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!
This was a bit of an impromptu excursion, I have to confess, and when I realised I’d forgotten my bank card and turned up at Henry’s with no more than a fiver and a handful of coins in my pocket it looked like just a little more planning might have been advisable. But it turned out to be a significant enough handful of coins to pay for a couple of pints, in the end, so disappointment was averted.
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.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Well well well, this was really rather excellent. I went along to an absolutely rammed Third Door last night (you know, that place which used to be Medina, but now has a brand spanking new soundsystem, which is excellent news for Edinburgh gig-goers) for an absolutely cracking three-band bill, and a forceful reminder that I have been rather neglecting Jeffrey Lewis for the last couple of years.
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.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Jeffrey Lewis & the Junkyard – Roll Bus Roll
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Website | Downloadable treats from Bandcamp and Soundcloud
Man oh man I enjoyed this!
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!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Buy from Club AC30 Records.
I just don’t understand it. I mean, I come back from the most amazing musical weekend I think I have ever enjoyed, and instead of being interested and happy for me, when I start telling people about it they get this weird look in their eyes which looks just a little like blind homicidal rage. Even more unusually, this look only seems to really go away when I shush and complain about the bad weather in Edinburgh this time of year. (The weather on Eigg, by the way, was awwwwwesome!)
Anyhow, this is the epitome, in its own quiet way, of the dilemma faced by much of the music industry at the moment. Do you make things smaller and more exclusive, and risk cutting off people who genuinely want to support you and be a part of what you are doing, or do you allow things to grow to the extent where they become unwieldy, lose their magic and you cease to actually find them rewarding yourself? Read the rest of this entry »
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh,
30 August 2010
[Martin Donnelly of The Savings And Loan reviews one of the flagship events from this year's Edge Festival]
“Listen,” she says, “have you gone to any concerts lately?”
“No,” I say, wishing she hadn’t brought this, of all topics, up. “I don’t like live music.”
“Live music?” she asks, intrigued, sipping San Pellegrino water.
“Yeah. You know. Like a band,” I explain, sensing from her expression that I’m saying totally the wrong things. “Oh, I forgot. I did see U2.”
“How were they?” she asks. “I liked the new CD a lot.”
“They were great, just totally great. Just totally . . . ” I pause, unsure of what to say. Bethany raises her eyebrows quizzically, wanting to know more. “Just totally . . . Irish.”
“I’ve heard they’re quite good live,” she says, and her own voice has a light, musical lilt to it. “Who else do you like?”
“Oh you know,” I say, completely stuck. “The Kingsmen. ‘Louie, Louie.’ That sort of stuff.
- Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, p. 236
Here’s a confession: I don’t really like live music; never have. When I was younger and the world was new, the gig represented a perfect excuse to go out drinking and meet my friends, but I’ve found that when you get old and get married those appeals start to wane, and all too often you’re left with unsatisfactory renditions of songs you’d prefer to have heard from the comfort of your own couch, glass of Lagavulin in hand and not another soul in sight. Broadly speaking, when I listen to music I want no interruptions; I want, in the spirit of Greta Garbo, to be alone.
So the essential live experience itself (“two-three-FOUR”) has seldom done much for me, especially when I’m intimate with the band in question. Despite this lack of love for the live thing, I’ve seen more or less all my favourites in concert – Waits, Cohen, Dylan, Eitzel, Wilson, The National, Afghan Whigs – resulting in almost uniform disappointment.
Better by far to go in with no expectations. One of the best gigs I can think of was Yo La Tengo at King Tut’s in Glasgow, probably around 1997. I hadn’t heard anything by them beyond a clutch of tracks on complication albums, and went along, well, to drink with my friends.
I was blown away. Not knowing any of the songs made every moment new, and I was forced to engage with the band on their terms, at face value and without the shadow of preconception. It was a rare encounter; the songs warm and fuzzy, the crowd beatific and beholden.
