me and Ex Lovers @ Macbeth, 21/3/09

2009-03-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

The way I see it, breaking artists can choose to play it one of two ways. Early gigs will be inevitably fraught with the strain of trying to establish and distinguish their particular sonic speciality from the mire of mediocrity on offer nightly, so how does one stick out from the crowd enough to gain that essential early support? It’s a choice between either bursting onto the stage in a set so stylised that it could have come ready-made from the Gaga school of theatrics, or affected nonchalance. The later – playing-it-cool – is as much a fabrication as the former, as in the early days, no band really knows what they’re doing or how to handle it. Which is why some of them choose to dress-up and play-up to hide their nerves. And why some of them don’t.

Right, well now that’s sorted, onto two bands that perfectly illustrate this point, both helpfully condensed onto one line-up by the inimitable wondrousness that is Twisted Licks. My Toys Like Me are first up, taking to the stage in dribs and drabs either for chorographical effect, or because the drummer needed a piss. No one’s looking much further than frontwoman Frances anyway, whose angular electro-funk dancing and bouffant blonde afro dominate the small stage. Her nonsensical lyrics are delivered in child-like murmurs over the acid-pulse of trippy electro beats courtesy of Lazlo Legezer. Lazlo’s production is seamless over the superlative soundsystem of The Macbeth, but there aren’t enough pill-popping electro-kids here to appreciate it, and consequently overblown affections like Frances’s whispered ‘taaaaaa’ at the end of songs just sound a bit silly.

Exlovers try the opposite approach, with heavily nostalgic indie-pop balladry that comforts after the achingly contemporary, angled acid-beats of the support. There’s five of them, presumably not all embroiled in some spider-like network of break-ups and relationships, although you’d be forgiven for thinking frontman Pete and glockenspiel-playing Laurel once dated – they look like two halves. Nobody smiles much, but their melancholy suits the forlorn vocal harmonies and milky-sad melodies that characterise their sound. Recent comparisons to Elliott Smith are misjudged and a bit rich – there’s the wistfulness of The Shins and the lazy swell of quieter Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! suggested at here, but a lot of polishing and tightening to be done before either of these comparisons properly hold water. That said, they’ve only been about for a year or so, so there’s plenty of time. And their nonchalance serves them well in the Macbeth tonight – Exlovers come across humble and wholly likeable, pitching themselves to the crowd perfectly.

Live Review: The Phantom Band @ Hoxton Bar + Grill 12/3/09

2009-03-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Scotland’s best kept secret no longer, The Phantom Band are all set to ascend to the dizzy heights of the bigtime this year. About time, too: this Glaswegian six-piece have been six years in the making, apparently spending their time between rehearsals working on the most convincing display of ginger facial hair this side of Family Ness.

Recently, though, The Phantom Band have been collecting acolytes with enviable rapidity, and tonight they play with the perceptible swagger of a band no longer content to sit on the sidelines. Their music is made to be heard in a live environment – it swells and bulges through the sticky back room in Hoxton, transporting all those present far from their sweaty confines and into the mistiest, most magnificent depths of the Scottish Highlands. Led into the mountains by the pied-piper call of the melodica (bagpipes for times of economic hardship?) in ‘Crocodile’, we are lulled with the sparse sea-shanty hymnal of ‘Island’, before being punched in the gut by the wrenching, distorted riff of ‘Half-Hound’.

All those years masterminding their plan for world domination have endowed The Phantom Band with an obviously refined sonic vision that seems to entail more instruments than your average orchestra, and new ways of playing them, too - although at one point pedal-man Greg Yale looks particularly lost on a banjo, as though he might never have seen one before. Frontman Rick Anthony extends his arms out over the audience in a weird conjouring motion throughout, while most of the rest of the band sport screwed up faces of concentration.

Well they might concentrate, too, as The Phantom Band specialise in distended, proggy Scot-rock that tends not so much to surpass as to shit all over the three-minute mark. With time constraints disregarded, atmospherics and attention to detail are paramount, though they indulge in wonderfully light-hearted touches, including an unexpected barbershop chorus in the anthemic ‘Throwing Bones’. If only one band is predestined to dominate the smaller stages during the coming festival season, The Phantom Band are it.

Clash Magazine: April Album Reviews

2009-03-17T16:37:00.000-07:00

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
COLLECTORS’ EDITIONS OF CLASSIC ALBUMS
MUTE

This series of reissues will see Cave and The Seeds’ entire back catalogue digitally remastered and remixed with added B-sides and films for the discerning completist. The back story of Australia’s first-man of maverick genius kicks off with 1984’s From Her To Eternity in all its filthy, sacrilegious glory, followed by The Firstborn Is Dead, bloated with Elvis disturbia and lyrical blasphemy. By the time Kicking Against The Pricks was released in 1986 Cave had become the ‘outsider’s outsider’ picked apart by the media for his messianic personality and held aloft for his inimitable, reckless musicianship. It’s only with Your Funeral… My Trial that Cave began to cement his vision into the kind of audibly comprehensive blues manifesto that contemporary contenders can only dream of.

8/10

GET 3 SONGS: Wanted Man, From Her To Eternity, I’m Gonna Kill That Woman
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, Jerry Lee Lewis

CAROLINE WEEKS
SONGS FOR EDNA
MANIMAL VINYL

Bat for Lashes multi-instrumentalist Caroline Weeks here steps out of the shadow of Natasha Khan for some experimentalist musings. Songs For Edna is a sparse, delicate, nine-track solo debut that takes lyrical inspiration from the much-overlooked American poetess, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Armed with an oddly-tuned Spanish guitar and the softly-spoken verse of the archetype of pre-war American bohemia, Weeks’ succeeds in creating a record that defies convention in both subject matter and melodic form. Her method works best on the most lyrical of Millay’s poems, as in ‘Renascence’, but falls uncomfortably short in places. Equally, while Weeks’ is evidently enormously musically gifted, the overriding sense of amateurism that accompanies her unsteady vocals tends to detract from the album’s overall effectiveness.

4/10

GET 3 SONGS: Renascence, Oh Sleep Forever In The Latmian Cave, Elegy
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Essie Jain, Gregory + The Hawk, Blue Roses.

CAMERA OBSCURA
MY MAUDLIN CAREER
4AD

You’ve got to give them credit: Camera Obscura have carved their niche and are sitting pretty. New album ‘My Maudlin Career’, the Glaswegian quintet’s first on 4AD, heralds more of the same heartbroken, up-tempo chamber-pop. This time though, they’ve traded the glitz of the pipe-organ that proliferated on 2006’s Let’s Get Out Of This County for schmaltzy string orchestras and plenty of twinkling tuned-percussion. Traceyanne’s distinctive vocal breathes life into simple lyrics, only losing charm with heavy-handed production that sees her swamped in reverb on the stark melancholy of ‘Other Towns and Other Cities’. Lead single ‘French Navy’ is the inferior cousin of ‘Lloyd I’m Ready…’ but still carries plenty of tinny charisma, bolstered by a brass band and the wholesome clarity of Camera Obscura’s unfailing musical consistency.

6/10

GET 3 SONGS: French Navy, You Told A Lie, Honey In The Sun
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Belle & Sebastian, Au Revoir Simone, Ra Ra Riot

JEFFRY LEWIS & THE JUNKYARDS
‘EM ARE I
ROUGH TRADE

Immutable anti-folk muso, Jeffery Lewis, returns with his fifth full-length album on Rough Trade. ‘Ere Are I brims with Lewis’ dry, conversational lyrics and friendly three-chord musicality. What shines through, as ever, is the superlative wit with which the humdrumeries of day-to-day life are presented. Even at his most existential, Lewis employs more bathos than your average, at one point comparing life to the common cold on ‘If Life Exists?’ The Junkyards colour an unadventurous musical canvas with much-needed detail, aided by Herman Dune and Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. There’s the somewhat incongruous inclusion of ‘The Upside Down Cross’ by bassist brother Jack Lewis, but it can’t deter from this unusually consistent long-player from the ultimate anti-hero of naturalist folk.

7/10

GET 3 SONGS: Roll Bus Roll, To Be Objectified, Slogans
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Adam Green, Diane Cluck, Kimya Dawson

YEAH YEAH YEAHS 
IT’S BLITZ 
INTERSCOPE/POLYDOR  

When a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album opens with electro-jitter reminiscent of that ubiquitous Little Boots single you know you’re in trouble. It’s Blitz, contrary to titular promise, is so far from blitzkrieg it feels a bit like betrayal. While the Is Is EP perfected the balance between cohesion and brutality, It’s Blitz is swamped in a mire of wet synths and keys in the Celtic colourations of ‘Skeletons’ or washy new-wave sensibilities of ‘Hysteric’. Previously Nick Zinner underpinned Karen O’s somatic vocal with a heavy dose of brainaching guitar smut; he’s now content to hide behind the keyboard. The darker inflections of ‘Dull Life’ and ‘Shame and Fortune’ touch on past glories, but for the most part It’s Blitz is a trendy aberration of slippery atmospherics – all bark and very little bite.

3/10   

GET 3 SONGS: Dull Life, Shame and Fortune, Soft Shock
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Howling Bells, The Duke Spirit, The Raveonettes

Clash Magazine's Ones To Watch: Chew Lips

2009-03-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

“A couple of micro-Korgs, a couple of really old-school Casios – the kind people used to collect up tokens for – a bass guitar, a laptop and a drum machine…” Tigs could feasibly be listing the instrumental line-up of every band to emerge this side of 2007. With an eighties electro-pop revival in full swing, Chew Lips might look like more of the same trendy synth-obsessed casio-kids, but they would like to beg differently. “We’re an electro-pop act in the form of a rock band, and we want to make classic pop music – music that’s sounds so dated it doesn’t date.”

Chew Lips formed a little less than a year ago from the ashes of various rock and indie bands. “We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but we did know what we didn’t want to do. We knew we didn’t want to be another guitar band in this post-Bloc Party world… so we got instruments we weren’t really used to.” Will and James then worked on perfecting the kind of wonky bleeps and blips that would be just as much at home on an Eddie and Sunshine demo from 1981 as they would on a Metronomy or Hot Chip record from last year. Meanwhile the striking, diminutive figure of Tigs transforms minimal, lo-fi electronica into compact pop songs with the help of her distinctive, soulful vocals. That voice might already be familiar to those of you paying attention – Tigs once guested on the skiffle-blues of The Brute Chorus’ ‘The Cuckoo And The Stolen Heart’.

These days, however, her heart belongs to pop – “if early eighties Prince is pop music, and Scritti Politti is pop music,” she clarifies. Tigs tells me how, by their fifth gig and before they “had one single fan”, they were being approached by those-in-the-know. It was a similar story with French-fashion collective Kitsuné, who put out their first single, ‘Solo’, on 23rd March: “[label founder] Gildas Loaëc e-mailed to ask us what our plan was, and we just replied that our plan was to put out a single on Kitsune, and then he came to London to see us and he was wearing a double denim combo. And we liked the cut of his jeans.”

Having toured with Howling Bells and amassed some sixty to seventy songs, Chew Lips are eager to get into a studio and set to on an album – one that we’re surely going to be hearing a lot of in the coming months. In the meantime though, forget comparisons to the overproduced female pop acts of the hour – Chew Lips are lo-fi DIY electro-pop at its finest.

Unique Fact: Vocalist Tigs’ favourite singer is Karen Carpenter.

Download these tracks: Solo, Twin Galaxies, Salt Air

School Of Seven Bells Interview

2009-03-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

For a front-woman of a scene Brooklyn band, Alejandra Deheza is unusually smiley on stage. The diminutive, raven-haired twin of fellow vocalist Claudia, Alejandra and her grin are almost completely hidden behind a thick black fringe as she executes gilded, frosted dream-pop that could melt an ice-sheet. It’s partly the angular, word-centric phrasing and crystal-clear harmonies of SVIIB that has seen their steady ascension to the realms of one of the must-see-must-hear bands this year. The other half is down to the band themselves – the combination of the beautiful and fascinating twin sisters, and the reputation of Ben Curtis, formerly of American alterna-rock trio Secret Machines. Ben’s reputation is a weighty one, too – when he left Secret Machines in 2007 he even received hate mail from some of the band’s more fanatical fanbase. So has it been worth it? Gigwise spoke to Alejandra about the SVIIB story up to now.

“It couldn’t have gone better, the crowds are really charged,” Ally Dehezra tells me of the early days of their mini-UK tour. The UK dates are followed by some time in Europe, SXSW, and then support slots with Bat For Lashes, White Lies and Black Moth Super Rainbow that will take them through to summer on a relentless and gruelling tour schedule. It’s not a predicament that Ally seems particularly concerned by, though. “Before we’d even thought about recording we were being asked by bands to go on tour,” she says of their early popularity, “so we worked out a lot of music live, in rooms, by hearing ourselves go through the songs every night, and I think it came from the live performance.”

Live, they were able to make the ‘very deliberate’ decision to use a drum machine and pre-recorded electronic bass that makes their songs so effortlessly rhythmic, conveying Ally’s sense that “it’s definitely dance music. People say they like to chill out to it, but personally, I think it’s got really great beats.” The oft-repeated shoegaze tag, then, is a misleading one. “People assign you to something, and that’s totally cool, as long as it’s a genre they love I don’t mind!” Unconcerned as she may be, SVIIB make music born of a slick process so far from the heavily distorted, noise-obscured tendencies of shoegaze that to label them that is to do both the band and the genre a disservice.

Perhaps SVIIB defy categorisation precisely because they eschew it, instead absorbing influences from all directions. “Deheza is a Basque last name,” Ally explains of her heritage, “but we were born in Guatemala, my mother’s Costa Rican and my father’s Parisian, and we grew up in the states since we were 11 months old.” Musically, their backgrounds are similarly diverse, “We don’t just listen to one kind of music, and I think that comes out, but we have our things that we love, like Robert Wyatt, and jazz.”

Certainly for guitarist Ben Curtis, SVIIB marks a huge departure from his previous work with Secret Machines. It was a brave move to walk away from the security of being in a mid-level rock band with a cult underground following, but ultimately, it has paid off. There is something very ‘new’ sounding about SVIIB, and Ally doesn’t speak out of turn when she says “I feel like this record has a really long life, and that people will keep on discovering it: it won’t get old.”

As you’d imagine of a band at the forefront of modernistic pop, SVIIB hail from Brooklyn, today’s creative capital of the states. Back home, they move in artistic circles with the likes of Blonde Redhead, which partly explains why they bagged a recent support slot on the Blonde Redhead tour – something that Ally draws out as a highlight of the past two years. “They’re really great,” she says of the fellow-twin-featuring band, “they really took care of us on the road. Amedeo changed our tail-light when it ran out and Kazu made us this really incredible curry one night, she fed us in the tour bus.” Blonde Redhead is also remixing some of their album, alongside Justin Broadrick from Jesu and Mark Clifford remix.

With debut ‘Alpinisms’ released only last month this side of the pond, it comes as some surprise that School Of Seven Bells are already eager to set to work on a new record. “We want to start recording again in the summer,” Ally says. For the time being though, as they sell out shows in the UK and the US and continually beguile with an angular dream-pop that is all their own, Ally is one cheerful front-woman with a lot to be smiling about.

Breaking Artist: 1877

2009-03-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

When Edison premiered the phonograph – the first machine to record sound – in 1877, he could have little handle over its revolutionising effect. Some 250 years later Edison’s precious invention has been prostituted just about every way possible – from the distorted squall of noise-guitars to the fluorescent, saccharine bleep of 2-bit electronica. Everyone’s had a go. But few bands out there seem to have much of a grasp on how take the chewed up results of fifty years of phonographic experimentation and create something genuinely cohesive.

This is where 1877 steps in. Pulsing with pneumatics and the ghost of Ian Curtis in Narcolepsy, or schizophrenically melodic in Conversations In A Cheap Room, 1877 is sonically shot with a thousand bites of musical nostalgia that coalesce in dark corners, in pools of thick aural gloom.

There’s enough of everything here – slices of synth and strange robotic whizzing alongside the fuzz of filthy distortion and clean, reverberating riffs – to remind us that we’ve been spat out the other side of the history of the phonograph, that what remains is to put the shards of what we’ve learned into place to reflect the post-phonographic whole, and deflect the comedown of a million sonic misadventures. Not many bands have the genuine vision for such a task. 1877 is one of the few that do.

