Afternoon troops, seeing as I am at the Wide Days conference (come along if you’re in Edinburgh, it’s worth it, I promise) it is going to be pretty much impossible to write about music today, so I thought I would talk about some of the sessions going on and you can… umm… well, do as you please with it. This is the internets after all. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s quite busy this week, although perhaps not in the way you’d thing. Is today the day Jeebus was crucified, the day he was plonked in the cave, or the day he rather creepily rose from the dead? One of those anyway, because it’s definitely Easter, although how rabbits and chocolate eggs relate to zombie hippies rising from the dead I have no idea.
I suppose that’s the best thing about your entire worldview being based on ‘making shit up’ – if you want chocolate eggs, then dammit you can have chocolate fucking eggs, balls to it if it doesn’t make sense. A bit like the Mission Impossible films in that respect.
This will be another guitary gig, from old school slacker indie to full-on mental racket. Fat Bicth and Shudder Pulps were introduced to me by Dolfinz, and are touring together, with Glasgow’s United Fruit coming through to headline.
I loved the Felice Brothers, but since rather horrible personal circumstances prompted Simone to go it alone, his own material has been equally gorgeous. He’s been quite heavily involved with the ever-growing Communion project too, which is an interesting one, although the music clearly fits so I suppose it makes good sense in that respect.
The full list of seminars can be found here, but Wide Days is always worth attending. For anyone wanting to get involved in music professionally, whether it’s as a musician, manager or pretty much anything else, this kind of thing is really helpful, just to get a feeling for how things work. Don’t go along pockets stuffed with demos or business cards which you thrust into the hands of everyone you can, though.
I’d personally recommend just soaking up the chat at the seminars, just to gain an understanding of the general landscape, and then make sure you have a demo or business card on you, because the best time to hand one over will be when you spend an hour chatting with someone over a beer and they ask you for one. If they ask, they will remember. If you thrust it upon them, it will probably go in the bin.
In the evening of Thursday 12th a selection of bands will be playing at various venues across Edinburgh, from Sneaky Pete’s to The Third Door and on to the Electric Circus. It’s sort of a musical pub-crawl, and a fine, boozy way to end two days of chatter and schmooze!
Last year was the first time I saw PAWS play, who we’ve ended up releasing in the form of our forthcoming split 12″, and bands this year include Homework and Honeyblood at Sneaky Pete’s, followed by Michael Cassidy and Quickbeam at The Third Door. Donna Maciocia, Lady North and Honningbarna will play at Electric Circus, which will also host the closing party. All gigs are free and fans can simply order tickets for the act they want to see. Details can be found at www.widedays.com/tickets. See you there.
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!
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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…
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
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:
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.
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.
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