After complaining last week about the continuing collapse of Edinburgh’s venues and the harm that does to anyone involved in music in the city, this remarkable gig came as something of a pleasant surprise.

Of course, if the currently proposed Public Entertainment License, which contrary to the impression you might get from the current discussion is not just restricted to Glasgow but in fact nationwide, comes into force, then gigs like this will become prohibitively expensive and awkward to put on and will therefore simply not happen.

And a good thing too.  One thing Scotland doesn’t need is eccentric bands playing intimate gigs in odd places. Bad Fun? Innovation? Pah! Balls to it.

Mary King’s Close, for those who are unfamiliar with the place, is part of the old town of Edinburgh, buried under the Royal Mile.  It was reputed to have been filled with the corpses of plague victims back in the Seventeenth Century and bricked over, with some of the wilder stories saying that many still living were bricked in there with the dead, but apparently these tales have since come to be regarded as ‘somewhat exaggerated’.  I am, of course, hardly an expert.  Certainly the tourist attraction the close has become plays heavily on ghosts and haunting and all that bollocks, and while that is a bit childish and gimmicky, there is no denying the creepy atmosphere of the place.

Paul Vickers and The Leg are an odd concoction as well.  It never comes across as ‘The Leg, but with some other bloke doing the singing for a change’ nor ‘Paul Vickers and his backing band’; there is a genuine meeting of minds here which, although it was less obvious the first time I heard their recorded stuff, is particularly clear when you see them live.

Unamplified, they gives themselves a few challenges, not least in robbing their cellist of his multitude of pedals, but it doesn’t harm the show in the slightest.  In fact the four of them, doused in flour and cackling at one another, could hardly have been presented in a more appropriate manner.

I have to confess to not being all that familiar with the band’s repertoire, so the performance was as curious for me as the venue, but there were some stonking tunes in there.  The maniacal glee with which they were delivered was an added bonus, not just by Vickers himself, but by the supportive screeching of various members of The Leg too.

It was odd, but it was a cracking evening.  We need more stuff like this around here.  Lots more.

Rather than a single coherent post this afternoon, I have a collection of bits and pieces of interesting news all looking for a home, so I reckon one big jumbled post of stuff was probably the way forward.

PAWS: First up, that video above is a new song by well-established Toad favourites PAWS. Phil apparently wrote and recorded the song one night when he couldn’t sleep, and the footage is all stuff shot in the woods around Tain, where he’s from.

Apart from the rather scrappy genesis, what I like about the song is that it sounds very much like a PAWS song, whilst being of a very different pace and feel to their more characteristic, raucous pop music.

It bodes really well for the album, because if they had a challenge ahead of them for that (apart from continuing to write good songs of course) it was to be able to break up the stream of bouncy pop gems with some stuff which was a little different, just to give the album some ebb and flow. Between this and the brilliant, largely improvised instrumental they recorded for our split 12″ it looks like a band known for their mental live shows and irrepressible pop tunes have an awful lot more range to them than people might have come to suspect. This is a good thing.

Yoofs: I think these guys ended up with two songs on my end of year Festive Fifty, which tells you all you need to know about how highly I rate them. They are loosely affiliated with bands like The Black Tambourines and Joanna Gruesome down South, and have a split coming out on the brilliant Art is Hard Records later in the year, I believe.

Before that, however, this. Whilst Yoofs clearly show leanings towards the lo-fi, garagey, sometimes surfey stuff being made quite a lot in the South of England at the moment, they actually prompt me, for the second time in a week, do draw a comparison to the Bees. This is rougher and growlier, but I think the comparison still stands, and it’s one of the reasons I find this band so interesting: because instead of drawing their influences directly from the States, be it slacker indie, lo-fi, psychedelia, surf or whatever, these guys also seem to add in something more distinctly British. Apart from the Bees comparison I can’t put my finger on exactly how that manifests itself, but I do think it’s there.

Anyhow, they have a splendid new single out called Hazy Days which you can download for 50p from here.

Dolfinz: And finally, PAWS’ bedroom record label Cath Records is spluttering into life at the moment as well, which is really good news. As well as the excellent, if a little odd, Generation Scum record (of which more later this week) Cath will be releasing a four-song tape by fellow Song, by Toad Split 12″ band Dolfinz.

The EP is called Mean Girls and is, I kid you not, about the film Mean Girls. I don’t know if they were inspired by Sex Hands writing all their songs about Friends but umm, well I’d rather people wrote songs about this bollocks than some of the po-faced crap which does get released.