School Of Seven Bells + Kyte + Apache Beat @ Cargo 26/2/09

2009-03-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

Yet another band to emerge from Brooklyn’s crowded scene (is there anyone left there not wielding musical aspirations of global proportions?), Apache Beat combine intense, angular post-rock with the razor-sharp vocals of Christina Aceto. At least, they do on record. Tonight in Cargo Apache Beat don’t quite manage to hold their own on a storming line-up that leaves them slightly awash in their own noisy, pompous pop. There’s just too much going on as dreamy synths pull strong guitar riffs apart at the seams, while percussion rains down, powerless to anchor such disparate musical elements. Aceto should dominate on vocal-led songs such as ‘Knives’, but she lacks charisma tonight, at one point meekly dropping the mic at the end of a track in what is obviously intended as a gesture of rock ‘n’ roll recklessness, but ends up looking like a sort of resigned defeatism.

Kyte fare better, but still lack the hypnotic, gilded polish and sonic confidence that they mastered on last year’s eponymous mini-album. This handsome Leicestershire quartet sculpts mesmerising soundscapes, combining dreamy Scandinavian pop and Postal Service’s glitchy electronic clarity. There is some discrepancy between Nick Moon’s recorded vox-vocals, which breathe effortlessly through shimmering synths and icy keyboards, and his live performance, which comes over brasher and more affected as he repeatedly sweeps his hands through his hair, cowering over keys. But this is perhaps to be expected from an act that requires a large amount of pre-recording to render their music live, and their set still holds up in the dark, cavernous venue. It’s the perfect setting for the ecclesiastical beauty of ‘Boundaries’ and the yellow-hued glimmer of the aptly named ‘Sunlight’. As the only UK-based band on the bill, they do our solitary isle proud.

Numbers swell remarkably in Cargo’s dingy underbelly ready for School Of Seven Bells. New York’s darling band of the hour have gone from relative unknowns to one of the most sought-after acts of the year so far with their stunning debut ‘Alpinisms’, and the turn-out reflects this remarkable ascendancy to the dizzy-heights of the trend-setter. Part of the reason for their new-found popularity is their ability to combine modernistic pop sensibilities with infectious, tribal beats. But they also employ a powerful mystique due to the magnetic beauty of twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza and a propensity for abstraction that would come across as pretentious were it not for the fact that they have the musical grounding to merit a bit of ostentation (they list ‘the dialogue with heaven, earth and death’ as their influences on myspace, for example).

On stage Alejandra stands spotlighted in front, grinning like a stage-school protégé as she executes pitch-perfect vocal harmonies with help from sister Claudia. Meanwhile ex-Secret Machines guitarist Benjaman Curtis broods in the back, his face obscured for most of the set. Single ‘iamundernodisguise’, which has received considerable radio airplay in recent weeks, appears early on. Towards the end the tracks become brighter and build in intensity. ‘Half Asleep’ is particularly well-received, revealing some well-versed fans in the cramped audience, where as ‘Chain’ chugs, its syncopated vocals rooted above sliding electronic effects.

School Of Seven Bells radiate with confidence in both sound and style, making them worthy inheritors of hype that would have swamped lesser acts. The trio embark on an almost impossibly hectic touring schedule right through to summer, a season that will surely cement them as one of New York’s most exciting musical exports in 2009.

The Deer Tracks – ‘Aurora’ released 9th March 2009 (Despotzs Records)

2009-03-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

Providing the soundtrack to the still clear memory of snow as the first rites of spring begin to glow and bloom, The Deer Tracks emerge from Sweden as worthy competitors in what promises to be a big year for Scandinavian pop music. With new albums from Norwegian’s Royksopp, Denmark’s Veto and Sweden’s own Karin Dreijer, the northern territories are proving a formidable musical force-du-jour, held together by an unrivalled collective propensity to conjour sweeping electronic landscapes of sound.

The Deer Tracks distinguish themselves from their Scandinavian contemporaries by creating music that simultaneously twinkles and crashes, imbued with the deliberate crackle and click of digitally rendered lo-fi affectations. Aurora opens with the seven minute long ‘Yes This Is My Broken Shield’ that sees creeping and clattering atmospherics studded with stuttering ticks and ringing beats. Indecipherable lyrics and an evocative piano loop are obscured by explosions of synths and strings in a climax that overwhelms in intensity, before fading into a brass-led lullaby that demonstrates that The Deer Track’s instrumental abilities stretch beyond the digital realm.

As an album opener, ‘Yes This Is My Broken Shield’ sets the tone for a meandering tour of a unique musical vision, set apart by a conscious reinventing of typical musicality. Unidentifiable sound effects blend seamlessly with orchestral elements throughout Aurora, notably in ‘127 Sexyfra’ with its clarinet and trumpet elements and the tinker of a piano heavy-set in reverb. Meanwhile the stutter and shift of ‘Chrismas Fires’ invokes a childlike window onto a wintry world, and ‘Before The Storm’ is almost Bjork-like, with its spacious brooding vocals over glitchy techno beats.

Comparisons to geographical bedfellows Sigur Ros, Múm and Mew will be hard to eschew for The Deer Tracks as they make ground among their better-established contemporaries. But on the basis of this debut, the Swedish duo are well-deserving of a place among a Scandinavian musical roll-call that consistently sets itself apart from a global climate of mundane and formulaic pop.

Live Review: The Phantom Band + Scanners @ The Macbeth 21/2/09

2009-02-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

It’s rare that the support act trumps the headliner, but The Phantom Band are certainly giving it a go tonight at Twisted Licks. The Macbeth is swollen at the seams by nine, quite a feat for a Saturday night, and as the band come on the door staff have to resort to one-in-one-out. The amazing turn-out is for a good reason: The Phantom Band have finally ventured down from Glasgow to unleash prolonged, moody Scot-rock upon us London types, aided by more various and copious percussion instruments than you could shake a beater at. It’s almost reminiscent of music lessons at primary school, each band member equipping himself with a wooden hitty-shaky-scrapey stick that swaps hands during the set.

There’s nothing amateurish about The Phantom Band, though, whose quiet confidence imbues every feedback-laden guitar effect and each dark, layered chord. With six of them on stage, it’d be hard not to produce a sound thick with instrumentation, but this is achieved with such guile that disparate elements, including keyboards, melodica and synths, seem inseparably mashed.

The Phantom Band are, at times, as noisy as fellow Scots The Twilight Sad, but rhythmic preoccupations makes some songs more angular and anchored than their distortion-laden contemporaries. There’s something indelibly Scottish about the way frontman Rick Anthony plays the melodica, too, as though it’s a budget set of bagpipes held aloft to the mic. The audience absorbs walls of intoxicating sound through shifting tempos and keys, awestruck at the level of technical brilliance and talent that The Phantom Band have managed to hide for so long (they’ve been playing together for some six years now). This is a band destined for big things.

Scanners, meanwhile, were a band destined for big things some three years ago, but for one reason or another early hype about 2008’s album, ‘Violence Is Golden’, never quite delivered. The four-piece create punk-pop rock PJ Harvey would be proud of, saturated in friendly hooks, catchy melodies, and formulaic lyrics about nightmares and heartbreak and the like.

There’s confusion over what exactly they want to achieve though – Scanners aren’t quite filthy or raw enough to match Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, although frontwoman Sarah Daley is turning heads with her blunt cut black hair and slightly whiney rock vocal. Equally, if they want to court a pop market there needs to be less rock-star posturing, a la Howling Bells (whose comeback album this year smacks of watered-down, chart-hungry blandness). That ‘Lowlife’, one of their earliest tracks and already twice released without causing much bother, should still come off as their finest moment among much new material, speaks volumes.

Live Review: The Soft Pack + Stricken City + The Invisible @ The Lexington 20/2/09

2009-02-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

The Lexington, with its sunken dance floor and freshly revamped red décor, is an apt setting for tonight’s line-up, courtesy of Rockfeedback vs. White Light. The Invisible’s close, proggy electro-funk reverberates in the heat of the dark room, infectiously rhythmic and almost hypnotic in its intensity. The Invisible are a three piece consisting of borrowed members of other bands (Jade Fox, Matthew Herbert, Polar Bear) that have been playing together for about three years; long enough, at least, to hone their synth-laden guitar-based space-pop to a level of mesmerising polish. Their sound isn’t a million miles from TV On The Radio’s, but infinitely more laid-back, with Dave Okumu stealing all the limelight as a huge silhouette in a glistening tunic, anything but invisible himself.

Stricken City is a million miles from this opening. After the honed precision and obvious experience of their forebears they appear especially young and musically flawed – although it is clear that intentional imperfections are part of the act. Front woman Rebekah Raa is an act in herself, in fact. Dressed in an odd concoction of sportswear, feathers and animal print, she cuts a diminutive, unwashed figure centre stage, flicking her wrists and babbling nonsense between tracks.

Stricken City’s produce piecemeal indie-pop heavily informed by the lo-fi twee-indie-pop of the eighties. At first it’s unclear whether Rebekah can sing for all the affected tweeting and whooping she is mustering, but there are moments where notes tail off into magnificent vibrato, hung on the scratchy indie-hubbub of the band. Although she commands the limelight admirably, Rebekah’s stage persona grates with its stylised eccentricities, and it is somewhat a relief when Stricken City depart the stage ready for tonight’s headliners.

Heralded as ‘the new Strokes’, The Soft Pack gained mini-notoriety recently for changing their name from ‘The Muslims’ because of racist concerns. The gimmick has worked as a small masterstroke in PR, managing to grab them headlines that they perhaps hadn’t quite earned with the recent release of their only EP. The hard work starts here for this San Diego four-piece, as they try and retain the interest in them sparked by the name-change. While comparisons to the Strokes aren’t unfounded, there is something woozier and less-angular about their fuzzed, west-coast rock that suggests Wire or even The Velvet Underground. It’s delivered with confidence, but The Soft Pack lack panache tonight, perhaps due to the heavy touring they’ve been doing of late.

This is rock music that wears its influences on its sleeve, too, and while revivalist rock ‘n’ roll has its place, for those of us savvy to recognise sonic nostalgia like this, it tends solely to ignite a yearning for the real deal. With this in mind, whether or not The Soft Pack can carve their own niche will be critical to their longevity in the coming year.

Live Review: Ra Ra Riot + The Answering Machine @ Kings College 17/2/09

2009-02-20T02:45:00.000-08:00

Tonight’s Ra Ra Riot gig has been upgraded from Borderline to King’s College – and it’s a masterstroke. Not only did the freshfaced New Yorkers sell out Borderline’s 300 capacity, making them eligible for a bash at flogging the 700 tickets needed to fill the College, they’ve also attracted what feels like half the student population to their gig in the upper echelons of the student union. (Prompting the question: why is it that all student unions look like oversized squash courts?)

It’s already packed when we arrive in time to catch the end of The Answering Machine. They’re a young and lacklustre fourpiece from Manchester, and that’s pretty much all there is to say without being downright nasty. File under ‘landfill indie’ and back away.

Ra Ra Riot are on hand to add some class to proceedings. This Syracuse sextet have been playing together for some three years now, and it shows. Just months after they began showcasing their polished orchestral pop, their drummer, John Pike, was discovered drowned in Massachusetts. It wasn’t enough to put an end to the band, but the scars of the tragedy still run clear on the surface of their music. Nearly all the songs on their debut album ‘The Rhumb Line’ strike of a kind of joyous loss, a resolutely exuberant tribute to a departed friend.

Live, the band manage to fill the stage with infectious energy. Both guitarists seem to have styled themselves on the Ben Folds school of geekery, and are flanked by two pretty young string players brandishing fancy electronic stringed-things that lend an air of professionalism to an otherwise young-looking outfit. The strings define Ra Ra Riot – they carry every track from the realms of upbeat, quirky pop and into a kind of majestic and mesmerising higher plane. This soon becomes evident when the strings segue seamlessly from first track ‘Run My Mouth’ into ‘Each Year’. While the youth of Ra Ra Riot is overt, much like with Welsh pop-ettes Los Camposinos, they aren’t quite so gratingly twee, hitting on a Vampire Weekend-esque kitsch-pop and making it all their own with that string section.

Ra Ra Riot are jubilantly received in Borderline tonight, frontman Wesley running across the front of the stage clapping hands with the crowd during ‘Dying Is Fine’. But the best is saved for the encore – a cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’ that blows the Futureheads out of the water. No, really. Wesley’s voice is remarkable, and surrounded by such impressive musicianship, they make the cover their own. Tonight marks the end of the band’s UK tour, so you may have to wait a while to see them perform this side of the pond again, but you’d be well advised to catch Ra Ra Riot on their return.

Royksopp Interview

2009-02-15T02:48:00.000-08:00

In the words of Royksopp’s Svein Berge, “there are things brewing in the north.” Not least among them is the third album from the smooth-talking electro-pop pair. Entitled ‘Junior’, this latest instalment of gilded Royksoppian glitch-pop promises to fall somewhere between their million-selling debut of 2001, ‘Melody AM’, and the catchier, melodic sensibilities of 2005’s follow-up, ‘The Understanding’. Though ‘Junior’s’ list of guest vocalists reads like a roll call of Scandinavian pop goddesses, it’s the return of the internationally acclaimed Norwegian duo that that fans are most anticipating. In a very special early preview, Svein tells Gigwise what we can expect…

“For us ‘Junior’ is following the concert of Royksopp in terms of trying to create unique songs – that sounds very pretentious but that’s what we try to make in all honesty,” Svein begins of Royksopp’s third studio album. Even on the phone, his famed good-humour and silver-tongued press-manner shine through. He tells me that the new album contains “special songs with emphasis on trying to present interesting sounds in the traditional heritage of Royksopp,” in a description so spectacularly evasive that there seems little point asking him to elaborate further.

Instead, we move onto Junior’s Scandinavian celebrity line-up. Robyn, Lykke Li, and The Knife’s Karin Dreijer are holding the Swedish fort, while Anneli Drecker represents Royksopp’s own Norway. “There are a lot of good things coming out of Scandinavia at the moment from Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” Svein says of his contemporaries. “We know these people and they know us: it is all intertwined and very inclusive, the whole operation. I don’t mind being associated with these enormously talented artists. Royksopp are a bit on the side of it, but we try and invite ourselves into that clique, obviously.”

But Svein is keen to make clear that Royksopp have never quite courted convention: “I notice that we are still being called either a downtempo, chillout duo, which I believe is quite wrong, or I see us branded as a dance act, which I also think is mistaken. I wouldn’t really go out and shake my hips to a song like Royksopp’s ‘Forever’, you know? It would be kind of hard unless you have very special dancing abilities!”

“There’s no one around quite like us,” Svein elaborates of the difficulties of being a crossover between dancefloor acts like Daft Punk, Justice, or the oft-compared polished electro-pulse of Air, and the recent surge of indie-electro bands, like MGMT. “This album in particular I believe is quite eclectic and diverse: I couldn’t really recommend one single place to listen to it. Torbjørn likes to listen to it while he’s driving a car. I’m more of a shower man myself, I like to listen to it when I’m showering. I’m an Aquarius, so I like being close to water, and then there’s nudity, which adds to it.”

The ten years of Royksopp’s history make for impressive reading. Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland met at school, though Royksopp came into being a few years later, in 1998, in a Norwegian musical renaissance remembered as the ‘Bergen Wave’, after its place of origin. Just three years on, the success of their debut, with its ingenious videos and ubiquitous commercial licencing, catapulted them into an international sphere of recognition that has seen them win numerous awards and sell millions of records. It’s an illustrious career, no doubt, but Svein isn’t quite finished just yet: “I’ve always wanted to touch Vangelis’ beard. I want to touch divinity, and to me he is the god of synthesizer. After that I can just wither and die, I’ll have done my share of mortal toil.” I meekly suggest that some Royksopp fans might object to this rather unexpected demise of Norway’s best-loved musical export, at which point he muses, “well, there’s always the option of remastering Melody A.M. ten times with different remixes…”

To the contrary, new single ‘Happy Up Here’ more that suffices to prove that Royksopp have no intention of living off their past successes: “Age is coming whether you like it or not – but it’s not as if we are going to drift into mediocrity,” Svein assures. The single’s seductive, reverberating throb coats familiar Royksoppian melodic murmurings that promise, "You know I really like it/ I know I'll always be here.” And while, much like ‘Forever’, the allusions to eternity strike of ambition beyond Svein and Torbjørn’s mere-mortal means, it’s clear that Royksopp haven’t quite lost their charisma, musical or otherwise, just yet.

Live Review: Crystal Stilts + A Classic Education @ Windmill, Brixton 13/2/09

2009-02-14T02:41:00.000-08:00

Brooklyn has been at the centre of a garage-pop revival of late, born of stripped-back diy-rock that finds its feet somewhere between the dreampop of C86 cohorts The Shop Assistants and lo-fi post-punk outfit Young Marble Giants. Key players on the scene include Cause Co-motion, Vivian Girls, and tonight’s Windmill headliners, Crystal Stilts.

