The Dodos – The Visiter

There’s a lot of crazy anthropological one-upmanship going on in American alternative music at the moment. Exotic influences are getting flung ostentatiously around the place like cards in a demented game of indie top trumps played by collegiate hipsters- Dude, our Javanese Gamelan sound totally beats your Zimbabwean xylophone. The Dodos’ second album, ‘The Visiter’ is the latest record from the States to come marinated in imported musical influences, specifically West African Ewe drumming. I’ve never heard any West African Ewe drumming but, if ‘The Visiter’ is anything to go by, it must be bonkers. Drummer Logan Kroeber’s hide-rattling, polyrhythmic percussion is the beating heart and soul of this album, elevating a collection of swirling, enigmatic, acoustic folk songs to thrilling heights. During the rare few times he effectively drops the sticks (‘It’s that time again’, ‘park song’) the album sounds merely intriguing, but on songs like ‘Fools’ when the beat is in full exhilarating flow, this sounds like an album of the year.

Hard Working Class Heroes: Saturday and Sunday

In fairness, I ought to call this post ‘Hard Working Class Heroes: Wot Darragh saw wot wasn’t that much’. So for that reason, after chewing the cud for a few days I’ve decided to regurgitate and conveniently roll Saturday and Sunday into a small, easily digestable blob of a blog for you to enjoy. If you want to blame somebody for the vile and sputumish metaphor above, email Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up whose bodily function-erific EP ‘The Year of the Pig’ is on my stereo a lot and messing with my head.

Day 2

Grand Pocket Orchestra: Andrews Lane Theatre

Grand Pocket Orchestra remind me of one of those little rubber dinosaurs that you put into a bucket of water so it grows quicky to, err, one and half times its usual size. Actually scrap that, those toys are disappointing. GPO are not. They are like one of those toys actually working. In the space of a truncated set tonight, they completely dazzle. Lead singer Paddy is a wild presence on stage, a loopy, jerky bundle of magnetic oddness. Throw in flourescent Bronwyn, who looks like a hilighter pen crossed with a girl, and drummer Peter’s spectacular mohawk, and you have the most visually arresting band around.

Old favourites are banged out with the usual vigour, as are a few songs from soon to be released EP, ‘Make Happy War’. After one listen to some of it live, and on the strength of previous singles, I’m going to throw my hat into the ring and say it’s likely to be the best Irish album this year.

Bats: Meeting House Square

Bats’ rhythmic, multifaceted take on post punk and metal is another casualty of the disastorous sound in Meeting House Square. Despite looking a little unhappy from time to time, Rupert and co. rock out as hard as the setting allows. A few people in the audience are perplexed when Rupert lets rip with some proper growling vocals. Others seem to totally get it. Catch them in a smaller venue around town if you like your music taut, intelligent, hard and fast. Yet another fine example of the Irish music scene let down by the sound system.

Halves: Meeting House Square

Another band. Another set of sound problems. Halves are annoyed because they can hear the house music playing. They soldier on, playing a set of their (wonderful in any other venue) sweeping, tripped-out post rock, that doesn’t quite fill the air, and for those near the back, the Saturday night shouts from Temple Bar are easily the match of the 80 decibel volume. Super Extra Bonus Party, Bats and Halves would all have succeeded a hundred times better in Andrew’s Lane in my humble opinion.

The Vinny Club: Andrew’s Lane Theatre

Easily the most fun gig of the weekend. The Vinny club is raucous. He appears dressed as Bono, but the wig is too long, so he’s more of a Bob Marley/Bono hybrid. He’s playing a guitar hero guitar. Because that’s what Bob Marley/Bono hybrid’s naturally do in Vinny’s dreams. A few months back I wrote I had mixed feelings about some of the early computer chip style compositions he posted on his myspace page. Tonight’s gig makes me reassess that criticism. Everything Vinny plays tonight has enough bounding energy and verve to power a small town, but also has a bit of backbone. A lot of it is really solid stuff. Don’t let the humour fool you. Vinny is no joke. And when he rules the world, fuck Tesco’s ‘computers for school’ vouchers because every child in Ireland will get their own commodore 64 on the day they are born.

Day 3

Armoured Bear: Meeting House Square

Well boy is it pissing down in Meeting House Square. A few sodden heads clump randomly together under umbrellas, to bravely watch Armoured Bear gamely try to cheer things up with some Teenage Fanclubesque rock. It was like watching someone piddle on a watercolour of a sunny day. Quite dispiriting.

