It’s odd, but that knowledge makes it difficult to actually absorb a performance objectively. When we recorded our Toad Session with him earlier in the day he was as charming and accommodating as he has always been when I’ve dealt with him, but he was feeling ill, and after travelling up from Manchester had already recorded a BBC Radio Scotland session before our own, so he was pretty bloody tired as well.

Had I been entirely without this knowledge I would probably have just sat back and enjoyed the performance – a fantastic one, albeit perhaps a little less electrifying than his mesmerising turn at Homegame this year.

But with this knowledge it was strange to watch him play the intensely personal songs we all know from the awesome Last of the Country Gentlemen, all the while wondering if his mind was really on the material, or if he was just feeling absolutely fucked after a punishing year of touring, in which he has played hundreds of gigs, dozens of festivals and any number of internet sessions for even the most no-mark of bloggers (such as, for example, myself). His between-song chat, despite being as entertaining as ever, only reinforced this because he was clearly not all that happy with his own performance because of his illness.

I did ask him this at the Toad Session itself, and he did suggest that he feels it is time to move on and perhaps leave this material alone for a little.  Because it is beautiful, but it is dark and intense as well, and as such I suppose it must have a natural shelf life, if just for the performer himself, and his ability to engage with the songs in a spirit which will allow him to sing them with the depth, meaning and commitment they require.

Mind you, the other impression gleaned from one successful and one aborted attempt to interview the man is that the emotions confessed in these songs are never really that far from the surface, so no matter how shite he feels, it doesn’t seem that hard for him to drag it all back to the foreground and then out to the audience.

Certainly despite his protestations, this was another great show.  His command of silence exceeds almost anyone else I have ever seen, and the barest brush of the guitar strings is allowed to dissipate out into the air, making it almost impossible to not pay full attention.

Consequently as Woman When I’ve Raised Hell and Sweetheart, I Ain’t Your Christ fill the venue it is a rapt and silent Oran Mor which stares back up at him in silent awe.  Even with the flu his sheer personality fills the place, along with the silences he plays so well, and I suppose that’s how he can switch so swiftly from laughing and joking between songs, to suddenly dipping once more into the heartbreakingly serious music he makes, with the audience and the man himself seemingly oblivious of the tremendous emotional gear-change we’ve all just made.

He’s a curious fellow, that’s for sure.  And possibly Man of the Year for 2o11, in a musical sense.

Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb

He was preceded on stage by The Wee Rogue, whose hunched playing style and gentle vocals we rather lovely.  Kittens, I wasn’t so sure about, I must be honest.  They were nice to listen to, particularly in the intimate environment of this particular gig, but I am not all that sure I would feel compelled to explore further.

The intimate environment was no accident.  The Iso Lounge is a small place, upstairs from the Isobar in Leith, with plenty of sofas and a nice, relaxed feel to it.  It was formerly the home of the much missed Leith Tape Club, and on Friday it was absolutely packed, taking the term ‘intimate’ to a subtly different level to that which was perhaps intended.

To reinforce the atmosphere he wanted to create, Drew also decided to play the entire gig without any sort of electrical assistance.  No amps, no mics, no new fangled-instruments.  In fact his own set, bar a couple of songs where he used an Indian instrument called a Shruti Box (which seemed like a wee harmonium in a handbag, pretty much), was entirely unaccompanied.  There wasn’t even any sign of the signature loop pedal he generally uses to layer vocals and build what most would recognise as the Wounded Knee ‘sound’.

I know a lot of people might find that kind of thing a little over-bearing and intense – just a little too in your face for those who want to come to a gig to relax, have a pint and enjoy themselves.  In fact, even if you’d told me in advance what the gig was going to be like, I think I might have been a little sceptical too. Tell you what though, it was bloody amazing.