I don’t think I approached this record with breath quite as bated as a lot of the rest of the Scottish music community.  I love RM Hubbert live; watching him play the guitar really is one of the most mesmerising things you’ll see, and the sincere but humourous chat inbetween songs is as engaging as the actual performance.

At the risk of enraging classical guitarists everywhere, however, I will venture that there are limitations to what you can achieve as a solo acoustic guitarist playing entirely instrumental songs.  Not that his recorded stuff was bad by any means, just that my concentration span didn’t always bear up that well over long periods.  For some reason, what was engrossing live, didn’t have quite as much of a hold on me when recorded.

This, however, for previous fans and new, is the kind of record to approach without any preconceptions, because it is entirely different in flavour from previous work.  The reason is simple: it is an album sprinkled liberally with guest appearances, both vocal and instrumental, which makes it sound almost like an entirely new artist at work.  And given the album is apparently about friends from the last twenty years or so of Hubbert’s life I suppose it makes good sense for it to be recorded in collaboration with others.

Despite the changing voices, the constant presence of the acoustic guitar, plucked as ever with a kind of weighty seriousness, gives the record a very unified feel.  Even when the vocalists change, the sense of unity is maintained.  There is also a surprisingly similar feel to the song performed with Emma Pollock and Rafe Fitzpatrick, Half Light, and that sung by Marion Kenny and Hanna Tuulikki, Sunbeam Melts the Hour.

The latter in particular is absolutely bloody gorgeous, and I think the peculiar character of Tuulikki’s voice in one song seems to mirror the off-kilter scrape of the violin in the other, lending them the similar character I mentioned before. Sunbeam Melts the Hour also brings us what I think is Hubbert’s most arresting guitar performance of the album too, and one that is very different to the rest of the album, and downright oriental in style.

The fact that these guest performances are stitched together with more familiar RM Hubbert instrumentals is also an important factor.  Had he simply presented an entire record of collaborations it would have been in danger of coming across as a compilation, it would have taken the emphasis just a little too much from Hubbert himself, and would (at risk of being a smart-arse here) have risked coming across just a little close too much like a ‘look at my celebrity* friends’ statement, dangerously close to the manner of Elton John.

I know I’m being facetious there, but hopefully it doesn’t mask the point I was genuinely trying to make.  For all the collaborations, Hubbert still needed to make this his album, and beyond the distinctive character of his guitar playing, the regular interspersal of songs entirely his own help give this a framework into which the collaborative songs are assembled, rather than allowing them to overwhelm the whole enterprise.

The other thing I really noticed about this record was the sheer seriousness of it.  Not that it’s no fun to listen to, but the combination of precise notes, and the rolling crescendoes of picked guitar (I am sure there is a technical term for this shit, I just don’t know it) have a similarly portentous feel to some of Josh T. Pearson’s playing.  In fact opener We Radioed is strongly reminiscent of the phenomenal opening track on Pearson’s own record, and whilst clearly no copy, a similar and similarly impressive effect is nonetheless achieved.

I’ve used the term impressive here, and I think I should make it clear how it is meant.  I do not mean in in a condescending ‘oh, jolly well done’ sort of way, more to say that the music makes a really strong impression on you.  Time and again I find myself listening to this album and stopping to just absorb the impact of it, not in a deer in headlights way, just stopping to allow the impressions of the music to be absorbed uninterrupted by anything else.

And if that sounds like a high compliment, it is meant to be.  This is bloody brilliant.

RM Hubbert – Sunbeam Melts the Hour

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RM Hubbert – Sandwalks

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*Yes, I know, believe me I use that term in the loosest possible sense.

The fact that this album is self-titled makes the headline for this post look like a bit of a joke, doesn’t it.  How many Djangos does one album title need, after all.

Anyhow, at the risk of repeating a little bit too much of this week’s podcast, these guys have been described in a few places, somewhat tenuously, as an Edinburgh band.  It’s a nice thought, but while they did indeed emerge, to the best of my knowledge, from the Edinburgh College of Art, I think they’re now based in London and have released their debut album on a French label, so I think it’s a bit of a stretch to refer to them as an Edinburgh band in any meaningful sense.

Add to that the fact their latest tour includes dates in Nottingham and fucking Norwich, but not Edinburgh, and I think we can say pretty conclusively that the band have moved on.  Which is a shame, because they’re very good, and given I had to miss their recent Sneaky Pete’s appearance I would really like to see them live again.

Funnily enough, I actually interviewed these guys at Homegame a couple of years ago, but an IT disaster meant that I couldn’t actually publish anything worthy of the name, unfortunately.  They were interesting people to talk to though, very thoughtful and considered, and they seemed remarkably focussed and together for a bunch of musicians.