New Amusement: Meeting House Square

It’s still raining. The random clumps have grown in number, so things are not completely desolate for New Amusement. These guys are unfurling quickly into being a signficant band with every gig they play. Hopefully, they won’t be fast tracked into that false ‘success’, that quickly sours into last month’s spat out leftovers, which seems to befall so many promising Irish rock outfits. Tonight, there is clear and confident demonstration of an insistent twinkling songcraft starting to mature that will need more time to blossom more fully. ‘Cos I can hear echoes of the Smiths, Orange Juice, and all sorts of sweet indie. Heirs to the Immediate’s sound and hopefully not their short career span.

The rest of Sunday melts into a tired fug. But The Ambience Affair seem to be quickly sprouting into a Dodos style guitar/drums combo to watch, and So Cow, according to others, was absolutely excellent. I do not doubt it for a minute. Dude’s got tunes. Probably wrote ten since I started this blog.

So it’s with a celebratory ‘Moo!’ I leave you ’til next year, when I will be running this festival. It will be compeered by Brush Shields in a community centre in Coolock and called ‘Irish Unsigned Bands go Spring Break Wild’. There will be an Afghan invasion and The Vinny Club will be curating the photo exhibition (selected snap shots from his favourite 8 Bit computer games). Sign up now.

Day one available here.

Hard Working Class Heroes: Friday

I said it before, and I feel compelled to say it again at the start of this review. Hard Working Class Heroes is the worst name for a musical festival. Ever. True story: my flatmate who has a passing interest in music, deliberately did not go to this event since its inception for the (admittedly fairly fatuous) reason that it has a shit name. So think about it organiser dudes, rename your festival and get at least one new punter.

My review of the weekend will be a single snapshot of the few bands I saw. There are some acts such as Fight Like Apes and Frightened Rabbit, that I intended to see but didn’t make it to, however. Ian Thrillpier gives some comprehensive reviews , including bands I didn’t see, here, here and here.

Day 1

Dublin Duck Dispensary: The Academy.

They make a wonderful racket do the ‘Duck Dispensary. Bobby dressed up as Santa. Guitarist/keyboardist Karl dressed up as an employee from a 1960s biscuit factory in Manchester. They have a bubble machine stage right. Sadly, they only play for what seems like 30 seconds and at an earlier time than billed, meaning that a good few interested punters land down just as their slightly shambolic, energetic and good-humoured set rocks out to a close. Dublin Duck Dispensary are a band to watch. Think early Pavement crossed with Guided by Voices. Guided by Ducks perhaps?

The Revellions: The Academy.

I stick around to watch The Revellions. With their winkle picker shoes and glossy pudding bowl haircuts, these guys all look like they were cloned from bits of Brian Jones. Unsurprisingly their music is as retrograde as their outfits. It’s competently played, organ driven garage rock that fetishes its influences: The Chocolate Watchband, The 13th Floor Elevators, all that sort of stuff. Its hard to watch something so studiously appropriated without feeling its all a bit of a pastiche.

Super Extra Bonus Party: Meeting House Square.

The biggest downside of the weekend quickly becomes apparent during Super Extra Bonus Party’s gig in Meeting House Square. The sound is freaking terrible. They sound like they are playing through a sponge. Later, Northern Ireland band Fighting With Wire get very disgruntled and make as if they are going to walk off because of this problem. For a group like Super Extra Bonus party, who rely on a noisy party vibe, the poor sound leaves the crowd underwhelmed in spite of their best efforts. It is a shame, and a bad portent for the other big gigs of the weekend.

Days 2 and 3 available here

The Hold Steady – Stay Positive

The Hold Steady have always been a divisive proposition for fence-sitting music fans. Depending on who you ask, they are either a bog standard bar band fronted by a Bruce Springsteen fanatic with a decent turn of phrase, or the most exciting lyric-driven American rock group since the Replacements. Whichever of the above you subscribe to, there is no denying their consistency. ‘Stay Positive’ takes the robust template of their last album ‘Boys and Girls in America’ and runs with it for another eleven songs. There is nothing here to convert the doubters, and no anthem to top the likes of ‘Chips Ahoy’ or ‘Stuck Between Stations’. Yet, as usual, Craig Finn eloquently holds forth on a riveting musical world of Kerouac-style drop outs whose lives are full of ruined dreams, atypical domestic dramas and guilty secrets. The music is strong, honest and steeped in beery gusto, especially on such songs as “constructive summer” and “yeah sapphire”. Like Marmite, this record will be loved or hated, but for those who come at it with an open mind devoid of trendy fads, the former will hopefully hold true.