Picking songs at random by inviting guests to ‘have a rummage in his bawbag’ for a numbered ping-pong ball, Drew perhaps got a little lucky with the fates, because the set was the perfect combination of folky and contemporary, sentimental and amusing.  Some song were singalongs (an invitation I declined, for the sake of my own dignity and everyone’s enjoyment), some were mesmerising laments.  There was an REM cover in there, versions of The Old Main Drag and A Pair of Brown Eyes, and a good mix of traditional songs and original stuff. I don’t know if the flow of the evening was down to the luck of the balls, or just the nature of the mix of songs he made available, but whatever the reason, it worked fantastically.

It helps that the man himself is a natural compere as well, chatting naturally, amusingly and with a very Scottish sense of self-deprecation between songs.  It was a favourable crowd, of course, and the perfect place to try something like this, but I was enormously impressed at someone able to so brilliantly keep a crowd, including myself, in the palm of his hand for so long and to produce such an absolutely mesmerising performance with nothing more than his own voice with which to do it.

I have still to entirely find a way of enjoying Wounded Knee’s recorded material, I have to confess and, frustratingly, this does kind of include House Music.  Particularly after enjoying this show so much I find that fact to be both annoying and a little bit perplexing.  Nevertheless, you can make up your own minds on that one, because the Bandcamp embed will let you preview the album in its entirety.

In any case, this live show was bloody brilliant – one of the best things I’ve seen this year.

It was similar last night actually, in the sense that having gone along with Ian, we ended up bumping into loads of local music people. Clearly something about the Twilight Sad excites music people.

Before we get into that though, fucking hell, Adam Stafford! Now, I enjoyed his latest album Build a Harbour Immediately, but live was something else. And, without wishing to hurt anyone’s feelings, I can’t understand how it wasn’t utter shit.

This is a man building up his songs with looped and layered beatboxing.  He adds just a little guitar here and there, but for the most part the actual substance of the music is built from layer upon layer of… and I am going to have to say it again here… beatboxing!  To explain myself, beatboxing is a little like rapping, in the sense that the mere mention of it gives me the fucking twitches. I am sure that in the right environment, done by the right people in the right context, it can be awesome, but it is very much Not For Me.  I even get the cold shakes when Tom Waits mentions beatboxing, and he is a musical deity who can do exactly what he pleases, as far as I am concerned.

So if you had described a man in a shirt and tie layering (and I kid you not) bow-chkka-wow-wow and deedy-n-dee-diddy and stuff like that, there is nothing I can picture being made with those ingredients that isn’t utterly embarrassing, unlistenable shit.

But he was brilliant.

As I said, looking at the actual mechanics of what Stafford does, it shouldn’t be great, but it really was.  It helped that he played it absolutely straight, but more than anything, despite what they were assembled from, the songs themselves were absolutely great. The performance was fantastic too.  The whole thing was fucking awesome.  I have no idea how he did it. I have got to go back and listen to that record again.  And I am damned if I am not going to see him again tonight, with Jonnie Common at the Electric Circus.*

Adam Stafford – Shot Down You Summer Wannabes

Anyhow, now for the Twilight Sad.  A new bass player and the added keyboard ensure that they sound a little different these days, but the cacophonous wall of ear-blistering noise hasn’t changed.  Neither has James Graham’s impassioned howl.

Watching Graham front this band is wont to give you the impression that songs were written by the devil, and the only he could think of sneaking them into heaven is to send them up through the soles of Graham’s shoes, twisting round his spine until he is so possessed he tilts his head back and bellows them into the heavens.

His tortured convulsions and menacing, delirious and yet oddly blank stare embody the effect on the listener.  This isn’t dance music, obviously enough, but it has a spiritual side to it.  It’s hypnotic, visceral and overwhelming.  Tonight, like the first time I saw them, all I could do was stand directly in the path of the deluge and accept the impact, tilt my head towards the sky and let them do their thing.