Since then, when their first two singles made such a splash, they’ve been so very quiet that I have to confess I half wondered if they might have been stuttering a little, but it appears that this is very much not the case, as their debut album was released last week, and it’s bloody ace.

The most obvious comparison to the Djangos’ sound would be The Bees, who were briefly huge about seven or eight years ago, with a similar brand of rhythmic pop music which seemed to draw its influences from all over the place.  Speaking to the band during the Amazing Self-deleting Interview, I remember them referring to this as one of the great things about the internet era – the fact that bands no longer needed to draw their influences from such narrow fields, as absolutely anything and everything was out there waiting to be explored and absorbed.

From all these influences, Django Django make what is indisputably best described in no more a convoluted way than ‘pop music’.  As experimental as some of the sounds are, the result has a relentlessly danceable rhythm, and a sense of energetic playfulness which is impossible to ignore.

Interestingly enough, whilst they’ve included all four songs from their previous double A-side 7″s, all four songs have been relegated to the second half of the album, as if to make the statement that after a year or two of relative quiet, they are not just returning to flog the last gasps of credit from relatively old material, which I think is a good decision.

Having done that, however, I would suggest that they have slightly fallen into the trap of packing the album with pop songs, somewhat at the expense of the feel of the record as a whole. Whilst it’s good to release double A-side singles, rather than implying that really only one of the songs is worthwhile and the other will do, this approach doesn’t work as well on an album.

If I had a criticism of this it would be that every song on it sounds like an A-side, so by the end of the record it becomes a little wearying, and I think it could have done with a couple of more marked changes in pace, be they an instrumental here and there, or something a little more dreamy or melancholic, just to break the atmosphere a little and offset the relentless cheerfulness of the rest of the music.  Recent single Waveforms comes closest to fulfilling this function, but I don’t personally find the change quite significant enough to really break the mood and get me ready for the second half of the album.

Nevertheless, this is a highly enjoyable album of joyful, mischievous pop songs and very welcome return from one of the few bands around who actually make me feel like dancing. Dancing badly, I’ll grant you, but that’s still a significant achievement for a sulky old stick in the mud like myself.

Django Django – Storm

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The Twilight Sad were one of the first under the radar Scottish bands I ever  really ‘discovered’ for myself, although oddly enough it was actually American blogs where I first started to hear about them, despite their being from just down the road, relatively speaking.

This is their third album, and despite a subtle shift evident in their second, represents by far the most decisive move yet away from the walls of squalling guitars which played such a part in the making of their name.

They have adjusted from a devastating combination of heart-rending vocal and relentless crescendoes of giddying racket, to something which you might perhaps describe as being more closely related to the hypnotic thrum of someone like Lower Dens, not that I’d directly compare the two, exactly. With the synths they’ve added to their sound there are actually moments which border on Depeche Mode as well, although I am sure that if I knew more about that kind of music I could make a more appropriate comparison.

Despite the change of pace, if one thing remains the same, it’s the quasi-spiritual feel to the Twilight Sad’s music.  The very first time I ever saw them, back at Bannerman’s of all places, years ago, I remember thinking that singer James Graham seemed to be twitching and howling his way through a particularly disturbing religious vision.  A similar feeling permeates No-one Can Ever Know, but it is more trance-like and a little less like a demonic possession.

Pre-release songs like Kill it in the Morning and the phenomenal Sick still stand out, but the rest of it is still strong, with perhaps my favourite beyond these two being Another Bed, which I chose for this week’s podcast. The fact that this song comes late in the album shows once again that these lads, for all they do write pop songs, still clearly put together whole albums rather than front-loading a couple of crowd-pleasers and making up the rest with whatever else they had lying around, as has been happening a lot recently.

Having seen them recently at the Bongo Club, I must confess that I still find a lot of their most thrilling material comes from their first album.  Since then they’ve released two more records, including this one, and both have contained songs I have loved, and a few to which I have never really warmed, I have to confess.

Again in this case, there are a couple of songs here and there which, whilst they are by no means bad, don’t quite thrill me as much as they might.  But then, some of this is just fucking great, and if I recall it was the lure of a handful of favourites which pulled me slowly into their debut album as well, so I will be sure and give this record the time it needs to sink in properly.

The Twilight Sad – Sick

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The Twilight Sad – Another Bed

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 With one EP already to their name, out for free on Glasgow’s brilliant Wiseblood Industries, this is the debut album proper by Now Wakes the Sea.  Contrary to what their name might hint at, they aren’t a nasty emo band, in fact a wonderfully muffled, slow-moving lot.

