Melt Banana: Crawdaddy June 20th

“We are Melt Banana from Tokyo, Japan!” shouts Yasuko Onuki as the band begin to furiously blast out hardcore noise-rock to the largest and sweatiest crowd I’ve seen in Crawdaddy for a long time. The place is jam-packed with obvious devotees who recklessly mosh to one of the best live bands around. That is if you like ear-shattering volume, minute long songs and surgical masks.

Before the show I was just as sceptical as you probably are right now. Melt Banana’s albums are notorious for being pretty inaccessible without investing a serious amount of commitment and my brief flirtation with them left me feeling apprehensive about what was to come. So it was with a healthy degree of fear that I listened to Party Weirdo, the excellent support, and waited for what I expected to be an hour and half of aural assault.

And that’s exactly what I got. Loud, short bursts of crazily distorted and layered guitar from Agata (who in his trademark surgical mask cut a pretty vultureific figure). Half-rap shouty vocals and killer poses from lead lady Yasuko. All accompanied by rumbling bass and frantic drumming. It amounted to a terrifying noise and peaked at the point Yasuko announced they were going to play seven short songs, which they delivered in around roughly two and a half minutes.

It was all that I expected it to be. Yet I didn’t expect that I would enjoy it so much. In fact I was completely won over by the sheer force of the music. The thing is that at points they would hit upon riffs and grooves that any regular band would turn into fantastic songs. In Melt Banana’s hands they were swiftly and deliberately deconstructed. It was captivating knowing they could easily create great songs but refused to. Instead they pushed these musical nuggets to the extremities of speed and sound. They created a constantly changing tension that combined with Agata’s theatrics, Yasuko’s slight tongue in cheek humour and the pure energy of the bass and drums all amounted to a great gig.

It may not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re ever sick to death of the same old, same old indie/electronic/folksy introspection that pervades alternative music Melt Banana provide a good antidote. A shot of highly distilled rock.

John Matthias: Stories from the Watercooler

John Matthias
Stories from the Watercooler

Matthias is not only a schoolmate of Thom Yorke: he also played strings on The Bends. Yet his preoccupations are more in keeping with Yorke’s solo project – ‘The Eraser’- than with that other band from Oxford. Disillusionment with modern life is coupled with banjo and harmonium accompaniment- an arrangement that Matthias’ modernist poet namesake would enjoy. Amid Cold Cut’s sparse production Matthias’ somber, gravelly voice tells tales of terrorism (‘One Sunny Morning in the No-Fly Zone), small town rivalry (King of a Small Town) and busking (‘Stocktaking’). Wry lyrics sometimes belittle content- not least when he describes bombs with Britney Spears’ face painted on them. Ultimately, however, the suite of ’12 short stories put to song’ overcomes such obstacles.

‘Stories from the Watercooler’ offers an experience akin to visiting a house where you once lived. Things that were once familiar have changed, and things that you were once assured of have become unstable. Lyrically alienating, but melodically embracing, it’s a record that is at odds with its surroundings.

Tindersticks: The Hungry Saw

Tindersticks
The Hungry Saw
Beggar’s Banquet Records

‘The Hungry Saw’, Tindersticks’ 7th album, was recorded in a home studio in France, where lead singer Stuart Staples now lives, because he felt ‘hemmed-in’ in London. It shows. The record aims for Scott Walker darkness and melancholia but instead, gets stuck in mid-life crisis territory. Where Stuart Staples’ baritone was once laconic and knowing, it now sounds like a morose bachelor uncle at a family Christmas party.

Melodically, and lyrically, ‘The Hungry Saw’ covers well-trodden ground. Ostensibly a song about the loss of innocence, and containing po-faced lyrics that speak of a ‘regression into the womb to find nothing at all’, ‘Boobar Come Back to Me’ is the height of self-indulgence. Meanwhile, ‘The Flicker of a Little Girl’ nods its head to the melody from Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Bring on the Dancing Horses’. End track ‘The Turns We Took’ briefly reverts to Tindersticks’ earlier, more experimental ‘My Sister’ years, but unfortunately veers back to the middle-aged plod of the rest of the album all too quickly.

The instrumentation saves the album however, thanks to strings arranger Lucy Wilkins. The pedal notes, creeping bass and tinkly upper-register pianos are reminiscent of Nick Cave’s soundtrack work- especially on the opening track ‘Introduction’ and ‘On the Other Side of the World’. The swooping violins on the final track and the Mc Garrigle Sisters-esque haunting backing vocals on ‘All the Love’ give the listener hope that Tindersticks haven’t lost their talent, they’ve just mislaid it.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy - Live at Vicar Street

Vicar Street’s full of wage slaves and moneyed ex-hips, most drunk and rowdy. A few in the industry are here too, including (according to Bren) Dan Deacon and Si Schroder. Following an amazing set by Baby Dee, Bonnie “Prince” Billy shambles onto stage with his band. They’re a ramshackle lot, the percussionist looks like a refugee from the Gypsy Kings, the double bassist looks plain bored, I’m sure the guitarist was in Mercury Rev and the violinist seems utterly out of place, given that she’s actually quite attractive. Bonnie “Prince” Billy (appearing as part of the Future Days Festival) himself is dressed all in grubby white, jeans and T, both much too small for him, neither attempting to disguise his paunch. His hair and beard are unkempt, giving the impression of feral 1890’s trailer trash. He’s on form, despite all this, lightening quick with the drunken audience:

Drunken ‘Office’ Drone - I’ve shaved my penis!
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy - Did you shave it off?