First up from Italy, A Classic Education are a sextet with an unpretentious yet unoriginal take on tambourine-bashing indie-pop of late, a la Arcade Fire (the band once opened for Win Butler and co. last year). Despite hailing from Bologna, their lyrics curl with a thick American accent that reminds of Deathcab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Two guitars give the band sound depth, while a violinist lends an orchestral element that veers towards the grandiose, but is limited by lyrics that tend to lack guile. They finish with ‘Stay Son’, a track from the ‘First EP’, and depart the tiny corner stage to disperse among the tight-packed crowd.

First impressions of Crystal Stilts confirm them a frosty bunch. The sporadic elements of their sound, shot with lo-fi romance, seem in constant conflict, which lends itself to a stuffy tension. Vocalist Brad Hargett towers at the front, but his voice is barely audible beneath rattling tambourines, the tinny chimes of a sixties organ, reverberating surfer guitars and what can only be described as ferocious drumming on the part of ex-Vivian Girls’ percussionist, Frankie Rose. It’s at once gloomy and infectious.

What Crystal Stilts lack in variation they make up for in sonic consistency, adopting a contrived unbalance that makes their sound lysergic and dour. Hargett reminds of Ian Curtis as he sways, arms swinging, steely gaze fixed and voice deep and droning. When the band address the audience, the words come from Frankie on drums, drenched in sweat and grinning, or muffled and vacant from Hargett. There’s something irrepressibly revivalist about the spectral guitars and faux-romanticism of the doom-pop Crystal Stilts purport. But they carry the flag unapologetically ahead of their Brooklyn-based peers and if art reflects life, Crystal Stilts are the perfect soundtrack to empty purses in the half-light of this wintry city.

Emmy The Great Interview

2009-02-13T03:14:00.000-08:00

I’m thinking that interviews aren’t meant to go like this. Emma Lee-Moss is sitting opposite me telling me about living with Charlie from Noah and The Whale, and coming home from a holiday to find Laura Marling in her house, and nicknaming Marling ‘Anne Frank’ because she was always in Emmy’s attic.

I ask her about Charlie as though I’ve known her for years, when in reality her PR only just introduced us, and I’m suddenly aware of just how unusual it is to speak to an artist that isn’t answering-by-rote. To the contrary, Emmy is completely unguarded when she leans forward and says, “We never touched or kissed or anything, but he lived at my house, and we slept in the same room because we were so inseparable. We were intensely good friends for six months, and then one day I came back and Laura Marling was in Charlie’s room. And then Charlie violently moved out, I don’t know what happened.”

What happened is that Emmy went on to shun everyone’s predictions that 2008 was her year, veering past major-label record deals and turning her back on the hype – and the new folk ‘scene’ in the process. It’s now 2009 and her album is only just about to be released. It’s called ‘First Love’, a title almost on a par with her own in levels of unbearable tweeness. Emmy’s been trying to tell everyone that the title ‘First Love’ has some kind of literary origin, but it seems unlikely, and the fact that the media lap up her stories is clearly a game to this deadpan, half-chinese, middle-class English girl with her smiling eyes. There’s a Catch-22 irony about a humble person self-titled ‘great’, and it smacks of good humour.

Personal difficulties aside, Emmy seems to struggle with the very idea of any ‘scene’. “Most of this new folk thing, I can see all the contradictions,” she says. “There are so many complications when the press decide that something is a scene, it’s just so much hassle. I just want them to all get in a group and say that they’re a scene and then for someone to take a picture.” She sounds at once brave and slightly indignant, but the message is clear: Emmy The Great intends to do things her own way, whether anyone else approves or not.

‘First Love’ rattles with that homemade feel; it sounds like faded wallpaper and peeling lacquer and the lingering warmth of recent sunshine. I assume this is intentional, but Emmy doesn’t seem so sure. “I’m aware of the record's flaws,” she says. “We made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t want it to sound hi-fi, so it sounds fucking awful, I wanted to use bad equipment. We maybe didn’t spend enough money on the actual recording.” A couple of days later she will hunt me down on facebook to give me a link to the remastered version with its much improved attention to balance and sonic consistency, and I’ll be left thinking, again, how rare it is in the music industry to find someone quite so unaffected.

Today, Emmy is half way through telling me about the time she got sold for ket at Reading Festival when her PR tells me to wrap up the interview, and it seems suddenly formal juxtaposed with all the chatting we’ve been doing. The NME, perhaps confused by someone so reluctant to leap onto bandwagons, described Emmy as the girl that boys want to take care of and girls love to hate. In truth, Emmy The Great is much like her music: disarmingly honest, steeped in good-humour and genuinely charming – qualities that confuse most people in this business. Here’s hoping she stays that way.

Live Review: Cherbourg @ Borderline 5/2/09

2009-02-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

Scenes are funny things. It’s near-on impossible to pin down the moment that a meeting of like-minds under the right conditions becomes a movement of cultural significance. And while NME like to hedge their bets by labelling every artist that emits so much as a squeak with a gibberish genre tag, the likelihood is that by the time we on the receiving end catch on to a musical trend, it’s already all but finished for those who instigated it.

That’s what Phil of new-folk’s latest offering, Cherbourg, means when he tells me the scene is over as we talk over cigarettes outside Borderline at the band’s EP release. He doesn’t mean London new-folk is dead – far from it with albums from Mumford & Sons, Noah and The Whale and of course, Cherbourg, scheduled for release this year. He means that now London new-folk is established, labelled, and accepted by even the most genre shy, those within it will inevitably start to grow out of its artistic constraints. What usually happens at this stage is that major labels sign lesser-talented imitation acts, rather like commercial vultures picking at the popularity of original movement.

Cherbourg are perhaps the last genuine new folk act, and to some extent even they surface in the shadow of their predecessors, Mumford & Sons. Frontman Andrew Davie sings with the same throaty folky drawl as Marcus Mumford, and the four members slip into similar four part harmonies throughout their set. They distinguish themselves by always erring on the unapologetically dark side of the lyric-stick, the line ‘it’s just another nightmare and you forgot to close your eyes’ but one example. Also, Phil swaps his fiddle for an electric guitar every now and then for some quite indulgent solos that he could probably pull off if they weren’t accompanied by closed eyes and a ‘meaningful’ expression.

Taking themselves too seriously might be Cherbourg’s greatest danger as they navigate the ‘scene’ this next year. They’re new-folk’s darlings boys – there’s a show of support from Noah and The Whale’s Tom and Jay Jay Pistolet mixed in with a very lovey-lovey crowd at Borderline tonight – but they haven’t quite made it yet. While songs about heartbreak proliferate, Cherbourg’s lyrics tend towards the formulaic and they’ve definitely been peeking at Mumford and Sons’ rhyming dictionary (at one point even rhyming ‘ear’ with ‘ear’). But as a tight musical outfit with mates in the right places, there’s no reason why 2009 shouldn’t work out excellently for them and their fiddler-friends in new-folk.

Fever Ray Interview

2009-01-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

Karin Dreijer is no stranger to success. As one sibling half of The Knife, the thirty-three year old Swede has released three internationally acclaimed albums, won a string of Grammis (the Swedish equivalent of the Grammys), and been awarded Pitchfork’s album of the year for 2006’s ‘Silent Shout’. While previous work sans brother Olof has included recording with both Royksopp and dEUS, Karin will release her debut solo album this year, under the new moniker Fever Ray. She caught up with Gigwise recently to talk about going solo, professional priorities and making a stand…

Karin Dreijer’s vocals are anything but apologetic. They are razor sharp, emanating from an underworld, burning through slick electronica as crystal salt on frozen ground; beguiling like the invented mystique of her musical persona. Her music videos show her masked, painted, impersonated: essentially faceless. “I think it’s very important to separate the person behind the work from the music,” she explains. “I’m sure that Fever Ray contains a lot of personal elements, it’s a part of me, but every person has different roles in their own life. You’ll be a different way in your professional life to the way you’ll be with your family, and again with your husband or partner. I feel like Fever Ray is one of my different roles in life.”

Although thirty-three and a mother of two, there is an unexpected unsteady element to her conversation. It might be simply a matter of language barriers and unfamiliarity, yet Karin is softly spoken, humble, and slightly shy as she talks intelligently about her work. The Dreijer siblings have frequently avoided media attention in the past. They didn’t perform anything live until five years after debut album ‘The Knife’ had gone triple platinum, and once famously sent friends in gorilla costumes to collect their Grammi Awards as a protest at the white, male dominated music industry of their home country.

“I don’t think we try to be anonymous, but it’s important to make priorities between doing promo or working in the studio.” Karin says of her musical preoccupations, which come as cold water to the face of a British music industry sold all too frequently on the skin-deep. “We weren’t into doing performances for the first six years or so because we concentrated on working in the studio, which we were good at. The shows we did in 2006 were very much a project for us, working out how we could do a live show. Since then we are a bit more open about it, when we talk about future Knife things we also think of it as a performance act.”

For now though, Karin’s making waves on her own in the wake of a Knife hiatus. “When The Knife finished touring in 2006 we had been working together for seven years, and I think both of us needed some time off and to do something else. I started working on my own and it turned out as Fever Ray a bit later. I love sitting by the computer and programming, and I’ve been using a lot of analogue equipment.” Kristoffel Bari and Van Rivers helped produce in the final stages, and a live band has been put together for the touring that will ensue this spring.

Fever Ray is indelibly marked with inherited sonic elements from The Knife, but there is darker matter at hand here, too. Of her influences, Karin explains: “I was very into the Jim Jarmusch film ‘Dead Man’ during last summer especially, which expressed a more primitive and primal element I wanted to capture. Also I’ve been listening to a lot of Tomahawk, an Indian inspired album called ‘Anonymous’. I feel like that album especially is very free and inspiring. Fever Ray is still very electronic, but maybe a little more organic than previously.”

The video for first single ‘If I Had A Heart’ runs as a short film across mist-covered rivers and into wooden houses hung with antlers, where Karin lurks, painted as a skeleton. It is a haunting backdrop to the sinister throb and dark, writhing vocal of the track itself, although not all of the video’s early audiences were affected by its horror-like supernaturalism: “My eldest daughter didn’t think it was scary! She said, ‘Mum, you look just like someone from KISS!’ She’ll soon be six.”

It is hard to identify the proud parent that Karin suddenly becomes with the fragile preconstructed image of her as the elusive, in-demand heroine of Swedish electronica. But if she eludes the restrictions of labels she does so in an industry that is becoming increasingly receptive to the individual. Karin is optimistic about the future of music, saying, “Now that big, powerful record labels are beginning to disappear, something good will come out of it. Especially with the internet, artists can reach out to a new audience without going through older, more conservative ways of releasing records.”

And of her own future? “I know that during 2009 I will be doing this with Fever Ray, some touring, and finishing the music for an opera that The Knife is working on. I love making music most of the time, but I don’t know about the future. I don’t plan that much ahead.” If her album receives anywhere near the recognition it deserves, Karin might find she has a busy few years ahead of her.

‘Fever Ray’ is out now on digital download via Rabid Records, and is set for physical release in March.

We Have Band Interview

2009-01-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

Times are hard in the music business. With the high street stripped of music stores, distributors holding CDs to ransom, and majors issuing pay-offs and lay-offs faster than you can flip a vinyl, the only thing you won’t find a shortage of is the sob stories of the suddenly jobless. But while most of the recently redundant are spending their time crying into the shrunken Guardian Media section, three names new to the EMI alumni are taking matters into their own hands…

Thomas and Dede WP are no ordinary husband and wife, as bandmate Darren Bancroft will testify. “They’re the most unique and special couple I’ve ever met. Sometimes we’ll have been together for five days and I’ll get home alone for the first time in ages, and then Dede will text me going ‘I’ve got some lyrics for a song,’ or something, just when I think I’ve got nothing left, I realise there’s always more.”

Together, the self-dubbed ‘disco-rock trio’ make We Have Band, the name that has been hovering on the lips of taste-makers and the electro-savvy for the last few months, ever since 50 Bones released 300 limited edition vinyl copies of their debut single ‘Oh!’ in November. Their sound is as equally DIY as their origins – they mix mucky, dark bass lines reminiscent of the raw post-punk of ESG with the brighter feral funk of Can and the more modernist, electro-pop hues of New Pony Club or Hot Chip. A sound which, let’s be honest, there’s quite a lot of around at the moment in various electro-pop-band guises.

“I’m not going to claim we’re doing something totally different,” Darren says of ‘the scene’. “I think that’s unnecessary. We don’t really care much about all of that stuff. People are always attaching themselves to any given scene, but I think it’s just what people have decided to focus upon at any given time, you know?”

For the moment, it’s what these three ex-EMI colleagues have decided to focus on, at least. We Have Band was conceived at the leaving do for another EMI associate, just as all three members took their redundancy from the label. “Sometimes when you’ve got nothing to lose, it’s like, let’s just do this,” Darren explains of the decision. “Tom and Dede already had the name of the band and everything, and we all knew we wanted to do something. The first time we got together we just all sat down, had some dinner so we were all really relaxed, and then we wrote a song, and that’s why it’s so easy for us – we just all really get on.”

There’s a definite magnetism between them off and on stage that has seen them attract attention from all the right angles. “All the people that have discovered us and started working with us tend to be the bravest magazines and radio stations. Even our manager hasn’t done loads of stuff before but he just really liked the band and went for it,” Darren says.

As far as record deals are concerned, they’re keeping their cards close to their chest and staying unsigned. “There genuinely isn’t the space to think about these things,” Darren says of the paperwork. “All our energies are in writing lyrics and recording. I think everyone is super scared at the moment, understandably so. Big labels will sniff at anything, and then the smaller labels sometimes take a bit longer. But we’re still recording the album, and the single we put out, it wasn’t rushed, but it was one of the first things we ever did, so also we don’t want to do everything so quickly. We just want to give things time to breathe I guess.”

It seems We Have Band are a three-way electro love affair that everyone wants a piece of, so taking that time out to hone their sound could be essential. “I’ve no idea what I’d do if it went wrong!” Darren exclaims of the future. For now, there’s a lot of buzz about We Have Band, emanating from inside the intimate adrenaline-fuelled threesome, and surrounding their dirty, tight electro-punk. They have band, and now they have a lot to prove. We have high hopes.

Kill 'Em All @ Fabric 23/1/09 featuring We Have Band + Yuksek + Brodinski

2009-01-25T10:14:00.000-08:00

Kill ‘Em All is the club-night cum pet-project of DJs-turned-band Filthy Dukes. Olly and Tim of the ’Dukes have been attracting some of the biggest names in electro to their resident Fabric nights for five years now, including Erol Alkan, Simian Mobile Disco, Justice and Chemical Brothers. Tonight, they showcase buzz-trio We Have Band’s Can inspired take on DIY electro-pop, followed by a heavy slice of some of the dirtiest bass available, courtesy of the beautiful Yuksek, and fellow Frenchman Brodinski – a line up easy on the eye if nothing else.

There’s no dallying with subtlety where We Have Band are concerned, especially crowd-density is considered in Fabric’s Room Two tonight. Considering one of them had never been on a stage five months ago and they’re all pretty new to the whole band thing, We Have Band aren’t doing half bad. The three-piece was conceived when all three members took redundancy from EMI, trading major-label anonymity for a speedy ascendancy in the ranks of a busy British electro scene. Now the trio are taking a bite at the music industry from a different angle and this time they’re leaving teeth marks.

Their sound is borne of a savvy, slick musicality that manipulates digital instrumentation as krautrock acts like Can did with the band sound in the seventies. They squeeze keys and electro beats all over fat, repetitious bass lines, overlaid with a triple vocal that sets them apart from their solo vocal contemporaries. Thomas and Dede WP, the married couple in the band, seem to rely heavily on the on-stage persona of the magnetic, buzz-cut sporting Darren, who grins his way through the whole set. If smiles were karma, Darren’s enthusiasm would help to offset Dede and Thomas’s stony, stylised vacancy, but as it is the pair of them seem slightly caught in the headlights of a rowdy audience who have abandoned all shyness at the door, and just want to dance.

Dede is pretty but cold-faced, centre stage, robotically hitting a tambourine and supplying vocals that verge on a cat-like yawp, especially in the band’s first single, ‘Oh!’. She comes off better in the slightly less obvious ‘Can You Hear It In The Cans’. Their set doesn’t overwhelm, but for a breaking act they certainly seem to be pushing all the right buttons and making all the right friends. They close with a cover of Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’, in a tongue in cheek eighties-revivalist twist that sets the floor pulsing.
The rest of the evening is left to veteran DJs Yuksek and Brodinski. Both impossibly handsome Frenchmen, their order of ceremonies for the evening splits the crowd fairly swiftly. Yuksek mashes up heavy bass with French electro-house, standing centre stage to execute the vocals from tracks from his 2008 EP ‘Tonight’ amongst other electro favourites.