Most bands who use these atmospheric, lo-fi productions methods do so to produce music which is raw and aggressive, daring you to tease the tune out of the static if you have the stamina.  Now Wakes the Sea, on the other hand, for all they have a couple of upbeat guitar pop numbers like the brilliant Seven Apples, use the muffled fuzz of the recording to create a gorgeously intimate feeling around their slow, pained songs.  It feels like a fireside confessional half the time, but the occasional bursts into full band beef and drifts into what borders on whimsy with songs like Subside make sure you don’t just get drowned in swamp of self-examination.

If the barely-structured ambient daze of The Fire on Hold pulls Fluoxetine Morning in one direction, and Seven Apples pulls it in another, what these songs chiefly serve to do is bookend the emotional range of the album.  Fluoxetine is an anti-depressant, and those two songs seem to express the barely-conscious narcotic daze at one end of the spectrum, and the bursts of determination at the other end, but it treats them like struggling insects who will never escape the spider’s web – one still fighting to get out, and the other on the very cusp of giving up altogether.

I think a couple of things make this stand out for me.  Firstly, on a purely technical level, the acoustic guitar, brief glimmers of noise and occasional use of things like drums cut through the fug of the downbeat, muffled body of the instrumentation, meaning this is a long way from just being a depressing dirge of an album, and never feels one-paced.

Then, in terms of emotional connection, there is something about the vocal delivery which is absolutely gorgeous.  It’s slow, barely even a singing voice half the time, and delivered with near perfect ambiguity between confidence and indifference.  It’s not an intimidated, halting delivery, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to presume that you give a shit. The depression hinted at in both the album and the song titles, whilst it seems present throughout the record, doesn’t feel like something which drags it down.

So, treading a lot of very fine lines indeed, this has ended up being an absolutely fantastic record.  For all the noise and ambience employed, it is still an album defined by its songs, and for all the morose themes explored it still feels like an album defined warmth and caring, and by its relationship with others, rather than just itself.

Now Wakes the Sea – Propranolol

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Now Wakes the Sea – Seven Apples

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Download or buy CD from Bandcamp.

 Hmmm, reading the email I was sent by Shift-Static, there is a definite emphasis on their Edinburgh associations which seems entirely absent from any of their other PR material.  So if they were trying to prey upon my nepotistic instincts then they, erm, probably had a point actually.

It’s hard to resist the idea that somewhere round the corner from you there exists a collection of talented fuckers making amazing music entirely out of the view of the world’s music chatterati, so despite the fact that this lot are clearly far more from Newcastle than they are from Edinburgh, I will confess I felt just that little bit more curious when opening this email than when opening many others.  Not least it’s unusual to hear about a band from Edinburgh who no-one’s told me about already.  Even if *cough* they’re really from Newcastle.

The other thing this lot have managed, which is really rather funny, is to make a total hypocrisy of my recent post descrying remixes. I know I joke about it, but this is where the local nepotism possibly did come into play after all.  Generally, finding sentences like ‘here is our amazing song and here is a remix of it’ sends me straight to the delete button, but in this case the combination of Shift-Static being a local band, of the email being nicely worded and the remix being attributed to Waskerley Way, who are a band I know and like, meant that I felt I really should listen.

And if they are reading, the poor fuckers in Shift-Static are probably wondering why I’ve got to the fourth paragraph of a writeup of their music without mentioning the slightest thing about it.  I apologise for this, but I suppose I just wanted to give you some sort of impression of what surfing my inbox every day is actually like.  Things get deleted so fast that even I myself am fascinated by what it is that nudges me to listen more closely to something.

Anyhow, now that I have (apologies to the band) finally got round to discussing the music, it’s not a thousand mile away from the LeThug stuff I wrote about last week.  It’s definitely electronic pop music, although there is perhaps a little more shimmering than shoegaze going on here.  In fact, for all Il-1 is glitchy and uncertain, by the time the second song – Thanks, Thugs -  kicks in, we are into the kind of territory which Goldfrapp and The Pet Shop Boys managed to straddle so successfully: that particular kind of electronic music which, whilst I assume it will please its core audience of electronic pop fans, will also thrill conservative and relatively narrow-minded indie kids like myself.

The remix mention came about because the band themselves highlighted both the original version of Sky Burial as well as the aforementioned remix of the same song, both of which take centre stage here as a one-two in the middle of the EP.