I do have to confess however that when, towards the end of the set, they played a handful of songs from their incredible debut album Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, I was reminded of the fact that they have yet to really do anything that has thrilled me quite as much as those early songs.  Mind you, live is often not really the right setting to judge new material, and with their promises that the new album is going to be unlike the previous two I find myself genuinely intrigued to hear what they are up to now.

The Twilight Sad – That Summer at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy

The Twilight Sad – I Became a Prostitute

The Twilight Sad – Kill it in the Morning

*Cue much I Told You So-ing from Peenko and Ayetunes.

Back when he first released Moving Up Country I was pretty damn impressed, but when he then followed it up with the outstandingly beautiful Just Beyond the River a couple of years later I was entirely smitten.

For all that, however, it’s now been a good few years since I’ve seen him play, despite both he and I being at pretty much every Homegame festival for the last few years.  As with a lot of locally based artists (in particular the Fence Collective heroes, who tend to pack venues out) I’ve tended to skip his performances in favour of bands I knew less well and who might offer something a little new in a slightly less suffocatingly busy room.

Eventually, I ended up saying ‘yeah, but I can see James Yorkston anytime’ so often that I got to the stage where, almost accidentally, I hadn’t seen him play live in about three years.  Foolish boy!

I got to the venue a little late, and only caught the last few songs of The Pictish Trail’s support set.  He sounded really good with a full band. I saw Fence compatriot King Creosote play with a full band the other week at the Liquid Room, and to be honest, it didn’t really do it for me.

KC’s songs are a little more edgy, and the full band seems to smooth off those edges a little too much.  I’d say about ninety percent of his stuff is at its best with absolutely minimal instrumentation, so with a couple of exceptions the full band just added an unnecessary and fairly undistinguished pop rock sound to songs which are at their most captivating when they seem on the verge of either falling apart or just evaporating into the ether altogether.

The Pictish Trail’s stuff, on the other hand, is a little more robust and, little as I have to confess to having seen, seemed to rise to the full band treatment rather than be swallowed by it.

I have actually seen James Yorkston with a full band – a small drumkit, a piano and upright bass – but on this occasion he kicked things off solo and when he did add instrumentation it was fiddle, clarinet and harp, rather than a typical ‘band’.

His songs seem to have the countryside in them, with a gentle rise and fall, rolling fluctuations which recall either the swell of a calm sea or the modest yet lovely Fife landscape.

A friend of mine who was less entranced found that the set failed to hold his attention for the entirety of the evening, and with similar, soothing oscillations at the heart of most of the songs I can understand how that might happen.  In that respect a drummer and bass player to make an appearance here and there might perhaps have been able to break up what was a relatively uniform pace, and give the odd song a little more bombast or sense of urgency.

For my part, however, I thought it was fucking lovely.  Yorkston himself is an accomplished enough performer to easily hold the attention of the Queen’s Hall by himself and, in the accompanying hush, the surroundings lent even more gravitas to the emotional heft of his songs.

He can punctuate them with humour at times – in fact that seems to almost compulsory for miserable music in Scotland, lest you are accused of taking yourself just a bit too seriously – but for the most part his songs are weighty and serious.

This is the kind of thing X-Factor devotees might write off as depressing or boring, but as you will know all too well by now, it is the kind of music I find more rewarding than almost any other.  There is something indulgent and enriching about listening to slow, lovely morose songs and letting them wash over you.

Maybe it’s the luxury of being able to appreciate the intensity of the feelings without the burden of having to bear the damage.  Maybe that is a significant part of the appeal of sad music in general. The makeup of his band add a little to this, giving the songs a slightly more elaborate, intricate feel, reinforcing the impression that even the most intense of feelings are there to be welcomed and embraced, be they happy or sad.

Were I listening to James Yorkston’s albums I would do it late at night, when it’s cold, there are candles lit and no-one else around.  Despite a full Queen’s Hall, that is exactly what this gig felt like, somehow.  Bloody lovely.