Quick as a snap, an instinctive entertainer he apes and gesticulates wildly, screwing up his face and amazingly agile eyebrows throughout the set. The mic’s about six inches too low for him, so he has to stoop in each time to sing, leaning forward, contorted. He’s in fine voice too. It can often seem, especially on his recorded work, that Bonnie “Prince” Billy is hiding his voice in duets or with layers of backing singers. Whilst these are present tonight, his voice is strong and piercing, close to sharpness, which adds great vulnerability and humour to the performance. Instrumentally the band are tight, especially percussionist Michael Zerang whose instinctive and restrained playing keep the rest on a leash. Although they don’t stray far from the original material, the band’s playing carefully interweaves and counter points the vocal harmonies. Oldhams’ electric guitar is rarely used, and then only to punctuate and accentuate rather than dominate, and the acousticity lends a timelessness and sentimentality to the whole experience.

Emmett Kelly and Jennifer Hutt, playing guitars and violin respectively, sing beautifully. I did Kelly an injustice saying he was in Mercury Rev; he just looks it, but he has a real talent and I would like to see him tour here alone.

The jaunty bombasticism of R Kelly’s ‘The Worlds Greatest‘ takes on a precariousness and aspirational quality, making it a celebration not merely of one man but of all of us. It is in such moments of quiet, when Oldham voice is most clear, the backing music and singing seeming to push him on rather than join him, that the night is at its best. He is so at home on stage: bunny hopping and miming, and yet backs up this knowing irony with real substance, genuine emotion. His penultimate song is a spine tingling rendition of ‘I See A Darkness’. Its a brilliant song anyway, but there, in Vicar Street, wearing clothes too small for him, flip flops and facial hair stolen from a sergeant major in the Boer War, with drunken office workers and the tragic posers, I See A Darkness shines brilliant, turning what could have seemed glib, or fake, to something amazing.

Baby Dee - Live at Vicar St

Support for Will Oldham at Sundays gig was provided by the enigmatic and unexpectedly wonderful Baby Dee. Antony Hegarty with a sense of humour, Baby Dee begins with the delicately beautiful ‘Look at Me’, on piano with Cello accompaniment. As the set progresses, it opens into a rich and full bodied four-piece cabaret, as Dee flits from piano to harp.

As a transsexual Baby Dee is ludicrous; cracking with oafish masculinity, like John Lithgow in the World According to Garp. As an artist she excels, weaving burlesque fairy tales that leave Vicar Street breathless - literally the venue, exhibiting an appreciation of the show far greater than that of the goateed office milksop audience, who blithy gab throughout.

Bren compares Baby Dee’s arrangements to Tom Waits’ Rain Dog LP. Dee shares too with Waits a melodramatic inconstant vocal quality, a shifting, improvisational performing style that keeps her band visibly nervous. Dee’s voice fuses the melodic unpredictability and throat catching tenderness of Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart with the tortured expressive sweetness of folk nymph Joanna Newsome. At the same time, her irreverent nuttiness belies a tight vaudevillian professionalism, reminiscent of oldball gypsy cabaret triumvirate ‘Tiger Lillies’.

Finishing off with the outrageous and captivating ‘Big Titty Bee Girl’, featuring the unforgettable line ‘You just can’t keep a good albino down’, Baby Dee delivers deliciously rakish musical theatricality, undercut with adorable self deprecation and gallant elegance.

Baby Dee’s fifth LP, the biographical ‘Safe Inside the Day‘ (produced incidentally by Will Oldham, and featuring a host of musoratti from Max Moston to Matt Sweeney), is out now on Drag City.

Future Days Festival: Vicar Street Saturday June 14th

Dan the Man: Pic by Loreana Rushe

As part of last weekend’s Future Days festival, Vicar Street turned into a hip musical playground by hosting a line-up of acts that was so ‘indie’ I’m surprised people weren’t being turned away at the door for not wearing cardigans or hair-slides. Here is a short digest of what went down in the big venue on Saturday night.

High Places
It’s 8.45pm and Vicar Street is worryingly empty. The lights are up before High Places (as they will be between all the acts tonight), and the increased illumination accentuates the cavernous emptiness of the place. We’re in tumbleweed territory before boy/girl Brooklyn duo High Places emerge. However, as soon as they start, the lights drop sharply and people start reverse-melting out of the shadows like vampires. Soon enough, there is a moderate and respectable crowd up front. I know nothing of High Places so I don’t feel all that equipped to comment in detail on their live show. All I can say is it sounds extremely influenced by Animal Collective, and on my first impression, in a derivative and flimsy way. There are sampled tribal-type beats, some live drumming, wigged out sound effects and the girl sings in an insipid, disengaged manner. Post Animal Collective bands are multiplying like bunnies at the moment. But while superficially adapting that band’s current sound might be achievable for groups like High Places, getting near the blistering creative genius behind it is the real challenge. Someone told me their EP is well wort a listen though. So I could be wrong.