I’ll admit that the clean, clear female vocal delivery of the original, for all it is lovely, strays a little too far into the polished pop world for my own personal taste.  Not that far, because I still really like the song, but perhaps a little further than anything I am likely to end up truly loving.

The Waskerley Way remix, however, for all it doesn’t do much, just seems to add both enough haze and enough heft to get me to really love what really is a simple, excellent song.  By this point Saint Etienne are strongly evoked, or possibly even the briefly incredible Dubstar, and I find myself looking back wistfully to that period in the mid-nineties when I first started to explore electronic music.  This has a lot in common with a lot of the things I first took a chance on when trying to expand my listening palette from indie to broader sounds, back when I was a teenager.  Yes, it was that long ago.  Fuck off.

So whether they’re from Newcastle or Edinburgh, whether you’d call them electro-pop (shudder) or alternative-indie-elec.. oh alright, I’ll stop now.  Whatever you reckon this stuff is, it’s very, very good.  When the band got in touch their only sales patter was “I really think its in your ballpark”.  And they were right, it really is.

Shift-Static – Sky Burial (Waskerley Way Remix)

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 Hmm, well I haven’t heard much music like this being made in Scotland I don’t think – well, not that I’ve liked particularly – but LeThug are really rather good.

They tag themselves as drone on their Soundcloud page, and the sound is dominated by a thrumming, rhythmic buzz, but there are strong elements of experimental electronic pop in here as well, a lot of it is heavily dependent on instrumental textures and it’s almost dancey in places.  Almost.

In Your Head Be It, the EP they have up on Soundcloud, starts with Down, full of quite abrasively glitchy clicks and squeaks.  For someone with my particular taste in music – someone who dabbles in this kind of stuff, but isn’t really particularly familiar with or knowledgeable about it – I was wavering a little at the beginning, I have to confess.

Once that song slowly fitted into context as it gave way to the much more shoegazey Lux I settled a little.  ClydeCoastBeachPlace which follows is altogether more dreamy and ambient, and helps mark out the boundaries of what is an impressively varied EP, particularly considering that there is little sign this is anything other than a series of demos.

In some ways this is like a heavier, denser cousin of the Japanese War Effort, more akin to something like Seefeel perhaps.  It’s hard to get an emotional handle on, given that the lyrics are always so buried you really can’t make out a bloody thing.  Musically though, there is a lot, and the emotional pitch of the music itself drifts from comfort to anxiety, with the latter particularly embodied in the relentless paranoia of 3rd Lanark (a song title of which I think the aforementioned Japanese War Effort would approve greatly).

Most of the songs are available for free download from Soundcloud, and presumably also from the widget below, and I strongly recommend getting hold of them.  I know nothing about this band at all, and their introductory email was cursory to say the least, but this is really, really good.

 Well, after last year’s obsession with rough and ready lo-fi garage rock, this year* has already thrown up two excellent Scottish releases which, whilst they share a lot of the lo-fi aesthetic, are very much more morose, downbeat affairs.

The first of those I’m going to be discussing is Smackvan, who formerly released with the excellent but now sadly defunct Benbecula Records.

I’ve not been particularly prompt about reviewing this album, I have to confess, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm.  It may be downbeat and low key, but even at the first listen I really enjoyed this album.

It sounds very much like a bedroom recording, but then again it’s a bedroom sound delivered in the style of a late night conversation, so the production really.  It does drift intriguingly though, with the lo-fi growly guitars and rattly drums being superseded at times by something smoother.  It’s almost as if the late night conversation I mentioned had moved from sharing a couple of cans in a bedsit to sharing a whisky in a dark Victorian living room. This contrast shows up most noticeably in the development from awkward opener 4am to the lush and lovely Black Eyes.

It’s an odd stylistic shift, and one you don’t see too often, but it works very well.  On an emotional level it seems to imply that the feelings being expressed are well-contained, resigned on some occasions and raw and bitter on others, which seems to fit well with the emotional range of the songs themselves.

For an album like this the challenge always seems to be to retain the attention for the full length of the record, but this is relatively short and the aforementioned shifts in mood, as well as timely interruptions by the likes of the wonderful instrumental song Cello keep my attention comfortably. I know people like me taking ages to review it is partly to blame, but as Scottish releases and Scottish bands go Smackvan and Sound in Space seem to really be quite criminally underrated by the musically inclined population around here.

Smackvan – 4am

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Smackvan – Black Eyes

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*Time of writing, not time of release, obviously!

 I’ve been to some very, very good gigs recently, but this was fucking incredible. Drew (Wounded Knee) put together an evening of bands to celebrate the release, on Gerry Loves Records, of his album House Music.

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.