Boo Tube

Looking back to the mid-nineties, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the more modestly successful bands that toiled in the shadow of that huge mid-decade straddling three headed monster, the Blurpulpoasisaurus Rex. One such band was The Boo Radleys. For my money, the humble Boos were the most criminally overlooked band of the era. During the extended coked-up party of Britpop, they were quicky and unfairly pigeon-holed as scouse nearly men and one hit wonders after the phenomenal success of ‘Wake Up Boo!’. This, in spite of already sitting atop a ridiculous mountain of glittering psychedelic riches that stretched back to 1991.

Their pre Wake Up career had already seen them transform from convincing Dinosaur Jr aping noiseniks (Ichabod and I), to postmodern dream pop experimentalists (Giant Steps) by way of gorgeous unadultrated shoegaze (Everything’s Alright Forever). Driven by the restless, hyperactive imagination of guitarist/songwriter Martin Carr and the angelic vocals of Sice, the Boos’ entire back catalogue, while containing the odd misstep, is incredibly strong and lacking in dull moments. Even their B Sides were brilliant (sad but true-my twin brother and I spent a rainy weekend making the ultimate Boo Radley’s B Sides collection. We called it…Boo Sides).

Wake Up Boo! was to prove a humungous albatross for the band. It became ubiquitous, annoyed a lot of people and alienated many of their shoegaze fanbase. Yet, in retrospect, the song is a fantastic piece of craft and a fine example of Martin Carr’s unabashedly Liverpudlian lyrical tendency to ram the maudlin and the joyous into a sweet ‘n’ sour package.

The post Wake Up! career of the Boo Radleys consists of two fantastic albums, the recalcitrant and bonkers ‘C’mon Kids’ and their heart-breaking compendium of psych-pop swansongs ‘Kingsize’. By the time ‘Kingsize’ came out, the poor Boos were ready for the knackers yard. Riddled with the problems of drink, drugs, underperforming records and fights with their label boss Alan McGee, Martin Carr was singing about the transience of youth despite being only 27. I felt for him. The Boo’s back catalogue is nothing short of extraordinary. That they ended up being the band that recorded ‘that song from GMTV’ is nothing short of criminal. Courtesy of Youtube, here are a few pitstops through their illustrious career.

Does This Hurt?
Everything’s Alright Forever: 1993

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLQoIdS2Tg4]

This gorgeous, gliding pop song is not even the best track on their magnificent 1993 album, ‘Everything’s Alright Forever’. The video is cobblers though. Actually most Boo Radleys videos are kinda cobblers.

Lazarus
Giant Steps: 1994

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rff9UPbrJk]

An absolutely epochal pre-Britpop track and possibly the Boos’ best. Those trumpets are like John Lennon conducting herd of intelligent Elephants.

Wake Up Boo!
Wake Up!: 1995

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumSB0vZ5l8]

It made them and destroyed them in one fell swoop. There’s no denying its brilliance though.

C’mon Kids
C’mon Kids: 1996
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2hhnJQ0kAQ]

I remember going apeshit when I saw this song on Top of the Pops. It was a scorching call to arms for their Britpop fans to follow them into choppier sonic waters (‘Have we ever let you down?’). Unfortunately, the kids didn’t listen. Their loss.

Patrick Kelleher – You Look Cold EP

Somewhere far below the dross infested peak of Mount Delorento, strange and wonderful rumblings are now emanating from the Irish underground. A vanguard of bands including Bats, Halves and now Wicklow native Patrick Kelleher are quietly establishing a confident and diverse underground scene which is rife with imagination and innovation. Kelleher’s new six track EP ‘You Look Cold’ is a strikingly assured exercise in evocative, experimental pop that deserves notice. In the space of 18 minutes, these curious songs demonstrate a restless imagination that flits between diverse reference points. There is reined in 70s prog excess (‘Coat to Wear’ and ‘Wintertime’s Doll’), Moldy Peaches style acoustic whimsy (‘Boy named Suzy Q’) and a distinct hum of the woozy dreamlike hiss of Atlas Sound in opening track ‘Wonder’. Kelleher also displays an obvious love of and mastery of musical texture. Relatively simple vocal melodies come swathed in distant hums, cracks and, at one unnerving point, what sounds like the chant of a monk slowly rotating on a pedestal. What ties this rag bag of influences together is hard to pin down, but something sure does, because ‘You Look Cold’ is more than the sum of its occasionally ephemeral parts. Indeed it is a very satisfying overall listen. Confidently odd and well worth checking out.

Tokyo Police Club: Whelans May 19th 2008

It is Tuesday evening and Whelans is positively heaving with bodies. Where did all these people come from? Since when did Tokyo Police Club become so popular? I feel like a fish out of water. Maybe I’m staring over the precipice of a generation gap? As the gig continues, and one non-descript angular anglophilic helping of post-punk rattles into the next, I wonder how so many people can be so excited about this band? Faced with such adulation, all I can say, is “Tokyo Police Club. We have no spark. But it’s not you. It’s obviously me.”