I had a similar experience with My Bloody Valentine at the Barrowlands in 2008. I know Isn’t Anything and Loveless well, and like them both a lot, but for various reasons I didn’t bother to get a ticket when the shows were announced. Long story short, I got offered one the day beforehand, and for want of anything better to do went along. Again, I was blown away, almost literally this time. My own physical experience existed in stark contrast to the personality vacuum onstage, the sheer sound filling inner and outer space alike. And me, I stood on the sprung dancefloor of the ballroom, eyes closed tight like a goddamn hippy, swaying to the twenty-minute apocalyptic freakout of “You Made Me Realise,” lost for a spell, in music, in the moment.
This, of course, is the exception and not the rule. But on the rare occasions when it occurs, it makes me think about the nature of the beats.
Sonic Youth’s Confusion is Sex has as its sleevenote an essay written by Kim Gordon for Artforum in 1983, called “I’m Really Scared When I Kill in my Dreams.” In it, Gordon analyses the relationship between the actors in the live rock experience, concluding that “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” I first read that essay about 10 years after it was written, at an impressionable age, and I’ve never forgotten it. People pay to see others believe in themselves, so there’s a weight of obligation on the performer to believe, or to give the illusion of believing…
[P]eople come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment. As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy. Performers appear to be submitting to the audience, but in the process they gain control of the audience’s emotions. They begin to dominate the situation through the awe inspired by their total submission to it.
- Gordon, ibid.
So that, in a nutshell, is what I always think live music ought to be, an intensity it seldom attains.
Anyway, to the matter at hand. My friend Noel from the Attic Lights phoned me on Monday afternoon, saying he had a spare ticket for the Low Anthem, and did I want it. The Low Anthem are the Yo La Tengo de ces jours, in that I’ve liked whatever I’ve heard, but not enough to get anything close to excited about it, excitement becoming a rarer commodity with age. I’d listened (once) to Oh My God Charlie Darwin a few months ago, and thought it pleasant enough stuff. But I call a lot of records that, and I forgot about them. But then I saw a song on TV at the weekend, all huddled around a single microphone in the old-time style, and found it quite, you know, quaint. Appealing, even.
So I took fate at face value, went along to the gig with Noel and the wife, and found myself enjoying it a fair bit. A fair chunk of the crowd, Noel included, were primarily there to see the support act, Avi Buffalo, who are evidently setting the modems alight just now. They turned in a decent half hour of Dinosaur Jr meets Television, with a few Angus Young-esque rock shapes for good measure. Before that we had some mainly unaccompanied harmonising from all-girl trio Mountain Man, which was pleasant enough in a Fleet Foxes vein but nothing to yodel home about.
And so, the Low Anthem. When it comes to this alt-folk business I worry a bit about preciousness – as Kim Gordon notes, the crowd’s attention isn’t something the performer has a right to, it has to be earned – but I needn’t have worried tonight, as the headliners interposed a few bluesy screamers amidst the general downhome prairie balladeering, making them an attractive halfway house between the two support bands, and pleasing both camps.
I also worried a little about the deerstalker and ‘tache that their singer sported on the TV, which was present and correct here as well. Angela Carter wrote that clothes are our visible insults, and the sartorial set-up matched the atmosphere and instrumentation. Electric guitars were in short supply, with a battery of musical saws, bowed cymbals, harmonium, stand-up bass and all the rest taking precedence for the bulk of the set. It was interesting watching the band wander round the stage to swap instruments between songs, and while there wasn’t a drummer among them on that stage, they all had a game crack at the kit. Their soft harmony singing was a touching, puritanical thrill in the way that, say, Midlake’s is not. Mountain Man joined in for a gang harmony attack towards the end.
While I’d love to be able to tell you what songs they played, I can’t, but they ended the set proper with “Charlie Darwin” and then for an encore did a rollicking version of “There’s a Hole in my Bucket” that left swathes of punters bemused, but others – myself included – headed out onto South Clerk Street with a genuine smile for once. Godspeed you mischievous tinkers.