Meanwhile in the main room Brodinski reveals minimalist preoccupations from his caged booth at the back. He does away with the instant gratification of his bass-heavy electro contemporaries in favour of a good hour of hypnotic and addictive techno, before breaking into mixes of everything from LCD Soundsystem to Metronomy. Between them, it becomes quickly apparent that the UK has some catching up to do where dance music is concerned. But if in the meantime we get to learn a few tricks from two of France’s finest, there are sure to be no complaints.

News: The Brit Awards Launch At Camden Roundhouse

2009-01-21T02:53:00.000-08:00

Coldplay and Duffy take four nominations each

The BRIT Awards were launched in an hour long ceremony at the Roundhouse in Camden last night, hosted by Fern Cotton.

The launch, which was later shown on ITV1, featured performances by Gabriella Cilmi and Scouting For Girls, both of whom have received nominations, for Best International Female and Best Live Act respectively.

Florence And The Machine, who has beaten White Lies and Little Boots to the Critics Choice Award, flung roses into the audience just before performing ‘The Dog Days Are Over’.

In the other categories, Coldplay and Duffy head a surge in British talent, receiving four nominations each. Radiohead receive one nomination for Best British Album for ‘In Rainbows’, which will see them go head to head with Mercury Award Winners Elbow.

Meanwhile, Kings Of Leon are up for Best International Album and Best International Group, and Pet Shot Boys have been chosen to receive the Outstanding Contribution To Music award.

The BRIT Awards will be hosted by Kylie Minogue, James Corden and Matthew Horne on 18th February, and feature performances by U2, Kings Of Leon, Duffy and Girls Aloud.

Live Review: Twisted Licks presents Deathray Trebuchay and Acoustic Ladyland @ Borderline 17/1/09

2009-01-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

Twisted Licks has been in the business of innovative and eclectic line ups for a while now, championing everyone from The Brute Chorus to A. Human. Tonight though, promoter-in-chief Tamsin McClarty has outdone herself – matching the joyous rambunctious brilliance of festival staples, Deathray Trebuchay, with the avant-garde jazz-punk invention of Acoustic Ladyland. Borderline is beyond sold out and the crowd contains everything from bespectacled middle-aged jazz aficionados to infectiously excitable teenagers in day-glo – a reflection of the universal appeal of the bill.

Deathray Trebuchay are the warm up and within seconds Borderline’s basement walls are thick with condensation from their contagious energy. Latecomers descending the stairs break into grins, witnessing the band bouncing around each other on the stage in tank tops and sunglasses, wielding brass instruments. Their sound has developed from Balkan-eqsue gypsy punk reminiscent of Gogol Bordello into a more polished jazz-tinted and ska-tinged melting pot of influences. There is still the emphasis on solid musical structure and the odd whoop and shout thrown in which makes their set infinitely catchy – those in front of the stage are dancing with sincere abandon. But as noisy and haphazard as it sounds, it is clear that Deathray have mastered their craft in the course of recording their album and can afford relentless energy throughout that has band members on the brink of collapse at the end of each song.

Deathray are surely the ultimate warm up to Acoustic Ladyland – critically acclaimed and musically gifted as they are, Ladyland sometimes risk alienating your average gig-goer with artistic brilliance that verges on arcane. Tonight, however, Deathray are like the chart-hungry gateway to their enigmatic elders, and the audience couldn’t be better prepared for the aural assault that awaits. Ladyland appear newly assembled with guitarist Chris Sharkey putting in a mindblowing debut live performance, doing justice to the Hendrix-association of their name. Pete Wareham cuts a towering figure as their endearingly humble frontman, and couldn’t look more the part in a leather pork-pie hat as he squeals and honks and seduces with luxuriously shifting textures on tenor sax. Sebastian Rochford, the drummer renowned for his time with Babyshambles and the Mercury-nominated Polar Bear, and to the lesser-musically-concerned for his enormous wonky afro, looks totally unperturbed as he smashes and rattles his way through what we are told is mostly new material.

Their sound is enervated to the point of chaotic, much like Melt Banana or, and they are capable of shifting gears and executing such furious pace that there are points where, for their calm exteriors, the music seems implosive, were it not for bassist Ruth Goller sonically underpinning everything with unshakeable precision.

Acoustic Ladyland are a marvel – there is the sincere sensation of having witnessed a kind of underappreciated genius after one of their gigs. They have an album, ‘Living With The Tiger’, due for release in the coming months, but from tonight’s performance their restless jazz-punk is bared as something that it is surely uniquely possible to appreciate live. On record, they are perhaps destined to stay the critics’ darlings and elude the mass. Yet in the flesh, there can be no disputing that Acoustic Ladyland are universally enchanting.

Electrocrap: In Defence Of Indie

2009-01-16T09:32:00.001-08:00

Does anyone else out there think that Lady Gaga’s video bears a striking resemblance to the Use A Condom Adverts gracing our TVs at the moment? You know, the everyone’s-having-fun-now-but-in-the-morning-she’ll be-pregnant-with-deformed-quintuplets-and-he’ll-have-stage-three-syphillis ones. (Incidentally, just how creepy would it be if every time you got a girl’s knickers off the voice of responsibility issued forth a whispered “gonorrhoea” from her fallulah?)

Anyway, she must be doing something right. The writhing, bewigged mannequin that is Gaga has stormed to number one this last week in what a load of people are saying is the start of the female electro-twat invasion. Sorry, I mean electro-pop.

All the major record labels have got a girl in their clutches for this latest fad. Fiery-haired soul-singing Florence and The (money-making) Machine is in the clutches of Gaga’s own Island, while Polydor goes redhead to redhead with La Roux, and Warner will be hoping Little Boots has a fighting chance as most people’s more credible outsider.

The majors aren’t signing bands anymore, because apparently guitar bands are dead. (Perhaps this explains why the market is awash with reissues and boxsets from yesteryear, all promising ‘never-heard-before’ material in pretty packaging for a pretty package of your hard-earned cash, too?)

The truth is, the majors are wrong, and have been about most things for some time now, which is why they’re in so much trouble. In fact ‘indie’ music (read: guitar bands signed to independent labels) is alive and well – and there’s plenty of ribcage rattling evidence to the contrary in some of 2009’s biggest and best indie hopefuls. Here’s who to look out for:

Prog-pop pschedelia was reinvented for the kids by Brooklyn’s finest, MGMT, last year. There are going to be plenty of people riding this colourful wave in their wake in the next twelve months. The (major-signed) Amazing Baby will be filling more than a few column inches, but there’s better to be had with Cambridge’s (the other Cambridge’s) Passion Pit (right), who concoct dreamy electronica of marginally psycheledic influence, that still feels somehow born of MGMT. And if that isn’t psychedelic enough for you, Perth’s Tame Impala will knock you out with their lysergic guitar riffs and intoxicating vocals. This attractive three-piece have got an album in the pipeline this year, which, if last year’s EP is anything to go off, will be just about as good as it gets.

The other big thing last year was wonky toytronica in the vein of Metronomy and Late Of The Pier – if you liked it, refer yourselves immediately to We Have Band and the slightly less sonically nonchalant Cats In Paris. Ragged indie rock is still about and sounding pretty spectacular in the form of Tigers That Talked and gig-circuit veterans Bombay Bicycle Club – you might think the latter have been going at it for an indie-epoque, but it’s only know that we’re finally sniffing an album release (smells good).

If you like your indie thick with nu-age modernism, School Of Seven Bells (left) make silken, looped psych-pop with laptops and twins. No, really. Meanwhile, Dinosaur Pile Up is the best grunge-revivalist act to hit the airwaves since the real thing, and Ten Kens are a must-listen, much blogged four-piece of staggering inventiveness and guile whose music grins from the darkest corners of American alt-rock.

And, though they don’t fit anywhere, if you liked the whole Marling nu-folk thing last year, for goodness sake listen to some of her contemporaries to hear some of the most humble, sincere and organic sounding stuff out there – this scene really is the antidote to Gaga and her gaggle. Mumford & Sons especially are ones to watch as they work towards an album release in 2009.

Apologies for the way in which the last few paragraphs are organised like I just vomited band names onto a page – but this is absolutely a reflection of the prolific, diverse and downright fantastic stuff about (most of it indie). Gaga and the viral popularity of outspoken, synthetic and stylised marionettes might dominate airwaves and column inches thanks to the gawp-and-swallow lowest-common-denominator consumer. But don’t let any brainwashed major marketing man convince you that indie is dead – one listen to any of the above will convince very much to the contrary.

The Factory Box Set released 19/1/09

2009-01-02T02:54:00.000-08:00

The Manchester music scene has long been the stuff of legend. It survives on the life stories of its two greatest egos if nothing else – Tony Wilson, the industry svengali whose reckless intelligence was responsible for transforming a moment in mancunian musical culture into the cult of Madchester; and Ian Curtis, ill-starred Joy Division frontman and the antihero of the hour. At the epicentre of the legend was a haphazard industry based on the musical whimsies of Wilson and his Factory confederates.

Factory was never grounded in a solid business ethos, and this, in many respects, was its undoing – even Wilson had to resort to charity to pay for his cancer treatment towards the end of his life. Yet this ill-advised label formula, directed almost exclusively by profitless passion for indefinable genius, was the magic of Factory. As a truly spirited independent it gave a voice to the dark pneumatics of Joy Division and the unhurried, inflated rattle-shake of the Happy Mondays, all of which rotated around the centrifugal cultural cyclone of the Hacienda nightclub.

2008 marked Factory’s 30th birthday – an anniversary commemorated by the release of ‘A Factory Box Set’ this month (January 2009). The box set comprises of four CDs of chronologically ordered Factory history from the fuzzed opening bassline of Joy Division’s ‘Digital’ right through to Happy Monday’s ‘Sunshine and Love’, the last ever Factory release. Many of Factory’s highlights feature here – from the apogee of New Order ingenuity in ‘Blue Monday’, to Joy Division favourites ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Transmission’, and Happy Monday’s ’24 Hour Party People’, the song that later gave its name to a highly fictionalised film about Factory’s heyday.

While the box set isn’t definitive, there’s enough here to thoroughly educate those with an interest in the label whilst satiating fanatics with meandering detours through the lesser known back-catalogue – including one-off appearances from James, The Railway Children and Miaow, to name but a few. Notable Factory exceptions include ESG, the post-punk/house Bronx sisters who played the opening night at the Hacienda, but who couldn’t be featured due to licensing problems.

Wilson’s favourite Factory track, Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’, is also omitted. But then, maybe that’s because Factory was about more than the self-stylised career of Wilson, a career that was increasingly dominated by an obsession with techno in the latter, ‘madchester’, era of the label. It’s indisputable that when Tony Wilson died in August 2007, a lot of the Factory spirit died with him – just as Ian Curtis’s death was the loss of Factory’s boy-wonder, in a tragedy that pre-empted the lurching inspirations of the entire Factory venture.

There’s still plenty to be gained commercially from stoking the embers of the burned out Factory phenomenon if 2007’s monochromatic ‘Control’ is anything to go by. In its crudest form, the Factory box-set does little more than just that. And yet, as the music industry limps forth into 2009 trailing the wreckage of countless bought-out and gone-bust independent dreams, now may be a more important time than ever to remind people of the wondrous woolly mammoth that was Factory – a financially shot musical empire built on the fucked-up musical fanaticisms of Manchester’s party people.

Top Tip for 2009: Mumford & Sons

2009-01-01T04:50:00.000-08:00

Mandolins, banjos, waistcoats, male part-harmony, the ability to induce impromptu jigging from twenty paces – Mumford & Sons are ticking all the right new folk boxes. They’ve already released two EPs in the last 12 months and have scheduled an album full of aural treats for 2009. If Laura Marling’s too morbid and Noah and The Whale are too twee, Mumford & Sons are likely to be what you’re looking for. And if you really want to be blown away, catch them live. There’s something that can only be described as hearty about their music – from Marcus’s muscular growl to guitarist Winston’s gyrating to bluegrass. And as 2009 kicks off with loads of hotly tipped female electro-twats on most peoples ones-to-watch lists, this is just what the industry needs: a heart.

Fee Fie Foe Fum @ Cargo, 16/12/08, featuring Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit, Jay Jay Pistolet and more.

2008-12-17T02:39:00.000-08:00

This year’s been a good one for homegrown folk music. A whole host of bands and solo artists have emerged, acoustic guitars in tow, to create a veritable sonic movement. New-folk distinguishes itself with an emphasis on earthy, acoustic musicality and stylistic integrity – a breath of fresh air in a digitally manufactured and commercially driven industry.

Fee Fie Foe Fum is new-folk’s Christmas party. It feels just like it, too, as the artists stand among the audience between sets, supporting one another and celebrating their individual successes and collective critical acclaim. We arrive to catch the end of Cherbourg, but cannot help being distracted by Laura Marling and Marcus Mumford, just a few feet away, in a romantic clinch. Most of the acts on the bill tonight have been touring together, across the globe, in one combination or another throughout the year, and there is an observable sense of community that makes the rest of us feel like the lucky gatecrashers.

Lucky is the word, though. Jay Jay Pistolet looks quite solitary as he takes to the stage after Cherbourg. He is softly sung, the vocal distorted by a mic effect that resounds in Cargo’s warehouse rafters as though emanating from a gramophone. There is an faux-sadness to his performance that is impossibly endearing, and a respectful hush falls upon the onlookers for each quiet, melancholy love song. What he lacks in versatility is more than compensated for in charisma, as he wishes us all a pleasant evening and, doe-eyed, departs the stage.

Mumford & Sons are next as the midnight hour approaches and the mood in the audience loosens up. The talented four-piece are waistcoat-clad and stand in a line, each absorbed by the task at hand as they dance, subconsciously. Their set is infectiously jubilant – there are soon people jigging in the audience, bottles held aloft. Mumford & Sons come off best in passages of magnificent male harmony (‘The Banjolin Song’) that sees all four of them singing like a dog-eared, growling Fleet Foxes, but without the same drifting tonality. If anyone steals the show it is Marcus and friends – and seeing as they don’t have an album out yet, that’s good going.

A little later, Laura Marling comments on how honoured she is to be playing on such an amazing line-up. “You are the line up!” someone shouts back from the floor, and is duly ticked off by Marling. She does look singularly beautiful in a dress and make-up tonight though – as though the boyish, dressed-down girl that we’ve all grown to love finally learned to take pride in her pretty face. She plays a meagre four songs – one new – and creeps off, before being encored back to the stage by the crowd. A rendition of ‘My Manic And I’ turns into a bit of a sing-along, which is utterly bizarre for a fatalistic little number without anything even approaching a chorus. But everyone loves it, and so we sing all of the well-worn words, encouraged by delighted smiles from the Joni Mitchell of new-folk.

“No one should ever have to follow Laura Marling,” Johnny Flynn grumbles as he takes to the stage. Although he is absolutely right, he still manages it as well as anyone possibly could. Flynn makes an angelic, if visibly nervous frontman, showing off extensive talent on any number of instruments while his band provide musical and moral support, ribbing him for his anxious chatter. Though it is the evening’s most unsure performance, with a lyrical slip-up mid-set, it still encompasses all of the best of qualities of new folk – earnest musicality, inclusivity, and humility. There’s not a single person without a smile on their face by the time Flynn and his band play the closing chords.

Forget idiotic day-glo lycra and faddy electro – if tonight’s anything to go by, 2009 will belong to new-folk.

Live Review: First Aid Kit @ 12 Bar Club, 15/12/08

2008-12-16T02:22:00.000-08:00

The flyer says we’re in for ‘a night of new Swedish music’. At least I think it does, it’s in Swedish. And anyway, in truth, we’re here for First Aid Kit. It’s the duo’s first appearance in the UK tonight, and there’s a kind of featherlight anticipation in the air. At just 15 and 17 respectively, Klara and Johanna Söderberg gained mini-notoriety in the blogosphere this year due to their astounding cover of Fleet Foxes ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, recorded in one take, in a forest (youtube it). They have but a handful of handpenned songs on their myspace that demonstrate glorious, viscid vocal power, thick with harmony, that has attracted quite a crowd of good looking neophiles to hear the real thing for the first time, this evening.

Support comes from Ben Thomas, a plaid-clad thick-set Scandinavian-type. He hulks over his guitar under dense dirty-blonde curly hair, his voice a vibrating growl. Although songs teeter on lyrically clichéd, there is a quiet magnetism about him that hones attention until the end of the set.