I forget to bring my notebook with me, and instead attempt to review the gig via the medium of text messages delivered to our very own Daniel Gray. Dan texts back the results to me the next morning. Erm, let’s just say they make for interesting reading. Here are my heat of the moment rantings about Tokyo Police Club. Ahem.

“Like getting trapped in a 5 min segment between Steve Jones and Alexa Chung on Channel 4 Sunday. Our own Dan Gray warned me not to go. Then I realized why: he was moonlighting as the band’s lead singer. Gray: you’re rumbled.”

“I am staring across a grandcanyon-size generational gap. And about 1 mile away I see a turd on the horizon….. I feel like I need Nivea Visage, youthful exuberance, and cloth ears”

“I would rather orally remove a piece of chewing gum from a Labrador’s paw in Kells than be at this soulles derivative MTV2 culture vacuum”

“I can’t even believe these derivatives have British accents. This Anglophilia sucks shit. I would find more musical sustenance at Lenny Kravitz. All I can smell is a fruity haze of trans-gender eau d’toilette and hear bleak, meaningless indie repitition in the english tradition. Horrid”

When Bradford gets angry…you know the rest

It’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox at the moment. In this interview with Analogue magazine, Bradford had the following to say about leaking records:

I resent someone else deciding when to leak your music for you. Like I’m not going to put our new album microcastle on the blog for free. Its an album we worked pretty hard on so its going to be more traditional

A week later and Deerhunter’s forthcoming album, ‘Microcastle’, was all over the blogs like eczema. This was a shockingly early leak, considering the album was not due out until October. In response, Deerhunter put together an EP called ‘Weird Era Contd.’ as a special surprise to be released with the album. According to GorrillavsBear, now this too was leaked, or more specifically swiped by some cheeky little scut who found out that Bradford’s mediafire folder was not protected. Not only that, but a demo of the forthcoming Atlas Sound album (Bradford’s solo project) was yoinked too and some pictures of Bradford as a child.

Mr Cox, understandably was not happy about all of this. The following screengrabs, of posts on the Deerhunter blog (since taken down) demonstrate just how unhappy he was.

To be honest, I’d feel a bit violated too.

Amazing what a bit of scrubbing up can do…

The announcement that Times New Viking, No Age and Los! Campesinos will be playing in Whelans this October 17th for the ridonculously cheap price of €15.45, is causing no end of excitement over on On The Record. And rightly so. Let’s just look at price tag again…€15.45. The best bit about it is the 45 cent. I love that 45 cent.

Okay we all know that the aforementioned ‘Viking specialize in a very abrasive sound. But have you ever wondered what it sounds like all cleaned up? Here is a clip from their recent appearance at the Pitchfork Festival playing the stonking ‘Teen Drama’. The scrubbed off fuzz reveals a melody I barely knew existed when Beth sings “get in line you pretty people/ we are coming in for the kill.” It still rocks nicely but, hopefully, in Dublin it will be wearing a fresh coat of rust and limescale ‘cos that’s why we love ‘em.

Monday Monday

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8TBmeK9Abg]

Monday, what a bleak word. Remember in primary school, the nature table, the chart about the days of the week? Monday. It always was, and always will be the shittest day in the strange 7 day week we inherited off the Roman calendar. Did you ever stop and think that the week could just as easily be 5 days, or 19 days? These old things are so arbitrary and archaic, yet they shape the foundations of our very lives. I was going to blog about Elf Power today. They were supposedly going to play Whelans last night as a Foggy Notions gig. Something happened and they did not play. Because the other elephant 6 band, Apples in Stereo, drew a weak crowd to Whelans, I am inclined to think they did not sell many tickets (I will happily stand corrected if this is not the case). It’s a shame, because Elf Power are great.

So instead of blogging about Elf Power, I would like to draw everybody’s attention to the strongest song in the European electronic tradition. It is called ‘I Feel Love’ and it is by Donna Summer. You may have heard it here or there, as part of a compilation, or at a cheesey party. But have you really listened to it? This song is Europe claiming electronic music back from the states. It is us saying, yes we can do this too, and do it differently. It is dripping in an addictive European soul. It bawls out for people to dance, move and forget everything in a gigantic electronic blur. It is a call to party. A hymn to hedonism. A soulful bawl of the future of techno. It is literally one of the most thrilling songs ever written. Enjoy.

I feel love.
See yis soon!

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