[The Savings And Loan release their début album on Song, By Toad Records later this year]
[Three more videos below.]
Lach’s famous New York open mic night the Antihoot is responsible for launching the careers of many of the bands people who read this site love the most. He is, in fact, the man responsible for terms like anti-folk and the movement it represents.
I have to confess I find this kind of odd. The term is something which has been so ingrained in my musical vocabulary ever since I started writing about music that the idea of it having been invented so recently seems really rather odd.
I always kind of knew I was into anti-folk as well, because the rinky-dinky super traditional stuff has never really attracted me that much, so even before I knew the term I was drawn to bands like The Pogues and Bob Dylan (and even to a degree people like Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg) who would take traditional formats and give them a good beating before they sent them out there. In fact, Dylan’s own struggles with the New York folk establishment rather mirror those of Lach, so the concept of anti-folk has been around for a while, even if the coherent, more unified movement which gave rise to the likes of Jeffrey Lewis and Kimya Dawson did not.
Most of the Edinburgh alt-folkies I know speak of the original anti-folk movement with a kind of hushed reverence, so I guess it’s no surprise that most of them are making an appearance at some point during the Antihoot’s three week Edinburgh run.
On the first night we had a couple of Toad Records favourites down; Yusuf Azak and Neil Pennycook from Meursault. I’ve seen both of these guys perform like this many times however, so the happiest surprise of the night was actually Finn from Trapped in Kansas. He hunched over his guitar and sang in an oddly nasal voice, but his was the genuine ‘Oh, hello, what’s this?’ moment for me on the opening night, particularly as I had no idea who he was until he mentioned his band halfway through his set.
Invariably in the midst of a Festival best known for its stand up comedy there were a few in the crowd who, by one in the morning, had optimistically decided that they too were funny, funny guys. Lach himself, as compere, did a good job of keeping them quiet, but the bands dealt with it well too. Most satisfyingly, I heard a couple of the performers talking about getting their mates down on a regular basis so that there was always a hardcore presence of people who were there to enjoy the music.
One thing, however, which became increasingly obvious as the night wore on was this: when the bands were good, the shushing didn’t have to last beyond the first thirty seconds of the song because the most talented musicians, irrespective of genre, were consistently able to keep the crowd’s attention. This, I suppose, is the double-edged sword of the open mic night.
I also thought the show benefitted from the format: eight minutes or two songs, whichever came first. It meant that if someone was shit, they were off too quickly to become tiresome. That alone makes it worth going along, particularly if one or two people you know are likely to be playing, because there were a lot of good performers there who I’ve never heard a whisper of before.
Dylan has also put a few photos up on Blueback Hotrod, if you fancied a look at those too.
Edge Festival at Electric Circus
Saturday 7th August 2010
There’s a palpable air of expectancy around Milk, nurtured by the band’s mysteriously low profile (try googling them), and the word on the grapevine that components of the much celebrated Findo Gask and equally esteemed My Kappa Roots have combined in this new collective.
My first encounter with Findo Gask was at Homegame earlier this year, and I stood sidestage at Legends gobsmacked by just how tight they were, and it looks like drummer Michael Marshall has transplanted that tightness to this new outfit. The first things that grab me are the whipcrack snare shots and rattling hi-hats of the insistent, spiky sixteen-beat rhythms that carry the band’s sound.
Meanwhile, Pablo Clark, of My Kappa Roots renown, throws himself bodily into his new berth at the helm of Milk. Dressed in skinny jeans and baggy vest-top – both garments as pristine white as your daily pinta – he cavorts bodily about the stage, twisting and pogoing; and at one point manically thumping a tom hanging in his direction off the top of drum kit.
