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

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PAWS – Kim Deal

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Website | Downloadable treats from Bandcamp and Soundcloud

Does Carl Barat at the Liquid Rooms on Thursday qualify as an interesting gig for this page?  I am not sure.  A couple of years ago it might have.  I saw Dirty Pretty Things at the Corn Exchange back in 200somethingsomething and, much like their album, found them to be highly enjoyable but always slightly short of earth-shattering.

Somehow, not all that many years later, the gig seems almost completely irrelevant, both to me and, I imagine, to almost anyone reading this. No wonder musicians often end up with a love-hate relationship with their fans – we can be a fickle bunch of bastards and no mistake.

Anyhow, it’s pretty quiet this week, so I am going to break from precedent and list a Glasgow gig for a change.  You’ll see why…

Wednesday 6th April 2011: Jonnie Common’s Deskjob launch at the Captain’s Rest (Glasgow).

See, normally I wouldn’t list a Glasgow gig, but this one is a bit special.  Jonnie is launching Deskjob this week, which is a collaborative album whereby some of his favourite bands came round to his house and recorded the bare bones of a song, and he then built up the rest of the song around this.

He’s adamant that they aren’t remixes, so I suppose you would have to call this more of an old-fashioned producer’s album.  All but one of the bands (I think) are getting together at the Captain’s Rest in Glasgow on Wednesday, and Jonnie’s being a little elusive about previews, so I am going to just embed his thirty second snippets here instead of including a downloadable song as I usually might.
Jonnie Common presents DESKJOB – album preview (paper)clips by Jonnie Common

Wednesday 6th April 2011: Broken Records (acoustic) at the Bristo Hall.

I am not sure exactly how acoustic this is going to be, but it is the latest in an ongoing series of fundraising gigs being held to help save the Forest Cafe from extinction, after the collapse of the Edinburgh University Settlement.   Broken Records can go from very loud indeed to extremely minimal with equal success, so I highly recommend this. They probably won’t be quite as pared-down as in this video, but I still like it:

Thursday 7th April 2011: Wide Days at the Teviot, with live showcases in the evening.

There’s more to explain about Wide Days than can be discussed in this brief paragraph, but here are the very brief highlights: four seminars during the day, based on providing as much practical advice to DIY musicians as possible, followed by a series of live showcases in the evening, with bands like Withered Hand, Paws, Rachael Sermanni and several others playing gigs at a variety of venues across Edinburgh.  Go to their website for a more detailed explanation – and see you there.

Sunday The Late Call, The Japanese War Effort & The Wee Rogue at the Wee Red Bar.

The Gentle Invasion’s return to the world of promotion so pleased me that I managed to forget to include this initially, so sorry about that! The Late Call make rather lush acoustic pop, The Japanese War Effort could be playing anything from solo with guitar to solo with all sorts of loop pedals and odd boxes which make strange noises, and The Wee Rogue play gorgeously hushed folk songs. This will be a good gig, I can pretty much promise you.