Live | The Grain

GIG REVIEW – WILD BEASTS/BLUE ROSES @ BRISTOL THEKLA

Wild Beasts - Blue Roses

One of the more hopeful developments in British music over the past couple of months has been the widespread enthusiasm shown to Wild Beasts on release of their second offering Two Dancers. They might have invited a rash of lazy journalistic similes (the prize for coffee-table smarminess must surely go to Alexis ‘Fucking’ Petridis of The Guardian for invoking ‘Antony Hegarty lowing away mournfully like Nina Simone phoning Call You and Yours’ as a way of describing Hayden Thorpe’s voice); but overall there are some tentative signs that the UK is very slowly beginning to work its way out of the hype-driven middlebrow swamp of recent years, beginning to rediscover bands and artists inclined towards subtlety, marginality, idiosyncrasy, even (gasp!) innovation.

Off-the-beaten-track haphazardness seems to define everything Wild Beasts do, so walking up the gangplank and descending below deck to press into the dark hull of Bristol’s Thekla to hear them on said album tour seemed appropriate. Travel arrangements over the border from Wales meant that the Blue Roses were already towards the end of their supporting set when we arrived, which was our bad luck; the beautiful vocals of Laura Groves, with her use of measured dynamics undulating over violin, piano and guitar accompaniment, created an intimate atmosphere within the oblique confines of Thekla (a boat navigated to Bristol from Sunderland by one of the members of Bonzo Dog back in the seventies). Read the rest of this entry »

GREEN MAN 2009: DAY 1 – OPEN UP YOUR, OPEN UP YOUR, OPEN UP YOUR THROAT

Animal Collective headlining Friday Night on the Main Stage

It was off to (sometime) sunny Green Man festival in the picturesque (probably an understatement) Glanusk Park in Brecon Beacons for the Grain on the weekend for three days of music, and starring amazed as ominous clouds passed over without shedding a drop. With a backdrop leaving the feeling you’d wandered into a postcard, 10,000 revellers wandered the compact sold out site, with an amenable, laid back to the point of falling down, atmosphere. The surprisingly family friendly festivities began bathed in unexpected sunshine on Friday following the briefest of brief downpours with something of a fancy dress-come-village fete ambience that so many boutique festivals aspire to but never quite reach. Green Man’s line-up was slightly more psychedelically inclined than previous years, though still with the indie-folk influence on which it has made its name.

But enough of poorly written scene setting introductions and to the music. Friday’s first notable performance was delivered by Newcastle’s Beth Jeans Houghton on the Far Out Stage, with her unmistakable appearance (essentially that wig) and attire not too dissimilar to a lot of the pre-teen girls around the site ( fairy wings and tutus the uniform of choice) so she was fittingly accompanied by images of images of childhood innocence as she delivered the sort of gentle folk-pop influenced melodies that are most associated with (and perhaps expected from) Green Man; sometimes its good to give the people what they want. Apart from an alluring rendition of her debut single Golden, she dedicating the more uplifting and uptempo Hoofs of the Sun, complete with bracing horns, to her violinist apparently off to a leper colony, and offered the similarly crowd pleasing jaunt of I Will Return, I Promise. The set suffered a little from the similarity of sound in tempo, style and texture, lacking in a breakaway moment, or even a little element of subversion, but enjoyable in this setting nonetheless. If you wanted a little more adventure and complexity in your song writing without losing the sanguine edge you were better off taking a trip to the Green Man Pub Stage later in the day for a forcible performance by Peggy Sue.

Beth Jeans Houghton

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SOUNDS FROM ANOTHER WORLD: CURIOUS EAR, AUG 22, THE SALISBURY, GREEN LANE

Curious Ear

The Grain brings you news of Curious Ear, a fully endorsed (mf) free night! Expect the curious rhythms outlined above and a veritable smorgasbord of musical cochlea-based delights. The whrrring of the rumour mill suggests you should expect some dub, off beat worldy sounds (think sublime frequencies/honest johns??), classic rawwwwk, maybe even a slice of psychedelica, dancehall, and various other gratifying forms of music. The Grain’s thinking of passing on its Cubanism in the Congo record and collection of funk to the curious ear fellows to help get the party started. . .