According to Chris Buckle’s recent Skinny article – just about the only decent reference point I can find to provide research for this review – guitar and keyboards are provided by Callum and Sam respectively. Little more is currently known of these two gents. Callum lurches forward from the lip of the stage, bequiffed and menacing, looking after the “bottom-end” of the band’s sound by favouring the bass strings of his big semi-acoustic six-string and occasionally tapping at a bass synth of some sort hidden amongst Sam’s stack of gadgets; while Sam himself busies himself with making his synths sound just like synths should – fat, squelchy and fuzzy – and looking achingly cool and aloof in a fitted houndstooth jacket with – inevitably – the collar turned up.
As the band sign off at the end of their set, Pablo Clark apologises for what he perceives as a messy set. I’m not sure I agree, and I don’t think the punters who have been bouncing enthusiastically around the front of the stage – and even grinding suggestively up against the venue’s structural pillars – would agree either. To me, Milk look likely to re-energise the local scene with a polished and accomplished brand of punk-pop. Okay, it might be a bit of a stretch to wheel out the “breath of fresh air” cliché at this point, as this ground has been well trodden since 1980s New Wave, but Milk certainly sound like they have a spiky, aggravated point to make and don’t care who hears it. And that’s usually not a bad thing.
FOUND take the stage for the headline slot shortly afterwards and embark on a showcase for the highly anticipated new album that’s due out before the end of the year.
The new songs have been leeching one-by-one into FOUND’s set for a good eighteen months or so now, and the last couple of times I’ve seen the band I’ve noted they seriously seem to be getting the hang of them. Something has definitely clicked, and I don’t think it’s just my own sense of familiarity. The arrangements of the new songs now sound nailed-on, while the performances, perhaps hesitant and lacking confidence a few months back, have achieved that unmistakeable FOUND swagger and poise.
Regrettably, the notorious Electric Circus sound gremlins rear their ugly heads during FOUND’s set. At one point frontman Ziggy Campbell unplugs both his bandmates’ backing-vocal mics mid-song in an attempt to eliminate a howling bout of feedback that’s defeated the soundman’s efforts to control. No soundman would take such drastic action as a compliment, but this venue does have difficulties with unorthodox instrumentation. Stick a four-to-the-floor rock band on stage and everything seems fine, as soon as a band get a bit tasty with the electronics – Meursault struggle here too – then the stage teeters on the brink of tumbling into a maelstrom of feedback.
Happily, this brief spot of bother doesn’t detract from the overall quality of the evening’s entertainment, bassist Tommy Perman even takes advantage of the moment for a spot of impromptu comedy, mugging with the unplugged mic and shouting his backing vocal lines at the top of voice, which wins the audience back in favour of the band.
Although that favour was never really in doubt. I don’t want to queer the pitch and get ahead of myself, but I have a sneaking suspicion FOUND’s new album might be a bit of a scorcher.
Homegame this year was a distinctly danceable affair for me. Not that I did dance (I wasn’t that drunk) but the bands I enjoyed the most were the ones like Findo Gask and Django Django who are most definitely very friendly to those of the dancing persuasion. I had to miss Silver fucking Columns though, because it clashed with the Cold Seeds gig which, being a record released on our label, I really had to attend.
Homegame was in fact the first ever Silver Columns gig, and Johnny and Adem were nice enough to sit down with us on the morning of the show, give us a cup of tea* and chat a bit about their new project. Listening to the live footage, I think this is going to be a cracking album. I know I’m much more into my whiney folk at the moment, but stuff like this serves to remind me that my Mum raised us with Erasure, ABC, Bronski Beat, Duran Duran and Depeche Mode, so it’s not like infectious dancefloor electro-pop is a massive stranger to my ears.
Many thanks are due to Dylan for filming both the interview and the gig. The title shots for each video are taken from his photos from the gig, the full set of which can be found over at Blueback Hotrod.
*Alright, it was Lapsang Souching with milk, but I appreciate the thought.
Site design by Nonimage.
Social icons by Komodo Media.