James Yorkston & the Athletes – St. Patrick

James Yorkston – Tortoise Regrets Hare

Well well well, this was a bloody great event. Alan Lomax, for those of you who don’t know, is (to borrow from his own institution’s language) considered to be America’s foremost folklorist.  In normal English, he is a guy who went out and made hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of field recordings, documenting the folk culture of communities across the States, and later further afield.

The event at Word of Mouth just off Leith Walk on Wednesday was a screening of selected clips of unseen footage from later journeys where he was able not only to record the music, but to shoot accompanying video as well. It was hosted by Screen Bandita and thoughtfully introduced by Nathan Salsburg, who works for Cultural Equity, the association charged with preserving and disseminating Lomax’s work.

Now, I went to see the Sigur Ros film INNI a while back, and in all honesty I thought it was pretty fucking boring.  I enjoyed the music, and the visuals were nice, but that is a long, long way from being a compelling film.  I sometimes think that when people make movies like that that they are woefully underestimating the craft of a film-maker.  And, actually, of a good, brutal editor, which seems to me to be just about the most important role of the lot.

So, I was a little apprehensive when this started off and it swiftly became apparent that it really was just a collection of songs, rather like a stream of YouTube clips, rather than a single film in its own right.  There was no need to be nervous though, because the diversity of music and the fascination of some of the performances made sure this was utterly compelling from start to finish.

I was struck by so many aspects of these recordings, and I don’t want to write an epic here, but for the sake of it I did want to mention a few things.

1. The difference between the performances when being filmed and when simply being recorded seemed immediately obvious.  People acted up considerably for the cameras, in ways I strongly doubt they would have for someone with a tape recorder.  I’m am not saying this is a bad thing however, and when you are documenting folk traditions and folk music, showing the role of that music in the communities which created it made the feel you got for the whole infinitely richer.

2. Commercial and folk approaches to music are at pretty direct odds.

2.1 The old lie peddled by entertainment conglomerates that if we don’t buy their records then we will lose great art is clearly bollocks.  People make art because they are compelled to do so and they gain a great deal from doing so.

You can be sure that pretty much no-one covered in this series was making a penny, but the music was stunning, and it was pretty clearly a joy based on participation, not remuneration.  I am not saying that artists shouldn’t be entitled to their share of commercial exploitation of their music, but if people cannot make it commercially viable, we will still have plenty of great art.

2.2 The way copyright is being used to prevent sharing, copying, remixing and reworking is clearly and obviously detrimental to the fundamental culture of music.  Stopping Rihanna from nicking someone kid’s killer riff and warbling over the top of it without compensating them is a compelling case, but many of the rest are not.

Listen to the following clip of Little Margaret – these particular lyrics occur paraphrased and in fragments all over the place in folk music. This makes the music richer, not poorer. If you clamp down on this too much you throttle the creative process.

3. So many old people! The folk world may not be all that ageist, but the pop world is, despite the recent surfeit of ‘heritage acts’. I know wrinklies won’t sell Heat For Music NME quite as well, but the way the voice changes with age (and I mean proper old age, not just middle age) was wonderfully clear watching these performances.

The old voices we saw wavered with fragility or burst forth with surprising strength, but they all had tremendous character and impact.  More old fuckers  in music please.  No Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Turds, and not another cynical reunion back-slapping circle jerk-a-thon, but properly old people singing beautiful songs.

4. The ‘over-supply’ of music is not a new thing.  This is a common whinge of people who are sadly desperate to be an authority on All Of Music, and also of those who feel the need to be told what to listen to by experts, but honestly, grow some fucking balls, both groups of you.  But looking at these films, there is clearly music absolutely everywhere in these communities.

Now, clearly there are more ways to express your creativity and urge for social and cultural participation these days, but that would imply that, infinite wastelands of the internet or not, there should be less music not more.  It’s just that back then we rarely, if ever, had access to the grass roots community level music from a hundred miles away, so we got on with enjoying what was going on in our own communities, even if it was no more worthy than an old dude blowing a tune on a half-empty Pepsi bottle.