Chairs have to be cleared before First Aid Kit, to cater for the swelling audience. Klara and Johanna look unafraid, almost vacant, as they prepare the stage, but when the set opens with an almost-acapella call-to-arms that shakes the dust in the small backroom, the reason for their quiet confidence is suddenly quite apparent. They befit simple, sometimes green sounding folk songs with very little accompaniment, with Klara on lead vocal and acoustic guitar and Johanna colouring harmonic holes with autoharp, keyboard and vocals.

While First Aid Kit’s lyrics, which seem to dwell curiously on infidelity, sometimes slip off the boil with juvenile sentiment, the duo are, for the large part, capable of remarkable maturity, both musically and otherwise. At times Johanna screws up her pretty face and clenches her keyboard stand with the force of her vocal power, which rips through the room. What’s more, there is clear versatility in what the girls produce, ranging from seductive, bluesy vocals to the razor-edge country twang of ‘You’re Not Coming Home Tonight’. And then there is the Fleet Foxes cover, which threads aural vines of earthy forest-folk through the floorboards, leaving everyone spellbound.

Their set finishes with big smiles as the elder bashes the keyboard and the younger strums a coda, and their giggles get lost in applause. The endearing childlike edges that colour their set might not endure, but this is music and talent crafted to last. What we’ve witnessed tonight marks the beginning of a very exciting time for the Söderberg sisters.

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion Preview

2008-12-04T04:36:00.000-08:00

Gigwise went down to Plastic People in London for a very special invite-only preview of Animal Collective’s eighth album last night (3rd December).

‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’, as the record is titled, will already sound familiar to those who have witnessed Animal Collective live in 2008, with much of it made up from retitled set material performed this year.

From first listen ‘Merriweather’ steps away from the pop sensible inflections of 2007’s ‘Strawberry Jam’, which induced a bit of a panic amongst fans that AC were becoming more commercial. Instead it shows shades of minimalist techno, especially in album closer ‘Brothersport’, perhaps the closest AC have ever come to dance music. This is overlaid with their familiarly strong preoccupation for fuzzy psychedelia, realised through much lo-fi production and down tempo 8-bit.

‘Merriweather’ follows in a more experimentalist vein that might be best described as garage electronica, much like contemporary releases from fellow avant garde noise proponents Deerhunter and TV On The Radio, which will likely delight long-time fans of AC’s ability to push through accepted generic form.

‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’ will be released on Domino in 2009.

Ladyhawke Interview: The Accidental Popstar

2008-12-03T06:45:00.000-08:00

It happened somewhere in a field near Leeds in 2007, watching Johnny “firstly, I’m a genius” Borrell strut across a stage lit up brighter than the heavens, clad in skin-tight white, like the Jesus of a generation: the realisation that indie music has a habit of creating these truly ridiculous egomaniacs who will stop just short of actually nailing themselves to a backlit crucifix to prove that they are the undisputed saviour of music. It was the same sentiment that surfaced upon hearing Reverend And The Makers frontman, Jon McClure, proclaim that he was going to quit music earlier this year with the words, "I'm gonna go out having told the truth and with my head held high and having stood for something.” (Did anyone ever work out what?) Thankfully, this mutated sub-species of musical hubris generally results in a nasty media backlash (like this one) and the perpetrators of such usually end up looking like silly pricks (like McClure).

The absence of this all-too-familiar arrogance is one reason why Ladyhawke is somewhat of a breath of fresh air. She’s not reinventing the wheel with her synth-laden Stevie Nicks-esque take on modern pop. Ladyhawke takes what any self-respecting music lover once loved about the eighties – those Kate Bush synth-choirs, that hypnotically tinny drum machine, and that impressively voluminous backcombed barnet – and dusts it off a bit for a new generation, spruces it up with a plaid shirt for the indie kids. This isn’t just all hot air and blonde hair – take a good listen to Ladyhawke’s debut and you’ll hear everything from Tangerine Dream in ‘Manipulating Woman’ to Gary Numan in ‘Paris Is Burning’ to Human League in ‘Better Than Sunday’. So yes, plenty of early eighties references here then. And all that from a Kiwi girl the wrong side of twenty-five with roots in hardcore and punk.

“I guess I never really expected it to get to this,” Ladyhawke admits. Only she’s not really Ladyhawke today – there’s no sign of the vampish alterego that the name suggests – no Jesus complex, thank God (apologies). This is just Pip Brown, admitting that her aspirations “were quite small. I was writing in my bedroom, expecting to sign to some indie label and release an EP in Australia, and to be honest I think I would have been quite happy to do that.” Instead she accidentally made a wildly successful pop record, selling 3500 copies in the first week of release and catapulting her into the media spotlight. Which hasn’t been easy, especially as Brown suffers from Aspergers, a condition on the autistic spectrum that can affect communication, interaction and imagination – three qualities that at first glance seem fairly essential for your average aspiring popstar.

“Sometimes, if I didn’t have stuff to do I’d just never leave the house, I went through a period of time when I didn’t leave the house for ages [three months, to be exact] and my friends were telling me that I had to get out!” Pip says of her social nervousness. She doesn’t come across all that shy in person, but she visibly suffers from stage fright in her live shows, something that the media have often noticed. “I always worry I’ll fuck up – make a mistake, sing off key, make a fool of myself on stage…” It was to counter this that Ladyhawke was invented – an alterego for Pip that could embody the starry qualities her creator lacked. This kind of method acting isn’t new – The Beatles tried the same tack to counter the professional pressure they felt with Sgt. Pepper in 1967. But has it worked?

“It didn’t work out, because we’re just the same person,” she admits. “Sometimes I try and use Ladyhawke more, I try to dress differently on stage. But mostly I just take that side of it as it comes, I don’t expect it to get better.” Strangely then, it’s actually the gigging that Pip likes best. “Even though I get nervous and everything, I just have to tell myself it’s over in about forty minutes – my sets aren’t very long. I love playing – it’s kind of a love hate thing. And you get so much free alcohol!”

It’s the same with her music – Ladyhawke is absolutely a pop record, and yet Pip loves heaps of stuff from the other end of the musical spectrum. “First I was in a hardcore band, and then a grunge band, and then this punk rock band. I still listen to AC/DC, and I always think it’s only a matter of time before I revert back to that.” She talks of side projects in sixties rock that feature her on the drums for future collaborations, and reminisces about her early punk days, which even saw her play at New York’s CBGB club – the birthplace of New York punk.

As for Ladyhawke, Pip has no plans to procrastinate over her second album. “I already have an idea of exactly where I want to go with the next album, I want to try something new.” And when asked if she plans for it to come out next year she squeals, “definitely, I don’t know why I would wait until 2010, it seems far too far away! I’d get bored and probably move home!” Pip seems fairly savvy about the fickleness of celebrity culture, quick enough, anyway, for her to realise the importance of capitalizing on 2008’s success with a sharpish followup.

Ladyhawke has had a few run-ins with the weirder side of celebrity this year. “My friend actually put me on to this youtube video called ‘Ladyhawke Lover’, and it is so scary!” she tells me, of her biggest fan. “This girl is obsessed! She has this big picture of me above her bed with lights all around it, and then she goes to her cupboard and she has a shrine with a picture of me in it. And then she gets a glass of wine and she dips her finger in the wine and rubs it on my face, and she says, “Please Ladyhawke if you see this get in touch with me!” She’s a New Zealander though so that made me feel a bit safer – I’m over here and she’s over there!”

Pip seems to find it hilarious that someone out there could really become obsessed by her and her music. There is genuine bemusement at her own success in her voice when she says “it surprises me how things happen and once the ball starts rolling people just seem to catch on – it’s insane.” This kind of humility is a breath of fresh air in an industry saturated in self righteous Jesus-types and mediocre reality TV victims. Here’s hoping Ladyhawke hangs around in the UK long enough for it to rub off.

Jefferson Airplane: White Rabbit

2008-12-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

Released in 1967 following ‘Somebody To Love’, ‘White Rabbit’ is arguably Jefferson Airplane’s finest achievement. It was written and performed by Grace Slick whilst she was vocalist for The Great Society (as was ‘Somebody To Love’), and was part of the reason that bassist Jack Casady asked her to join Jefferson Airplane in 1966. ‘White Rabbit’ came from their sophomore LP ‘Surrealist Pillow’, although it was only featured on the US version of the album, and peaked at number 8 on the US billboard charts.

Slick is rumoured to have written the song in an hour, as a reflection of the drug-addled sixties counterculture and based on ideas in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’. The original included an oboe solo played by Slick herself, but it was her haunting, sturdy contralto vocal in ‘White Rabbit’ that was to go some way in establishing the solo female vocal in rock music (most vocalists were male at this time) and influence numerous female vocalists throughout the seventies and beyond, including Stevie Nicks and Patti Smith.

The music itself is has a strong Spanish rhythm that Slick claims to have taken from Ravel’s famous ‘Bolero’, the idea for which came to her after taking LSD and listening to Miles Davis’ album ‘Sketches Of Spain’. The propulsive, hypnotic quality of the music climaxes in a terrific crescendo, at which point Dr Gonza demands that Raoul Duke throws the tapedeck into the bathtub with him during a nasty acid trip in Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’. The ‘one pill makes you larger, one makes you small’ refrain is also an idea rumoured to have influenced the dilemma faced by Neo in the 1999 film ‘The Matrix’.

In reality, ‘White Rabbit’ became the soundtrack to the 1967 Summer Of Love. It represented the lysergic euphoria of a generation of young people who turned to drugs to escape from the horrors of Vietnam and Nixon, as the seventies approached and America began to rot from the inside.

Interview: Frightened Rabbit

2008-11-28T04:45:00.000-08:00

Few Scottish bands these days can say they’ve sold out huge venues in the states, garnered a celebrity following and written an article for a British national newspaper. Especially while retaining a level of relative anonymity on home soil that makes it possible for them to gig in tiny pubs in their neighbourhood without so much as turning a few heads. Yet Selkirk natives Frightened Rabbit find themselves in this unusual predicament.

Their latest album, The Midnight Organ Fight, released back in April, is already big news stateside. Early blog support saw it spread like wildfire and has propelled the band to the prestigious ranks of Pitchfork darlings – an enviable if not impossible feat for most British rock bands. This side of the pond, they fill huge venues with ambitiously instrumented layers of sound, if not always people. On top of intricately woven guitars and keys, lead vocalist and songwriter Scott Hutchison, who was the first, lone Frightened Rabbit back in 2003, splutters a cracked and plaintive brogue, by turns desperate, bitter and brave, about a break up that happened some years ago, to him at least.

These days, he’s found someone new, someone who calls over to him to hurry up as we squeeze onto an open table for our interview in the frozen winter night. His brother, Frightened Rabbit drummer Grant Hutchison, comes too, and it is striking how tired they both look this evening. Grant’s drumming is part of what makes Frightened Rabbit one of the singular most exciting British rock acts of the moment. On stage he is transformed into a deranged yeti, teeth bared, shoulders squared, fists clenching drumsticks that he has been known to snap in seconds.

“We haven’t been off the road for months and months,” Scott offers by way of excuse for their exhaustion, “but why would you be in a band and not do all the gigs you can?” Plenty of bands have bemoaned life on the road – few have been invited by The Guardian to write about it. I ask Scott about this recent journalistic triumph. “I’ve actually had loads of e-mails requesting I do more!” he exclaims, clearly delighted. “It’s hard to write about life on the road without coming across as if we’re moaning, because it is great. We’re lucky: I know hundreds of thousands of other people would want to be doing what we’re doing, but sometimes it is just like, fuck this, this is ridiculous! I’m taking years off my life living like this.”

It must be exhausting, too, to relive the trauma of losing someone every night in front of a whole load of new people, I suggest of The Midnight Organ Fight and its barefaced, wounded account of a breakup. “There’s no rawness anymore,” Scott says. “It was two and a half years ago, and I wrote it six months after it all happened, so I could tie a knot over everything, as closure. If you hammer out a song over a hundred times, a lot of the emotion is going to fade away.”

Nonetheless, Scott still manages to recreate the confusion and hurt of that time live. He explains: “We still love playing live. A lot of the audiences, especially on this tour [they are currently supporting Death Cab For Cutie], are new to our songs, and that makes us feel new to them as well, in a way. And maybe our new audiences have just had their big ‘thing’ that happened to them recently, and that’s great, that people can walk into our songs and become the person that I’m singing about.”

Maybe its Scott’s lyrical frankness when dealing with the private universalisms of love, loss and sex that explains Frightened Rabbit’s disproportionate success stateside. “It’s different the way that music spreads in the US. They’re really big on blogs over there – I know we have blogs here as well – but in the US that’s kind of how you find out about new music, whereas over here it tends to be the NME and the music press,” he tells me. It was those faceless, secretive creatures – bloggers – who caught wind of Frightened Rabbit early on in the states and propelled them to the front of their ones to watch. “The Americans have this romantic view of the Scottish,” Scott tries to explain, meekly. Or, just maybe, Frightened Rabbit are really very, very good.

Frightened Rabbit seem perfectly happy with the way things are going, anyway, even if a lot of people ‘over here’ have never heard of them. (“It’s weird to say ‘over here’ as if we’re not from the UK!” they laugh.) But all that could change with their current and upcoming tours with Death Cab For Cutie, of which Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer are huge fans, and fellow Scot, Biffy Clyro. They’re re-releasing a Christmas single, ‘It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop’, which stings with the broken humour of putting grudges aside ‘just for one day’, and they hope to start working on new material in the new year, if they ever stop touring. I tell Scott that I hope we don’t have to wait for him to go through another messy breakup before he can write a new album. “Speaking of which,” he smiles, motioning behind me where his girlfriend waits, “I’d probably better go.”

DOWNLOAD (that's right kids, my first ever download) Frightened Rabbit - It's Christmas So We'll Stop

Some Tracks I Liked In 2008

2008-11-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

There may well be more to come, but it's getting to that list time of year again. And there's nothing I like better than a good list, so I'm getting mine in early. Jamie dabbles in that sort of thing, too...

The Dodos – Ashley (Visiter)

There was something about the biting cold of early spring that I found within the music of The Dodos. I was heading towards my finals at uni and each day entailed an uphill hike to the library for hours of silent reading, and something about the cross rhythms in Ashley seemed a part of the heavy momentum of that time. Coupled with which, the exponential improvement in this band’s live shows over the course of the year make them worthy of an end of year accolade, if nothing else.

Laura Marling – Blackberry Stone (Cross Your Fingers EP)

Alas, I Cannot Swim blew the large majority of the music press, including myself, away, even earning Miss Marling a Mercury nomination. (“I’ve no idea what all this is about,” she later confessed to me at the awards ceremony.) But it is in ‘Blackberry Stone’, originally the B-side to single ‘Cross Your Fingers’, that Marling’s astounding vocal range and the mesmerising ache in her lyrics really comes to the fore.

Frightened Rabbit – Backwards Walk (The Midnight Organ Fight)

The Midnight Organ Fight seems one of those albums that people can form an almost unspeakably personal relationship with – even bloggers who usually muster prolific jive on any given subject. Scott Hutchison’s broken Scottish brogue and the band’s epic approach to instrumentation express a kind of red-blooded hurt that is severed before it really takes off in Backwards Walk, a musical manifestation of the frustrated lyrics. The Daytrotter session of this track is a must.

MGMT – Kids (Oracular Spectacular)

Maybe one day, I will be able to listen to this song again. Right now it’s still more irritating than Katy Perry. It became the inescapable summer anthem of 2008, and it was rammed down my throat almost hourly at every festival I went to. But it’s for that reason it makes the top five, too, because one day I’ll hear it and remember chasing mediocre pop stars around Glastonbury and climbing midnight trees in Benicassim and drinking whisky with boys in bands at Roskilde.

Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (Fleet Foxes)

It was actually stumbling upon a First Aid Kit cover of this that I fell in love with it, leading me to properly listen to Fleet Foxes’ much lauded debut album. Baroque pop? The saviours of American music? Sounds overblown, but in a strange way Fleet Foxes deserve it for reinventing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young for a new generation, for sounding so unlike everything else that was released this year, and for the best Jesus facial hair this side of the bible. Amen.