In short, vinyl only, take no prisoners, be there.

Saturday 22nd August, get to The Salisbury on Green Lanes. Do it! for FREE!

See this Polysics video for I Me My Mine to sample the sort of moves The Grain expects to be breaking out . . .

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CONTRASTS: THE INVISIBLE / DETROIT SOCIAL CLUB @ STANDON CALLING FESTIVAL, HERTFORDSHIRE 31/7/09

I can’t quite fathom how Detroit Social Club manage it. In a time of unheard-of musical availability, an era of iPods, myspace, torrent sites, and Spotify, a time in which the entire history of popular musical is almost laughably accessible to anyone who knows how to work a computer or press play on an mp3 player, this imaginatively-handicapped Newcastle band seem to have lighted on Kings of Leon, The Verve, latter-day Oasis, and Kasabian as the eclectic influences to underpin their completely hope-shatteringly boring aesthetic.

In 1994 this sort of thing would have been just about credible, or at least believable. Watching it live in 2009 at Standon Calling (a small-scale ‘boutique’ festival in Hertfordshire) I felt as though I was in some way dying. I felt like the years were peeling away as I hurtled backwards through a suffocating abnegation of everything good that had ever happened to me, like all the stuff that makes you want to carry on – goodness, love, the possibility of change – was being buried under a landslide of dirty, gravelly, archly-conservative, progress-denying, beauty-lobotomised, death-in-life bloke-rock.

I have nothing more to say about this lot, ever, and I apologise without reservation for all the positive things I said about Newcastle in the Findo Gask review.

Fortunately, for the sake of everyone, The Invisible were/are a much more worthwhile proposition. Much is being made of them right now because of their Mercury Prize nomination, and in my eyes they have a pretty decent outside chance of winning (not least because this year’s list is pretty embarrassingly MOR-oriented when it isn’t taking in fashionista shallowness and feminism-as-a-brand mediocrity). Read the rest of this entry »

NISENNENMONDAI @ THE LUMINAIRE, LONDON, 20/07/09

Nisennenmondai @ The Luminaire

The diminutive figures of Masako Takada, Yuri Zaikawa and the imperious Sayaka Himeno, form all-girl band Nisennenmondai (which apparently means Y2K problem/bug in Japanese – a reference to the supposed computer programming flaw that was destined to lead to Armageddon on New Years Eve 1999); a product of the noise scene from Kansai, Tokyo who now play something between the krautrock of Neu!, ESG, The Boredoms and OOIOO, building everything around compelling pulsating rhythm.

London’s best promoters, Upset the Rhythm, ushered in the return of Nisennenmondai to the capital, this time sandwiched in-between the noise drone of Team Brick, running his throat singing and vocals through an FX pedal chain with, frankly, tiresome results and Growing, a former drone band currently peddling their wares on Kranky, who delivered what sounded a lot like orthodox dance music, if slightly warped, with off-kilter processed vocals that also failed to hold the attention. Maybe this is overly harsh but throughout both my boredom came close to engulfing me as these two couldn’t hold their own against the girls from Tokyo, who were the definite stars tonight.

Previous Upset the Rhythm appearances by Nisennenmondai have taught me that it’s easy to give yourself over to their dynamic, driving sound and that the trio bring an enthusiastic crowd, willing to embrace its trance like qualities, which was true again tonight.

They opened with a version of their latest record, FAN, Takada looping and layering her rhythmic syncopated metallic guitar lines, finding gaps, building elliptic rhythms slowly; it’s nearly 5 minutes before the bass drum kicks in, by which time the rhythm has already got you. Yuri’s bass follows, adding depth to the sound, and much like every part tonight starts out with just a note each bar before building and elaborating. As the sound fills out with the high hat, the pounding rhythm, and Takada adds phases of melody, it becomes apparent that what makes Nisennenmondai so compelling is drummer Himeno. In a band with an average height somewhere around the 5ft mark, she still stands out as being particularly tiny (you don’t want to see this band when they play on the floor), and her high tempo technically proficient playing drives the band, hitting 16ths, displaying incredible tightness and an almost manic presence at centre stage.

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