So stop worrying about listening to everything, it makes you look a bit silly. Enjoy what’s happening around, whether your community is geographical or virtual or a combination of the two. Yeah, you’re going to miss out on some stuff, dry your eyes.

5. Last, but very much not least: fuck me, some of this was bloody amazing. Remind me again, why does anyone actually watch the X-Factor? The Alan Lomax Archive profile already has seventy-eight videos uploaded to YouTube, so go and watch them instead.  And thanks so much to Screen Bandita (whose mailing list I recommend you sign up for here) and to Nathan Salsburg for an amazing evening.

Malky from eagleowl asked if a friend of his could come along to Rob St. John’s album launch the other week and take some pictures.  Well he did, and despite the lighting being a bit of a challenge, they’ve turned out beautifully.  The gentleman in question is Iain Stewart, whose website is here, and here is a small selection of pics from Pilrig the other week. Thanks – they look fantastic!

The gig itself was a Halloween night presented by the relatively new Edinburgh promoter John Truckasaurus, who we collaborated with in moving Viking Moses from his own bill to the lineup for the Rob St. John album launch.  This time he was working with an Edinburgh University-based fanzine The Edinburgh Rascal, and whatever they’re doing, they seem to be doing it right, because Henry’s was bloody busy for a Monday night.

Anyhow, first up were a band called Viennetta, who were pretty decent.  I’ll confess that even though I largely enjoyed it, I wouldn’t describe it as any more than a positive start.  The guitars were strongly reminiscent of The Sound of Young Scotland-era Edinburgh, which is a good thing, but very much smoothed off by the subsequent years of indie-pop, and I guess I wished they’d either be a lot more awkward and challenging, or just go the other way and write a bunch of really catchy pop songs.  Either way, they’re a new band, with more than enough time for development, and I certainly won’t be judging them on the basis of one gig this early in proceedings.

Hearts!Attack followed next, and I am fan of this band, but it didn’t really come across all that well live, unfortunately. Initially the sound guy struggled a bit, but after that the melodies still didn’t quite manage to extricate themselves from the rattle.  The songs I already knew sounded great, because I knew what I was listening for, but it was a bit like listening to music on an old car stereo – fine if you know it, but not the best way to get a feel for something new.

Hearts!attack – If You Were Dead

After a couple of tepid responses, however, I really enjoyed The Lovely Eggs. If I am being honest, I can find them unbearably twee and cutesy on record.  There comes a point where the kookiness is so extreme that it seems a little forced and I get to the point where I find myself wondering if the band actually have anything to say, or if they’ve just been half-arsing around for the last however-many years.

Live, it’s got a very different feel, however.  The guitar snarls a shitload more, and Holly wails at you like a punk-rock banshee – well,  half the time anyway, the playful ingenue is still there somewhere.  Live, they’re a punk two piece, and the music just has a punch about it which I have yet to really encounter in their recorded stuff.  “Don’t look at me I don’t like it” takes on a whole different complexion when it’s being screeched at you by a short blond lass in a red dress making her guitar squeal like she’d embedded one of her heels in its hand.

The Lovely Eggs – Don’t Look at Me (I Don’t Like It)

Viking Moses – I am really pleased Viking Moses rather randomly turned up on this bill, because he was absolutely excellent at Rob St. John’s album launch last Saturday, but I felt a bit weird reviewing one of my own gigs, so it’s nice to have the chance to put that right here.

Once again, Brendon was brilliant.  His songs have that old fire-and-brimstone gothic folk feel to them, and the wild mood swings of his delivery, from a tender croon to a distressed wail, keep you in a suitably ambiguous sense of uncertainty.  He doesn’t seem to sing songs so much as he seems to simply think in music, and when he lets it spill out, this is what we get. It was another performance which was both intense and whimsical, and full of charm.