And the shortlist: The Acorn – Oh Napoleon (Glory Hope Mountain) / British Sea Power – Canvey Island (Do You Like Rock Music) / Deerhunter – Saved By Old Times (Microcastle) / The Kills – Cheep and Cheerful (Midnight Boom) / The Last Shadow Puppets – Meeting Place (The Age Of The Understatement) / Mystery Jets – Flakes (Twenty-One) / Raconteurs – Many Shades Of Black (Consolers Of The Lonely) / Tokyo Police Club – In A Cave (Elephant Shell) / TV On The Radio – Halfway Home (Dear Science)

The Smiths - 'What Difference Does It Make?' (1984)

2008-11-21T06:22:00.000-08:00

Like the second sibling, floundering in the shadow of its predecessor, ‘What Difference...’ had a tough act to follow in the shape of 1983’s ‘This Charming Man’. Both Morrissey and Marr have spoken of it as the song that got away. “‘What Difference Does It Make’, I thought was absolutely awful the day after the record was pressed,” Morrissey confessed in an interview with Q magazine in 1992, whereas Marr put its relative chart success – it peaked at a very respectable 12 in the UK – down to it being part of ‘the peak’ that followed ‘This Charming Man’.

In fact, ‘What Difference…’ was the first single to come off The Smiths eponymous debut album, released just a few weeks later in February 1984. And while its opening riff wasn’t as brashly distinctive as that of ‘This Charming Man’, or its lyrics so boldly poetic, it is significant for its rambling catchiness, as evidence of just how early on in their career The Smiths honed their singular style.

The opening guitar riff was based on Jo Jo Gunne’s ‘Run Run Run’ of 1972, indicative of the importance of Marr in bringing the guitar-based sounds of the seventies back into vogue in a climate saturated in dance music. If you listen carefully to the recording, you’ll also hear a sample of children playing just before the final bridge, the reason for which is somewhat unclear given the lyrical theme of unrequited love.

It might have been panned, but on today’s ears ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ seems to embody more than ever that mordant humour and social realism that was so important when The Smiths emerged in the 80s. Their very name was chosen as the antidote to fanciful names found in 80s dance music, like Spandau Ballet and Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark. ‘What difference…’ is musically humdrum and lyrically fatalistic, and yet as one of the five most commercially successful Smiths songs ever released, the difference it made in the course of rock music history is immeasurable.

Live Review: Death Cab For Cutie and Frightened Rabbit at Brixton Academy 19/11/08

2008-11-20T03:39:00.001-08:00

Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard is all grown up, which is more than you can say for his average fan. At 32, Gibbard is still purporting Death Cab’s particular breed of teenage angst and hapless romantic pessimism. And the teenagers are still buying into it. ‘Narrow Stairs’, released earlier this year, marked their sixth album release since their debut, ‘Something About Airplanes’ back in 1998, ten years ago now. They must surely wonder at how their music still reaches an almost exclusively adolescent market – the only people above drinking age in the Brixton Academy tonight appear to be emo-sympathetic parents.

Support for the ‘Narrow Stairs’ tour comes from Selkirk’s ‘Frightened Rabbit’, easily one of the best bands to emerge in 2008. It was Gibbard and Nick Harmer of Death Cab who asked the Scottish fourpiece, personally, if they’d provide support on their UK tour, and it’s a well-judged selection. Scott Hutchison’s strained and aching brogue befits the acoustic of the well-worn theatre perfectly. Frightened Rabbit stick to uptempo numbers, but there’s still something brawny and raw about their sound that reverberates magnificently in the Academy, propulsed forward by percussion of unusual ferocity. Drummer Grant Hutchison inexplicably declares ‘drink stella!” before he leaves the stage at the end of the set – maybe that’s his secret.

It must be daunting following support as good as this, even for an act as well-established as Death Cab. Either that, or they’re not quite up for it tonight – ‘The Employment Pages’ is a poor opener, sounding pallid and empty in the stage lights reflected on the expectant, upturned faces of so many teenagers. Ben Gibbard is almost unrecognisable, skinny, lank-haired and spectacle-less, positioned stage-right rather than centre, perhaps to emphasise the parnership between him and lead guitarist Chris Walla.

If anyone shines tonight, it is neither of these two. Bassist Harmer is the only band member who seems genuinely enthused to be onstage, and a lot of the set is somewhat lacklustre – perhaps a pitfall of trying to recreate the fragile intimacy of Death Cab live. ‘We Have The Facts And We’re Voting Yes’ particularly suffers from this predicament; it almost sounds as though Gibbard is singing someone else’s song rather than his own as he trips over himself to get to the finish, while ‘Movie Script Ending’ is rushed, and loses all poignancy.

There are some moments that verge on a kind of polished melancholy, where the music really does seem to work. The anthemic ‘New Year’ is greeted with arms aloft, and set closer ‘Bixby Canyon Bridge’ is thick and taught with instrumental tension. Gibbard executes an acoustic ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’ mid-set, “for all the people hoping to find love,” and everyone sings along. It screams teenage campfire, but seems appropriate given surrounding company.

The encore is a generous four songs long, including a request in the shape of the lovely ‘What Sarah Said’, and they finish as per on ‘Transatlanticism’, distortion left to hang in the air as the band leave the stage. That Death Cab can draw such a prolific teenage following so many years since their inception is an impressive feat – they sit pretty in an emo-indie market that demands equal parts love-centric lyrical goo with credible amounts of guitars. Yet there is something particularly disheartening in witnessing such a prosaic rendition of songs that tend to teeter on glib, anyway. Gibbard has certainly endeared a new-generation of angst-ridden teenagers to Death Cab’s well-honed romantic existentialism, but whether the music he now produces still convinces himself seems slightly less certain.

Album Review: Pavement 'Brighten The Corners - Nicene Credence Ed.' released 18/11/08

2008-11-18T09:51:00.000-08:00

Completists rejoice, Domino have kept up with their millennium promise of a Pavement reissue every two years with reissue no. 4, ‘Brighten The Corners: Nicene Credence Edition’.

The original Brighten The Corners was released back in 1997, as Pavement hit their early thirties. They were all living in different cities by this time and made the exception to come together for recording, which evidences itself in the aural completeness of this, their fourth album. In true Pavement fashion, the record is snailpaced, embracing a kind of lazy lysergia that washes over rather than arrests. In many ways Malkmus et al were the underground band of the nineties – they embodied a kind of commercially unconcerned, stoner-rock materialist discontent with modern life, that manifested itself in Malkmus’ dry wit and Kannberg’s deliciously cyclical, unhurried guitar work. The British musical underground were to draw extensively from their intentionally lo-fi sound, with many bands including Blur and Radiohead citing Pavement as a major influence.

Unlike Pavement’s fifth and final album, Terror Twilight, which was completely written (and almost completely credited to) frontman Stephen Malkmus, two of Kannberg’s best contributions to the Pavement compendium appear here in ‘Date With IKEA’ and ‘Passat Dream’. That the duo were still working under the guise of a songwriting partnership during ‘Brighten The Corners’ sessions manifests itself in the balance of band components, with ample space given to instrumental noodling that is indelibly stamped with a heady Californian languor. It was as Malkmus began to overshadow his bandmates towards the end of the decade, with Terror Twilight, that Pavement began to fall apart.

Brighten The Corners, featuring perhaps Pavement’s best known work in ‘Shady Lane’ and ‘Stereo’, showcases the band at its most cohesive. This year’s reissue features two discs containing the whole of the 1997 record remastered from the original tapes, plus all the B-sides and compilation tracks from that period, and a plethora of unreleased live and studio tracks, numbering an impressive 43 tracks in total. Some of the most exciting new material to surface is in the outtakes and live recordings of Pavement’s 1997 John Peel Live Sessions – evidence of Peel’s continued support of a band that he championed right from their roots in the early nineties. The CDs come in an embossed slipcase with a 62-page book containing photos, ephemera, writings and more. Just in time for Christmas...

Television: 'Marquee Moon' (single), 1977

2008-11-12T04:06:00.000-08:00

Punk music was all about doing it yourself, and making the music you wanted with the tools you had. It was ramshackle and raw, and that became its signature: a doing-away with the need for co-ordination and complication in favour of sometimes piecemeal musicality but a professed unwavering inclusivity.

Yet something about the whole movement was ferociously protectionist, from the maverick nastiness of the Pistols to the purer, punched-up bite of The Clash. The Wire perfected a storming yelp and The Ramones made mince meat of eardrums with their unforgiving preoccupation for volume, but all of them snarled that punk belonged to them, and to you, if you only dared to take it.

In their early, Brian Eno-produced sessions, Television showed little sign of being any different. The taught pleading of Tom Verlaine’s vocal comes off wafer thin and grating back then, the balance all wrong. But by the time they recorded Marquee Moon in 1977, Television stood apart from their peers. There is an artistic purity in what they managed to achieve with 'Marquee Moon' that signposted the evolution of new wave and post punk.

The title track from their debut longplayer is Television distilled. There is a subtle artistry behind the musical textures here that goes beyond the simplicity of trademark punk, and yet Verlaine’s desperately reaching vocal alone would have you believe that Television just happened upon the careful progressions of their sound, that anyone could have it that way, if they wanted.

‘Marquee Moon’ rests on the casual groove of Fred Smith’s bassline, and percussion so impeccably placed that it barely registers. Verlaine’s solos meld twisted upturned riffs with noodling motifs, but are always executed with a steely conviction that makes them stand firm against the abstract tension of Richard Lloyd's rhythm guitar. Lloyd refused to sit pretty on rhythm: he had a knack for creating totally unexpected tonalities that coloured Verlaine’s confident solo work with an intense unpredictability.

Television took up Sunday residency at New York’s CBGB in 1974, the first rock band to perform at the club, which soon became the epicentre of the New York punk scene. Later that year Blondie, The Ramones and Talking Heads, to name but a few, would appear in that same venue. There at its inception, Television took punk’s magnetic filth and made it aesthetic – no where is this apotheosis more apparent than in ‘Marquee Moon’.

Album Review: Castanets 'City Of Refuge' released 10/11/08

2008-11-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

City Of Refuge is by turns twitching and soothing, awash with experimentalism and the upturned familiarity of American alt-folk. It was recorded in three weeks in a motel in the Nevada desert by one Ray Raposta, in a burst of creative solitude that resounds within the confines of the fifteen tracks.

Most of the themes within City Of Refuge are fleeting, ephemeral glimpses into the mind of a man alone in the vastness of the dustbowl landscape and the hollowed plains of his own consciousness. ‘Celestial Shore’ introduces the City with a guitar fanfare that resounds with sun-bright reverb and a melodic warmth. From thereon in, however, there is probing sparseness about the soundscape that Raposta has created in the City Of Refuge, which manifests itself as a mind creeping into forgotten corners of memory and undiscovered rifts of thought. Some of the time, Rasposta’s compositions are completely abstract. The ‘High Plain’ trio are pointillist experiments in the echo of crystal drops of synthesised sound, left to reverb as though in a goldfish bowl, or the outer layers of the earth’s atmosphere.

Where the city becomes more lucid, however, Raposta shows a clarity of concept that vindicates his exploration of abstraction. ‘Refuge 1’ revolves with dark intentions to ‘run to the city of refuge’, which by the time of penultimate sister track, ‘Refuge 2’ seem to have been fulfilled, as the thickly accented vocal drowns in the watery reverb of production. The momentary gospel of ‘Fly Away’ and the dry, spaghetti western guitar riffs of ‘Prettiest Chain’ place this largely experimental album within a musical context. But it is in the lapsarian tribute of final track ‘After The Fall’ that City Of Refuge is most melodic, and that lyrically and musically the finished album is best explained. Raposta writes ‘if I’d known where we were going, I would not have gone at all,’ but this album reverberates with the sense that it is only through journeying to the vast solitude of the Nevada desert that he could properly reflect on the valleys, plains and shores of his inner landscape.

The minimalist musicality and commercially uninterested abstraction of City Of Refuge is unlikely to win Raposta many record sales or a place in the mainstream music industry any time soon. Yet City Of Refuge resounds with musicality and clarity of expression of thought that makes it undeniably a critical success – that rare wonder of an album that manages to convincingly experiment with accepted forms.

Neil Young: 'Cowgirl In The Sand' live at Massey Hall, 1971

2008-11-03T08:34:00.000-08:00

‘Cowgirl In The Sand’ originally appeared on the 1969 album ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’, Young’s first with Crazy Horse.

He later claimed to have written it, alongside ‘Down By The River’, while passed out in bed with a raging fever in Topanga Canon. It is the oppressive thunk and shifting time of the original album recording that seems to manifest the heavy, crawling discomfort of illness. A rambling ten-minutes long, the original is dominated by hypnotic rhythmic interplay between Young and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, of whom Young later said “he just led those guys [bandmates Billy and Ralph] from one groove to another, all within the same groove.”

1971 was a pivotal time for Young, who would hit the big time with ‘Harvest’, and its number one title track, ‘Heart Of Gold’, just a year later. He was to hate the trappings of the musical mainstream. In this recording, as part of his ‘Journey Through The Past’ solo tour, Young is comfortably unfettered by commercial pressure – over half his set was comprised of material he was yet to record. And at Massey Hall in Toronto, where he was born, he appears both coy and contented – a musician enjoying his best work before the mayhem of middle of the road success descends.

Without Danny (who died of a heroin overdose in 1972), and cut to just under four minutes, ‘Cowgirl’ is no longer about the symbiotic rhythmic conflict of two guitarists. Still anchored by that uncompromisingly sturdy tempo, it is Young’s transcendent falsetto that is the manifestation of someone who struggled for liberty from others, but ultimately could not escape from themselves.

Mumford & Sons 'Love Your Ground EP' released 3/11/08

2008-11-03T03:39:00.000-08:00

There are only four songs on the Love Your Ground EP, evidence, perhaps of the painstaking meticulousness of Mumford & Sons, who must, surely, have a multitude of publishable tracks to chose from by now.

Each of them is lyrically lachrymose, from the quiet, introverted fury of ‘Little Lion Man’ with its refrain, “I really fucked it up this time,” to the grasping hope of ‘Feel The Tide’, that sings “you and I now, we can be alright.” And yet the words are upended and juxtaposed with banjos and mandolins and ukuleles and those sorts of folk-like, twiddling, inevitably cheery instruments that make the songs themselves seem bright as well as melancholy.

The songwriting here still sounds a little premature and not yet fully formed, and Marcus Mumford is not yet beyond writing lyrics that teeter between trite and touching. There are glimpses of poetry in ‘Hold On To What You Believe’ with the words “we’re young/open flowers in the fields of this war-torn world,” but the chorus is still irritatingly preachy. Similarly the music is heavily circular, risking mudanity, and yet is illuminated by inspired moments, such as in the surprising intrigue of a time-signature change in the same track.

Mumford and Sons have been better known as Laura Marling’s backing band for a good while now, and it is through this musical join-the-dots than they are inextricably interwoven into the fabric of new-folk, inhabiting genre shelf-space alongside Noah and The Whale, Mystery Jets, Marling and Emmy The Great. Their EP reaches for the more artistically sincere side of the new-folk stick, and yet falls just short this time, veering too often towards the predictable and twee. Yet there are moments here that speak of a kind of cold, rattling, expansive folk that needs only to be stretched and refined over time to produce something truly definitive. This will be the task at hand for the band as they put together their debut long player.

Album Review: Ryan Adams 'Cardinology' released 27/10/08

2008-10-27T03:19:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to pinpoint a moment when extraordinarily talented musicians make the irretrievably slippery descent into morbid mediocrity? Maybe it comes when they finally slip off the knife-edge of living the life of a rock star and into inevitably drug-fuelled song-writing paralysis – maybe the mainstream seems the only way to go once you’ve dallied with success on the periphery for so long. Dylan himself made the veering trajectory through the exhilarating unpredictability of the sixties into the gospel cud that he churned out with heartbreaking regularity by the eighties. His latter-day prophet, Ryan Adams, seems intent on following a similar path.

With Cardinology, you’d be hard pressed to catch even a faded glimpse of the twisted up, fragile beauty of 2004’s ‘Love Is Hell’, or the bold ache of 2001’s ‘Gold’. That Ryan Adams can churn out piffle is not news – his misguided attempt to release three albums in a single year in 2005 will have alerted even the most hardy of acolytes to his somewhat hit-and-miss approach to songwriting. Perhaps most upsetting with Cardinology is the worry that Adams intended this lazy transition to purporting meaningless puddles of MOR – and yet, equally, that is maybe Cardinology’s only redeeming feature.

Adams has transformed a fascination with mainstream modern rock that emerged with his undeniably magnificent transmogrification of Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’, into a watery emulation of stadium country-rock acts of boringly prolific output. The U2 comparison here is predicable and yet wholly warranted, especially with the aging warble of the vocal on rock-anthems like ‘Go Easy’ and ‘Magick’.