Seth Faergolzia – I know almost nothing of Faergolzia’s previous band, Dufus, beyond the reverence in which they are held by certain friends of mine. I am definitely going to be putting an end to that ignorance though, because this was fantastic.  A little like Viking Moses and Jeffrey Lewis, the personal charisma of the man himself was absolutely central to the performance.

He varied from the sentimental to the outright bizarre, at times reminding me more than a little of Fife-based Fence hero Gummi Bako.  There were acoustic guitar songs, supplemented with a thumping kick-drum when real emphasis was needed, and a couple of absolutely masterful monologues, delivered over a pre-recorded track of wonky electronica.  The best way I can think to describe these tracks is to try and conjure a slightly woozy chip-tuner after a few too many beers, slurring a half-remembered version of Tom Waits’ Diamonds on My Windshield.

It’s not unusual for people from bands to be kind of cringeworthy when they dip their toes in this kind of territory, but this was absolutely inspired, and by some miracle seemed to fit perfectly with the rest of the acoustic stuff.  And when he ended the set duetting with Jeffrey Lewis on a song called Weird Old Toad… well, it was like I was being personally serenaded!

Jeffrey Lewis – As for the man himself, well I left with something of a guilty conscience actually.  I thought Lewis’ previous album Em Are I was pretty good, but not really much better than that, so I ended up taking my eye of the ball a little as far as his recent stuff goes.

Well he has a new album out now, and although I don’t know it yet, and although he played a considerable number of old songs last night, I realise I have allowed myself to become a little lazy about a fantastic artist.

Having seen Withered Hand put in a truly excellent performance at the Queen’s Hall on Monday, the comparisons are pretty clear: a talent to be gulp-inducingly touching and laugh-out-loud funny in the same song, and to base their lyrics so heavily on pathos without ever seeming self-indulgent or self-pitying clearly applies to both artists.

The band switched seamlessly from a wistful sway, to frantic lunacy, to playful larking, and in general they neatly reflected the way that Lewis himself seems to have perfected that way of dropping all sorts of thoughts into his music, whilst always maintaining an odd unity of feeling, from the random spoken word histories of Marco Polo set to a cartoon slideshow, to exhortations not to waste your life as time ticks away from you, to a joyous (and recurring) cover of the Bob Seger System’s 2+2=?

And somehow the tangents on which they embarked never seemed incoherent or messy, it just all fit well together, presumably because deep down the entire project is based pretty honestly on the character of Lewis himself, and however much this kind of honesty in music is rarely ever entirely unguarded, his work seems to have a kind of frank integrity and gentle humour which lets him pull off things other artists could never get away with without seeming just a little too intense or self-regarding.

Being one of the best lyricists around and having the ability to write a seemingly endless supply of hummable tunes presumably helps too.

Jeffrey Lewis – You Don’t Have to Be a Scientist to Do Experiments on Your Own Heart

Jeffrey Lewis & the Junkyard – Roll Bus Roll

There were so many shite puns I nearly used for this title (PAWSome!, PAWS; the BAWS! and other abominations) but I showed some unusual restraint in the end, which will surprise some.  It certainly surprised me.

This lot surprised me too, I have to confess.  I’ve seen them on a few hipster-friendly bills around Edinburgh and perhaps because of that have showed a rather lazy lack of urgency about getting to see them play, despite hearing good things from reliable places.

They were second on the bill at Sneaky Pete’s as part of Wide Days‘ evening pub crawl through three of Edinburgh’s better known music venues, and fuck me they were absolutely brilliant.  My friends Andy and Paddy from Gerry Loves Records more or less shoved me out of the way to get down the front, and while I smirked at them before taking up a position a couple of rows back, I was soon very much eating my words and admitting that they were wholeheartedly in the right on this one.

PAWS do all their recording themselves I believe, and the results are a little patchy.  Sometimes they are brilliant, and sometimes they don’t quite capture the feral energy of the live show, but there’s no shame in that.  There’s many a very experienced and very expensive sound engineer who has failed that particular test, and these guys don’t so much fail as they only manage to achieve sporadic success.

Live, on the other hand, there were no such caveats.  These days I always try to be careful what I say when drunk and excited after a gig, but you can believe me that drunk and excited was very much what I was after seeing this lot.  It’s not musical rocket science: a zeitgeist-pleasing mish-mash of early-nineties American indie rock.  A kind of Pavement goes to Seattle in 1991 kind of a vibe, I suppose you could call it.

The difference is that while many of their contemporaries hide behind a barely-defined wall of guitar noise, this lot made sure that, in amongst the cacophony, there was always a cracking hook somewhere.  If you can, as they can, generate this kind of distorted, furious noise with just enough pop to keep it hugely infectious then I think you are indubitably onto a winner.

This is perhaps where their recorded material and I find ourselves eyeballing one another warily.  If they really push the dirty, overloaded, distorted aesthetic which is there in some of their demos and hugely prevalent in their live show, then they will create music which I certainly will be hopping up and down with excitement to hear.  However, I also sort of think that if they want to make a lot of progress then perhaps cleaning it up a bit might be a more sensible approach.

These guys could create music so dirty and nasty I would probably wet my knickers over it, but in the long run I suppose any manager of theirs would have to soberly advise them not to, because pleasing me is one thing, but I think they have the capacity to have a lot broader appeal than that. For my part, I reckon this lot can get as raucous and as fuzzy and as reckless as they want.  They were loud as fuck on Thursday, all buried vocals and walls of guitar racket, and it was just brilliant.  More please!

PAWS – Miss American Bookworm
 

PAWS – Kim Deal

Website | Downloadable treats from Bandcamp and Soundcloud

It used to be quite a regular occurrence that I would find myself standing alone at a relatively under-attended Cabaret Voltaire gig of a weekend.  They don’t seem to have been doing much gig booking of late so I haven’t actually been there that often in the last couple of years, so it was kind of nostaligic to be standing directly in the middle of the sound system’s sweet spot, just a little bit tipsy and nodding my head in that ‘I refuse to dance because I fucking can’t, alright?’ way that I share with many an indie kid around the world.

The first support, Pilotcan, were decent but Skibunny, who followed them, used a backing track, which is something which really puts me off.  Apart from the fact that it risks turning your band into some sort of self-covering karaoke performance, in this case I honestly didn’t think it was necessary.  They had guitar, bass and drums and I am sure they could have put their songs across perfectly well without the backing track.  Although let’s be honest, I listen to a lot of bands who use pre-programmed beats and samples, so it is a bit hypocritical to criticise these guys for doing what is extremely close to being the same thing. I wasn’t, however, that keen on the set anyway.

Anyhow, Ringo Deathstarr.  Well, they opened pretty much as they intended to go on: with a squall of guitars so loud you could barely even hear the vocals through the racket, never mind actually make them out at all.  This gradually changed, but one thing did not: the sound of heavily distorted, highly fuzzy guitar noise constantly battering surprisingly sprightly pop tunes to a broken and bloody demise.

It’s not an all-out noise assault by any means, at least not in terms of volume; it’s more the thick layer of fuzz which disguises the melody quite significantly.  They do it a different way, but it does remind me of the way their recent tour-mates The Wedding Present actually sound surprisingly melodic in retrospect, when all I heard was a wall of indistinct guitar noise the first time around.

Live, though, it’s just fucking loud and fucking great.  Even the more overtly indie-pop songs, which I am personally less keen on on record, come across brilliantly in a live setting, with that little bit more recklessness and aggression to their delivery.  That loose, ramshackle, pacy delivery is what the show was all about, actually.  The songs come and go thick and fast, and by the end I was just standing there still nodding my head blissfully, not wanting it to stop and wondering when the ringing in my ears would subside.  Brilliant!

Ringo Deathstarr – Imagine Hearts

Ringo Deathstarr – Starrsha

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