‘Stop’ is a shallow attempt to capture the deliciously sullen, sparse piano-balladry of ‘The Shadowlands’, but where the latter conjoured the frighteningly dark corners of the psyche of the protagonist, the former drifts into faux-grandiose string arrangements and unconvincing lyrics. ‘Memory Lane’ is twee in its reminiscent chatter of “simple times, hands entangled, fingers engaged,” and yet still manages to be less revolting than the pointless chugging of ‘Crossed Out Name’ or ‘Cobwebs’, which are repetitive enough to make Coldplay or Snow Patrol proud. ‘Let Us Down Easy’ dabbles in gospel, and I’m pretty sure ‘Fix It’ and ‘Born Again’ are actually the same song, mistakenly included twice.

If there was some saving grace, just one track that reminded of the man’s capabilities, a single ‘Hotel Cheslea Nights’ or a whisper of ‘Goodnight Hollywood Bvd’, would that be better? Cardinology might be bad, but it’s at least consistently mediocre: the rubbishy yelps of a man that wants to sell records and is following a well-worn blueprint to do so. One can only hope that this unremarkable, middling result was indeed Ryan Adams’s intention.

Album Review: Deerhunter - 'Microcastle' released 27/10

2008-10-21T05:19:00.000-07:00

Since the release of their eponymous debut in 2005, Deerhunter have occupied an underground space carved of white noise noodling and illuminated by frontman Bradford Cox’s obvious preoccupation with Lou Reed and Brian Eno. But for this, their third album, some of the distortion has been stripped to reveal a surprisingly melodic and complete long player. Microcastle demonstrates that, far from the fuzz of previous albums that had Pitchfork applauding and almost everyone else scratching their heads, Bradford Cox is capable of producing structural form and harmonic variance that comprises modern post-everything songwriting at its most interesting.

Where as 2007’s Cryptograms suffered from stylistic schizophrenia, oscillating between prolonged, self-gratifying ambience and tough post punk aggression, Microcastle is pieced together with self-conscious deliberation. Opener ‘Cover Me’ introduces the album with a steady compound sway and unhurried percussion that breaks into a ticking chug for Agoraphobia, which then endures throughout the first half of the album. Cox’s vocals, frequently fragile and submerged in reverb, are laid uncharacteristically bare for the opening of the eponymous ‘Microcastle’, erupting into a gently glorious vocal refrain, before damp, echoing guitars twinkle on into the delicious lullabye of Cavalry Scars.

The best of Microcastle is in its characteristically prolonged outro. Perhaps the finest work on the album is with the uptempo ‘Nothing Ever Happened’. An insistent bassline drives and anchors ethereal guitar effects, which no long swamp the aural landscape as with Cox’s previous work, instead interweaving with cogitable directness so that diasporic musical elements are matched into the melodic weave flawlessly. ‘Saved By Old Times’ opens with the lazy psychedelic loop of twanging guitars and sees Cox singing of ‘elaborate designs', before slipping into the lysergic ramblings of spoken snippets pieced together by Cole Alexander of the Black Lips. The penultimate ‘Neither Of Us, Uncertainly’ drifts off into an upward piano refrain before the gentle melodia of ‘Twilight At Carbon Lake’, with its rocking, compound rhythm, plays out to growing distortion, ending on chordal fuzz which reminds of Cox’s noise-laden preoccupations.

Where Cryptograms introduced many to a musical outfit prone to fits of artistic impulse beyond the comprehension of many, Microcastle sees the superficial fuzz of some of the most musically elusive of Cox’s compositions stripped away. Without this deceptive obscurantism, Deerhunter evidence themselves as surprisingly melodic and accessible, and reveal a writing talent in Cox that goes beyond the expectations of a large proportion of critics. Cox insisted in a recent interview that he hopes people hate the new album to relieve himself of promotional responsibilities: if Microcastle gets the recognition it deserves, the reality for Cox could be a far cry from his negative aspirations.

Live Review: British Sea Power @ Roundhouse, 17/10/08

2008-10-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

See original post here.

Few bands can lay claim to really putting on a proper spectacle in show business these days. It is perhaps partly due to this that British Sea Power have succeeded in maintaining exponentially increasing popularity, both critically and otherwise, over the last eight years of their existence. The fashionable Brighton outfit, who have cleverly trademarked themselves with songs steeped in historical narrative and outfits themed to suit their obscure naval preoccupations, can lay claim to a fastidious fanbase, sometimes titled ‘The Third Battalion’.

Having been the recent recipients of a Mercury nomination that dragged them from the clutches of the fashionably elusive indie elite and irreversibly into the commercial limelight, British Sea Power proved their mainstream appeal by filling the circular expanse of the wonderfully architected Roundhouse on Friday, right through to the seated balconies.

The respectable venue, a far cry from the cramped and dingy pubs and clubs where British Sea Power once performed, attracted a similarly respectable audience, whose demographic ranged from the younger, flag-wielding hardcore, to the surprisingly grey-haired surrounding majority.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a band transcending the normal commercial demographic, but the turnout was nonetheless surprising. It was as though British Sea Power asked ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’, and even those not naturally predisposed to gig going tentatively raised a hand and said, ‘Yes, actually, and we’ll buy a ticket to prove it.’

Their set demonstrated British Sea Power’s ability to achieve huge anthemic stadium rock during the likes of ‘Atom’ and ‘Waving Flags’, and then juxtapose it with filthy, angular rhythms and screaming vocals as in ‘Apologies To Insect Life’. Mostly though, the evening was composed of tracks from their third LP, with the London Bulgarian Choir (who also provided support) lit up behind a backsheet, providing vocal accompaniment during particularly epic moments. The rest of the time, the backsheet provided a canvas upon which footage of majestic, encircling sea birds were projected: a fitting visual companion to the revolving sea-sounds of ‘A Trip Out’, and the crashing waves of cymbals in instrumental number, ‘The Great Skua’.

Back-catalogue favourites ‘Fear Of Drowning’, ‘Wooden Horse’ and ‘Lately’ delighted a well-versed and receptive audience, that dissolved into catcalls of ‘easy, easy, easy,’ towards the end of the set, even before they were goaded into it by a huge flashing sign containing that one word during the final applause. Cue a characteristically entertaining encore of ‘No Lucifer’, which saw the band ripping up their tree-filled stage with the help of ‘Ursine Ultra’, their life-sized, patched-up mascot bear. For those unfamiliar with the band’s apocalyptic finales, the hilarious set-piece was unlike anything preceding it in rock music, and a subtle reminder of their deserved Mercury nomination.

With their choirs and costumes, British Sea Power can hardly get more musically epic, more theatrically inventive, or more lyrically intelligent. The challenge for them now is to move beyond this comfortably impressive plateau and continue their increasing commercial and artistic success, without compromising the marvellous eccentricities of their origins.

Album Review: The Acorn - 'Glory Hope Mountain' released 20/10

2008-10-20T04:53:00.000-07:00

See original article published here.

Sufjan Stevens once tried to write fifty albums, one for every American state. If he’d taken the melodic warmth of his songwriting further afield, to the colourful coasts of Central America, the result may have been something like this. A blend of familiar North American folk and something a little more foreign and tribal, Glory Hope Mountain manages to expound a musical narrative that is extraordinarily descriptive. It was written as frontman and vocalist Rolf Klausener’s tribute to his mother, Gloria Eperanza Montoya (the title of the album is a rough translation of her name), who fled an abusive childhood in Honduras, journeying to Canada to forge a new life.

But Glory Hope Mountain is more than a biographical exercise. A careful ear can hear the chronicled threads of a life caught between cultures and journeying far from home, yet beyond Klausener’s descriptive intentions this LP introduces a vital and diverse musical mind. Each track is an accomplished and carefully realised whole, brought to life through diverse ethnic instrumentation that gives The Acorn’s music a rare vividness and colour, setting it apart from the work of contemporaries in the vein of experimental folk.

Klausener’s music manages to be subtly upbeat without ever straying into the territory of the twee. Clever, poetic lyrics anchor the songs on the right side of comfortingly melodic. Opener ‘Hold Your Breath’ is sparsely orchestrated, telling of a birth, before slipping with a delicious thud into a pulsating, forward facing rhythm during verses. Punctuated mid-track by a beautifully upwards-leading instrumental bridge that feeds into a clattering guitar led outro, it is the perfect introduction to an album that is by shades epic and unrelentingly energetic, such as in ‘Low Gravity’, and at other times unhurried and soulfully down-tempo, as in ‘Flood Pt. 2’.

The foreign influences of the album, inherent and indelible underneath every track, become especially evident in the vocal accompaniment and steady calypso chug of ‘Flood’, a song that sounds so organic it could have climbed, tinkering and rattling, from the branches of trees. ‘Oh Napoleon’ is mesmerisingly woeful, with its rocking, descending guitar riff and lyrics you can disappear into: ‘Talk about your peace of mind/The one I found so hard to find.’

There are weaker moments. ‘Sister Margaret’ is overdubbed by spoken sampling that is barely audible, and never breaks into song, so that it kind of drifts instrumentally, acting as album filler of less memorable quality. Meanwhile ‘Antenna’ starts with radio white noise that leads into uncharacteristically bland songwriting. But with the fragile, wavering double female vocal of ‘Lullaby (Mountain)’, Glory Hope Mountain ends, leaving the listener lost in the mountains and rivers of aural landscapes, handcrafted with painstaking and seamless detail. Though by no means a perfect effort, this critically lauded LP from Krausener and co. nonetheless introduces a profound and expansive folk-writing talent, combining traditional, contemporary and foreign influences that are married with new vibrancy by this Canadian collective.

Music News

2008-10-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

Signed Pink Floyd Guitar To Be Sold In Charity Auction

Fender illustrated by Gerald Scarfe will go for thousands…

Those with a few pennies to spare despite the financial crisis gathered in Kensington last night for the launch of a charity auction of a unique white fender guitar. The instrument is signed by all the members of Pink Floyd and illustrated by ‘The Wall’ cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

The auction is to celebrate the launch of Gerald Scarfe’s book, ‘Scarfe on the Wall’, which details Scarfe’s creation of the artwork for Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, The Wall, a rock opera about the individual’s struggle against society.

The fender is especially valuable as it is possibly the last thing that the late Richard Wright signed before his death from cancer last month. The current bid is £4000.

The only member of Pink Floyd to attend the opening of the auction was drummer Nick Mason. Roger Waters, who resides in New York, was unavailable, while guitarist David Gilmour had to attend a parents’ evening.

Pink Floyd remain one of the most successful rock acts in history, selling over 200million records worldwide since their inception in the late sixties.

The fender will be on auction until the end of the month at www.buyoncegivetwice.co.uk.

Originally published 16/10/08 here.

Arctics Take Apollo Gig To The Big Screen

In one off cinema preview last night...

Fans of the Arctic Monkeys were treated to a feature length film of one of the band’s gigs in one off viewings that took place in selected cinemas across the UK last night.

‘Arctic Monkeys At The Apollo’, a 76-minute long film of the last performance in the band’s 2007 World Tour, was premiered at the Rex cinema in London on the 7th October, and will become available in DVD format on November 3rd.

Directed by Richard Ayoade, the film captures in high definition and surround sound the ability of the Sheffield four piece to reproduce their recorded work, live.

Vocalist Alex Turner fronts the performance with typical dry wit, at one point convincing the Manchester audience that the cameras surrounding the stage are because of a planned ‘live link-up’ with a Berlin audience, prompting hooligan cat-calls of ‘En-ger-land’ to reverberate around the venue, and several self-serving smirks to be passed between band mates.

The set list for the performance numbered nineteen songs from both Arctic Monkeys albums, including favourites ‘Flourescent Adolescent’, ‘I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ and ‘Brianstorm’, and the lesser known ‘Nettles’ and ‘Plastic Tramp’.

Published 15/10/08 here.

Bombay Bicycle Club Interview

2008-10-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

“People Treat Us Like A Gimmick...”
Bombay Bicycle Club on the pitfalls of being freshfaced and uber-talented...

It’s busy in the Macbeth in Shoreditch tonight. The pretty and pretentious youth of London’s east end gather on the terrace in the cool evening air of the late summer, puffing resignedly on cigarettes held up to painted lips. There’s a hardened, London look to most of the kids here, which makes it easy to spot three of the Bombay Bicycle Club boys as they shuffle through the smoke for our interview.

Much has been made of their youth by the music press, which is funny because there are lots of young acts about at the moment – Late Of The Pier, Cajun Dance Party, Laura Marling to name but a few. They don’t even look especially young. But there is a kind of sullen reservation in the way they conduct themselves, that soon becomes apparent as shyness. Save for the exuberance of their guitarist, Jamie, bassist Ed and vocalist Jack stare quietly at their shoes, seeming rather endearingly unsure how to answer questions. They might have some confidence yet to gain, but as far as their music is concerned, for a band that have been gigging and writing for over three years, their debut album certainly is a long time coming.

“The last few years have been building towards recording, which is a long time to put together a debut album, especially if you’re semi-well-known,” bassist Jamie says of their plans to record a LP. Semi-well-known is almost an understatement. Bombay Bicycle Club have been a staple festival band since they won Channel 4’s Road To V in 2006, and have been gigging successfully ever since, making quite a name for themselves on the indie circuit as Britain’s baby-faced answer to the Strokes. The only problem being, with their GCSEs only just behind them, there was very little the band could do during term time. “The interest in us was always peaks and troughs,” Jamie explains, “because we’d do festivals in the summer, and then we wouldn’t be able to do anything while we were at school.”

But no longer. The boys finished their A levels in July (Jamie solemnly admits: “School always came first,”) and have decided to take this year off to concentrate properly on the band. While their friends move away to start uni or fly off on exotic gap years, Jamie, Jack, Ed and Suren are getting used to everyday life in a band. “I don’t know what to do with myself now!” Jamie exclaims, with a happy grin, “When we’re not on tour or recording there’s nothing to do. We came back from a month on tour and we just wanted to take a break, but then you realise you’re just sitting at home all day, and all your friends are going on their gap years to East Asia or wherever.”

With this in mind, the boys are keeping themselves busy this month recording their debut album. Lead singer Jack pipes up behind a long greasy fringe that they’re thinking of calling it ‘Emergency Contraception Blues’, “but that might just be a song on it, we’re not sure yet.” As to the album itself, fans can expect quite a bit of unheard material. Bombay Bicycle Club have been lucky enough to secure Jim Abbiss as producer, the man behind numerous Mercury nominated long players from the likes of Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian. The boys talk excitedly about the prospect of Abbiss’s handiwork on the album. “He’s very versatile,” Jack lauds, before Jamie interrupts, “I think he’s very good at bringing bands like Kasabian and The Arctic Monkeys into the mainstream whilst keeping their edge.”
“Winning a Mercury,” guitarist Ed contributes, finally, “that’s our aim.”

Winning a Mercury is not exactly a one-of-a-kind ambition for a young, gigging band. The difference is, that with the intelligent musicianship and unlikely performing experience of Bombay Bicycle Club, their chances of achieving the outer reaches of British rock celebrity are perhaps not so slight. Each of their tracks combines wide-open-eyed lyrics about adolescence with swirling Bloc Party-esque keyboard and guitar textures and angular, catchy Strokes riffs that stick in the head and induce front row mayhem at gigs.

The only decider for Bombay Bicycle Club, this year, will be for them to get people to finally stop thinking of them as schoolkids and start seeing them for what they are: the most promising act to emerge from North London since Bloc Party. “It sometimes feels as if people aren’t taking us as seriously as if we were older,” vocalist Jack frowns. “People treat us like a gimmick!” Jamie adds, indignantly. “The NME is always saying things like ‘Out of term time, Bombay Bicycle Club are…” he tails off.
Jack adds, “People seem to have picked up on the fact that we’re really young compared to other bands, and have taken advantage of it.”

With school behind them and an album currently in production, Bombay Bicycle Club have a lot to prove in the coming months, especially to those that have underestimated them in the past. For now, as they shuffle off, all awkward handshakes and shy smiles, one can only think that if this young London four-piece can put together an album that is even just a fraction as promising as their early demos, they won’t be quite so unassuming for much longer…

Suggestions for the evening times courtesy of EYOE:

2008-10-14T04:37:00.001-07:00

Concrete and Glass Festival - various venues, London, 2+3/10/08

2008-10-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

See original article here

‘The whole idea of a music and art event we know sounds a bit stuffy, but basically what we hope we do is expose you to a bunch of stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily see…’

Those extraordinary things ranged from the neo-classical piano works of Ludovico Einaudi to the Kung Fu games of contemporary artist David Blandy. But somewhere less high-brow, in the midst of the experimental and the avant garde, Concrete and Glass also offered the punter performances from some of the most enticing and eclectic bands and musicians in the industry, including inventive electronica from Fujiya & Miyagi, stumbling and beautiful indie rock from Frightened Rabbit and laptop-folk from James Yuill and his loop pedal. Set across a prolific number of venues in London’s East End, Concrete and Glass politely asked purveyors of art and music in the impressively comprehensive programme to ‘please try to venture beyond your comfort zone’.

This wasn’t difficult given the magnificent job the organisers had done on the line-up. On Thursday Gigwise discovered two of the more promising acts to appear on our musical radar for several months. We started the evening with the enveloping, lazy psychedelia of The Oscillation in 93 Feet East. Though the turn-out left a little to be desired, those in attendance felt privy to an extended and unusually polished jam session rather than a performance. We clung to the edges of the dark venue like the luminous spotted visuals, which were handmade by a boy with a bowl of water over a coloured light. Saxophones and basslines swirled around the magnetic presence of vocalist Demian Castellanos, each song underlaid by a silken, steady rhythm that underpinned the wandering melodies of lengthy tracks.

Over at Old Blue Last, Errors concocted electronic hypnotism of a different variety. It was almost impossible to get into the tiny upstairs venue, but those with the foresight to get a place ahead of the queues witnessed wonky electro-pop with an edginess Foals can only dream about. This critically lauded Glasgow four-piece meld angular guitar riffs a la Battles over sustained keyboard counter melodies, like a more commercially concerned Mogwai. They ended on the delayed, glitchy keyboard refrain and buzzing bass of ‘Mr Milk’, all smiles and substance where their contemporaries rely on hype and frosty pretentiousness.

Back in the Old Blue the following day, Gigwise is just in time to grab a pint and catch the closing folk-rock cries of Kid Harpoon’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’. The obvious youth of the diminuitive plaid-clad figure of Kid Harpoon making his way from the stage still manages to surprise, considering his distinctive gravelly vocal style and epic acoustic talent.

It is Lykke Li that Gigwise turns to to kick off the weekend over at Café 1001. The program hails her as ‘the next big thing’, whatever that might mean, but she keeps us waiting some twenty minutes longer than expected, apparently due to illness. She is dizzyingly illuminated once on stage, her recorded hip-hop-pop moulded into new sound-shapes by added keyboards and crashing cymbals, whilst her body buckles its way through polished choreography. It comes off a little try-hard, but is carried by the strength of Lykke Li’s songwriting – ‘Little Bit’, ‘Dance Dance Dance’ and ‘I’m Good, I’m Gone’ are pop gems that can absorb a little too much lipsticked pouting and still stick in the head long after the set.

For the darker and cooler musical underground, Cargo’s dank and windowless arches host the height of Brooklyn brilliance – TV On The Radio. It seems the perfect pinnacle to a refined art-school line-up. Vocalist Tunde Adebimpe and multi-instrumentalist/producer David Andrew Sitek rarely grace this side of the Atlantic with their genre-elusive musical melting-pot of hip-hop, electro and punk. This is their first performance in the UK for nearly two years, and the turn-out evidences how much they’ve been missed.

We gather, pinned against each other, stepped on and shoved, with nothing to do except submerse ourselves in the haunting rumble of dystopic guitar fuzz and delicately pitched falsetto. Though the majority of the crowd are crushed and clearly off their faces, TV On The Radio still manage to get them clapping cross-rhythms before the first song is out. It’s testimony to their cult status and magnetically soulful songwriting that so many stick out the set despite the conditions. Adebimpe suggests we make ‘lateral moves’ rather than shoving each other forward, but with the seductively suicidal ‘Dreams’ most of us are at a loss to make any conscious movement at all, and merely sway, squashed against those surrounding us and subsumed by the comforting intelligence of the music.

It is the wonky techno of James Holden at Plastic People that provides our musical outro to the evening. Border Community’s finest plays in an underground pit, in near pitch darkness, with no fancy visuals needed to enhance the mesmerising polish of his intricately placed electronic beats.

Gigwise might not have made it to the art exhibitions, or have managed to witness more than a fraction of the innovative and intelligent musicianship showcased at this two day event, but, unlike from other London day festivals, we don’t come away feeling cheated. A well-written and simply presented programme makes even the most esoteric musical acts seem both accessible and enticing, while venue-hopping is better-accomplished with the help of a good map and pre-released schedule. While Gigwise regretfully misses the non-musical, the quality and scope of entertainment available at Concrete and Glass makes this an event that will keep people coming back for more ‘extraordinary stuff’, year after year.

Gig Review: Jonquil, The Shakespeare, Sheffield 26/9/08

2008-10-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

See original article here

We’re driving round some kind of industrial wasteland in Sheffield. (This isn’t hard – there’s apparently quite a lot of it.) The taxi driver’s lost, deep in conversation with his satnav, on which he’s spelt our destination wrong, anyway. My gig-going accomplice is telling me about prostitutes and drug-dens and where not to go after dark in the steel city as boarded up grey blurs in my outervision.

Defeat seems imminent, and we’re about to give up and head for the shiny lights of the centre, when a little lit-up pub miraculously appears, with a couple of kids sporting skinnies and shoes smoking on the doorstep. After paying the driver about half of what it says on the meter for the pleasure of the picturesque detour, we order double gins in the sudden noisy glow of The Shakespeare. It’s busy here considering the out of the way location, a concentric hub of plaid shirts and painted eyes that seems to do trade by word of mouth among a fairly clique-y clientele.

Tonight the kids are out for one of the most promisingly obscure faux-folk bands of the moment, Jonquil. Faux-folk because, having warned the aforementioned accomplice that he was in for a few hours of ‘experimental folk’ (for want of a better description) and watched him guzzle several pints in trepid anticipation, Jonquil got about five minutes into their set before he turned to me, toe-tapping, and happily admitted, “they’re pretty good, not too weirdy beardy at all.”

Genre-tagging is something Jonquil have been avoiding for a while now, with frontman Hugo Manuel confessing in a recent interview that the band would rather be associated with rock than folk. Live, it’s obvious why. There’s a spreading energy about each of their tracks, rooted in organically created sounds, but multi-layed and building so that the jubilant swell of their music is neither twiddly nor twee, but kind of noisily cacophonous and catchy. To achieve this they fill the tiny stage with band members (all six of them) and instruments that most rock acts would never have heard of.

Tonight Hugo’s vocals are a little shaky to begin with, as he struggles with falsetto in ‘Sudden Sun’, but he soon warms to the task at hand. Hypnotic unison vocals in the humourously entitled ‘Babe, so why no,’ contrast with the utterly mesmerising orchestration of new track, ‘Parasol’. Jonquil end with the creeping twinkle and bespoke beauty of an extended intro to ‘Lions’, their best known song and the title track from their recently re-released album. It’s a wonderful moment, encompassing oom-pa accordion propulsion with sea-shanty chanting, inciting infectious grinning in the audience in the poky venue.

This talented Oxford six-piece have lyrics that transport to musical Narnias, and instrumentation that colours these landscapes with tumescent exuberance, with solid melodic cheer as its motivation. Tonight, though, with the unresolved ending of ‘Lions’, our out-of-town excursion is over, and we’re stumbling down the stairs and out the door, for the directionless, uphill wander back to the city lights.

Feature: Branded

2008-09-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

This week it’s been Levi’s ‘5 Night Revue’, showcasing the best in new and unsigned talent as deemed suitable for the Hoxton clique, by Levi’s (who obviously know exactly what they’re talking about, being jeans manufacturers…)

The line-ups for these nightly Shoreditch showcases have been fairly predictable, with those that made it down to the east end being treated to the raucous promise of recent school-finishers Bombay Bicycle Club, handsome electro duo Iglu and Hartley, and eclectic toy-pop illuminators Metronomy, to name but a few.

Levi’s have been putting on their ‘Ones To Watch’ for over four years now with some success – past winners have included The View (thank you, Levis), Kooks and The Fratellis. Oh, and The Natives. (The Natives who?!)

But it’s clear that not many in the LOTW alumni can lay claim to much more that flash-in-the-pan first album success, followed by a disproportionate trajectory into second album obscurity – so is it really worth their while?

When we asked the Bombay boys about their decision to get involved in the Levi’s sponsored event, their unanimous response was, “We get free jeans!”

The attractive Levi’s promoters, however, confessed that they’re already looking for new ideas of ways to get new music out to the kids, without the stigma of corporate sponsorship. “This has been done now,” one PR said, “we need to change the concept, find new ways to do the same thing.”

The Branding Stigma is a problem that Jack White’s also suffered from this week after his Bond-theme collaboration with Alicia Keys was pilfered by Coca Cola for prime time TV advertising. “Jack White was commissioned by Sony Pictures to write a theme song for the James Bond film 'Quantum Of Solace', not for Coca Cola,” his management proclaimed in a statement.

Begging the question, is it possible to gain and keep commercial success in the modern music industry without being tainted by the grubby-fingered, money-hungry lure of branding? Answers on a postcard…

***********************************************************************************
All this talk of branding leads us nicely to the recent Converse ad campaign, in which lurid billboards flanking the main stages at major British music festivals and corporate-sponsored gigs proclaim: “Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive.”

Now, I understand that Converse have long been the footwear of choice for the subculturally preoccupied masses. From Kurt Cobain’s endorsement in the mid-nineties (and his posthumous Cobain Converse released earlier this year) to M.I.A and Karen O in the most recent ‘Connectivity’ ads, the colourful classics have carried a long-standing reputation for giving their owner a certain understated yet irrefutable veneer of ‘cool’. Even when they were uncool, Converse were cool. They’re the closest thing alterna-kids have to Chanel.

But just when did it become possible to convince the large majority of converse-sporting gig- and festival-goers that the star on their footwear means that they are, in fact, the unsuspecting vanguard of an impending cultural revolution?

Has everyone forgotten that Nike has owned Converse since they saved the brand from liquidation in 2003?

Comfy and colourful they might be, but nonconformist and original Converse certainly are not…

Gig Review: Bombay Bicycle Club – Levi’s Ones To Watch @ Macbeth, Shoreditch 21/9/09

2008-09-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

See original article here

There’s an art to fitting in in Hoxton, one that involves wearing silly clothes and looking disinterested, or mean, or both. Beyond this, the insatiable need for the musical new, unsigned and undiscovered hangs heavy over the vintage-clad vanguard of Shoreditch, as the marker of those who have it and those who don’t. For over four years now, Levi’s Ones To Watch have made it their job to sift through the up-and-coming in indie and present to the impressionable east end with their own special ‘fit for consumption’ seal of approval. Never one to be taken in by marketing tricks, Virtual Festivals went down to the first in their 2008 ‘Five Day Revue’ to see if the music stands up to the hype...

First up, Sky Larkin’s set contains a handful of fairly same-old fodder that has some kids dancing, and others looking especially disinterested, even for Hoxton. Frontwoman Katie, a little breathless behind dark hair, has perfected the slightly-off-key-at-all-times indie-girl vocal in the Los Campesinos/Jemina Pearl vein. One punter is overheard saying “she’s not even hot.” There are those that happily subscribe to the splashy generic indie-pop of their more recognisable singles, but on the basis of this performance, this Leeds-based trio have some way to go before they’re worth watching again any time soon.

This is especially apparent when Bombay Bicycle Club take to the tiny stage some moments later. Though barely out of school, their music belies their youth as both commercially astute and intelligently created, complementing the savvy verdure with which they execute their set. Two guitars allow them to embellish standard guitar progressions with alternately jangling and drifting riffs, adding a glinting playfulness and glossy texture to hook-friendly melodies, as in ‘How Are You’ and ‘Ghosts’. The latter of these encompasses dystopic guitar work and the ethereal shimmer of keyboard effects, that provides the ground from which wandering counter-melodies and splashy cymbals emerge.

Bombay Bicycle Club’s ability to goad the audience through changes in tempo, snapping back into percussion-led riffs with enviable precision, strikes of the infectious energy of early Maccabees gigs. Meanwhile their sound combines double-guitar effects suggestive of a very British take on The Strokes, or the synthetic keyboard textures of Tokyo Police Club. But it is the ethereal, quivering vocal of frontman Jack Steadman that distinguishes them, complementing hebetic lyrics that are endearingly innocuous rather than juvenile or ignorant. Yet to record or release an LP, the London four-piece rattle off a polished performance ending on ‘The Hill’ to a jubiliant hand-clap reception. And though they are bent double over their guitars as they dance around each other on stage, Bombay Bicycle Club cannot conceal their delight at the unexpected, word-perfect enthusiasm of their audience, who no longer look so apathetic. Ones to watch, indeed.

London Airwaves Festival - 19/9/08

2008-09-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

Music festivals, as the mainstay of the revelrous masses, have come a long way in the last five years. The well-worn formula of a long weekend dedicated to rural rebelliousness of the most extreme and exhausting variety has become pummelled, condensed and morphed into newly enticing manifestations. One such variety, the urban one-day event, has become vastly popular, this year especially, as a way of getting some of the best in new and smaller acts onto a festival bill for just a fraction of typical prices for the punter.

Airwaves is but one example of the one-day festivals that have emerged in this climate of live music diversification. Planned to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Iceland’s veteran Airwaves Festival, which has featured a range of high-calibre headline acts including everyone from Klaxons to The Kills, Airwaves branded itself as ‘an all-day extravaganza of cutting-edge music and culture’. But the reality of the event was somewhat different. Plagued with entry queues, schedule-clashes and street-level congestion, most ticket-holders were left feeling more than a little frustrated at a line-up that promised top-end entertainment, without much regard for the practicalities involved.

Even for those who managed to rock up straight from work, the eight venues earmarked for the night stretched right across London’s trendy East End – from Hoxton to Brick Lane – a fair distance on foot. Gigwise spoke to one girl who, in a fix about to get from Metronomy’s 9.30pm set at Hoxton Bar and Grill to Young Knives at Vibe in Brick Lane by 11pm, jumped in a taxi, only to find herself paying an extortionate £18 fare at the end of the five minute drive. For newcomers to the East End the risk of getting lost in a back lane and missing nearly every act on the bill was a very real possibility.

As such, gig-goers found themselves pigeon-holed into one or two similarly-located venues. For Gigwise, this meant missing the illuminated electro-pop innovation of Metronomy and the entrancing sequenced electronica of A. Human so that we were in the right place to see Young Knives at 11pm, which rather unfortunately meant suffering the poker-faced pouting of These New Puritans for a good half a set. Their heavily punctuated art-rock was lost on the dingy confines of the upstairs at Vibe, where clean lines of sound blurred and fuzzed into the humid central space of the sparsely populated venue, rendering the set messy-sounding and underwhelming.

The same sound issues plagued Young Knives’ subsequent set. With a band like Young Knives, however, personality alone is enough to counter technical imperfections. The unlikely-looking trio, done up in an assortment of clownishly large trousers, oversized specs and handlebar moustaches, played a set of overdone enthusiasm and unpretentious, commercial hooks and harmonies that induced a sudden bout of joyous, if not slightly odd, dancing on the floor. Between songs, lead vocalist Harry Darthall spouted comedic one-liners of varying profanity, at one point declaring, “The only fucking reason we’re here is because we get to go to Iceland –we’ll send you a postcard!” But their live set belied their proclaimed apathy, characterised largely by monosyllabic staccato nonsense held together by impeccable rhythm. They ended on a cacophonous blend of vocal and distorted guitar that was somewhat lost on the Shoreditch audience, who, in various states of inebriation, was only vaguely listening.

Last minute line-up addition, Digitalism, raised the festival spirit of the evening with their DJ set opposite, at 93 Feet East. The venue was soon bulging at the exits as people squeezed their way onto the dancefloor, overspilling onto the main stage and infesting tables and chairs in a jubilant and unrestrained display of nocturnal festivity. Musically, though, Digitalism offered little by way of interest, instead choosing to utilise their undoubted talent to mix crowd-pleasing fodder like Run D.M.C. and Nirvana into more enticing digital dance-numbers. It went down well, but critically did little but cement Digitalism as the poor man’s Justice in the electro pecking order.

For those still standing at the witching hour, there was little to do but trek to Hewitt Street carpark for an organised rave. Organised being the operative word, as kids queued in their fancy outfits to get through the barriers, queued for drinks tokens, queued for drinks, and then sat huddled in corners by corrugated metal fences, looking fashionably bored. We took the safer option, and headed for home.

On paper Airwaves and its urban festival cousins look like the ideal way of getting new music out to the consuming masses in one dense evening line-up. But in practice, the implications of switching venues eight times in a night to see just a fraction of what’s on offer left most punters wishing they’d spent their twenty quid on a proper gig, instead. Unlike Young Knives, we didn’t even get a trip to Iceland for the trouble…