White Williams
White Williams are another band I could write what I know about on a postage stamp. According to Wikipedia, this is how their record label describes their new album: “unapologetic pop that flirts with the vacuous nostalgia of the American dream; engaging ambiguous and schizophrenic instruments with impressionistic lyrics, driven by a casually heterosexual backbeat.” Ahem, a casually heterosexual backbeat? The vacuous nostalgia of the American dream? Who writes this shit? As punishment for that sentence I refuse to say anything more about their show apart from this…the lead singer does a freakishly studied Avey Tare (singer from Animal Collective) impression; same hat, same shirt, same dance, same strangled vocal yelps. Tonight Matthew I am going to be someone incredibly more talented than me.

Deerhunter
Just as I’m starting to worry that the world is insidiously being taken over by Animal Collective underlings, Deerhunter emerge to a respectably full venue. They look tired. Bassist Josh Fauver has huge bags under his eyes and singer Bradford is cranky, moaning more than once about the house lights. This could be a real disaster for a band renowned for their erratic live performances. If Deerhunter are in shitty form, they tend to play a shitty gig. It’s as simple as that. They are transparent that way. Somehow, things work out well enough. They don’t exactly bring the house down, but the clutch of new songs from Microcastle sound more alive, more muscular, and dare I say it, more Cryptograms-esque than they did at the last show in Whelans. It’s as if they recorded an album of poppy material because they were bored of drone rock, then took it on the road, realised they were bored of pop and started droning out again. The crowd are familiar with much of the new album (it was leaked a shocking five months ahead of its release date). What I hear tonight is, at the odd intense moment, like the new album being covered by Suicide, Spaceman 3 and Mogwai all at once. A short set is polished off with a ferocious reading of ‘Heatherwood’, which was sadly missed last time around. Man, they look tired though.

Dan Deacon
He does his usual thing, does our Dan, ‘cept on a much bigger scale. For those not familiar with a Dan Deacon show, it’s basically a completely interactive experience. It veers from ridiculously sweaty communal freak-outs in front of a strobey green skull as a crouching Dan messes with pedals and samplers, to his playful hi-jinks that involve, well, everyone. Tonight, these include a massive game of tag that turns the entire crowd into a vortex of sweaty bodies racing around Mr Deacon. He merrily conducts this madness in a pair of luminous pink shorts and a Jar Jar Binks t-shirt. It’s hard to describe these shows without making them sound lame and gimmicky. Rest assured, they are not. All the kerr-azy games hang together on the frame of Deacon’s music which is adventurous, forward-looking and complex. It’s also completely banging. By the end of an epic Wham City (his signature tune) thousands of mad hands are reaching toward a little light bulb that Deacon is holding up as the techno apocalypse crashes all around. Pink Floyd may have lasers and 20 foot high inflatable pigs, but that skull and that little light-bulb are the coolest fucking special effects I’ve seen at a gig. Small is beautiful. I heard this is the last we’ve seen of this incarnation of Deacon. I wonder what his next trick will be?

Richie Lynott? Pic by Loreana Rushe

Jape
Richie Egan must feel the pressure following up Deacon after the hardcore shagging he gave the crowd. It must feel like getting into bed with a spent lover after they’ve done ten rounds with Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt. He even humbly admits toward the end of the gig that he was shitting it. He needn’t have worried. After warming the post-coital crowd up with a few cuts from his solid new record Ritual, things really take off with ‘floating’ and from then on in its a beat-heavy ride to a barn-storming finish with that monster of a track, ‘I was a man’ which plays like ‘floating’’s big brother on ecstasy. The home crowd lap it up. Richie emerges one last time for an encore of newly minted anthem ‘Phil Lynott’ that morphs into a techno kiss-off as a very much alive-and-kicking bass player from Crumlin crowd-surfs through the throngs. Indeed, Jape were so good that midway though their set another Analogue journalist ended up punching himself in the face during a moment of mad self-harming excitement. Rock’n'Roll!

Daedelus: Love To Make Music To

Daedelus, a Los Angeles producer lauded for his uniquely genre sampled releases, which owe a lot to his musically spoilt background in jazz and electronic music not to mention his aptitude for an array of instruments; has released this similarly dappled album.

A feature of his music which has thankfully been sustained in this release is his signature indulgence in musical anachronisms amid electronic backdrops. Throwbacks to Glenn Miller big band era and samples of ragtime piano relate his keenness for distinctively era specific samples and particularly for those belonging to the 30’s and 40’s. The frenetic whiplash electronic interruption in ‘Drummery Jam’ for example is fed to us through an oneiric depression era chorus in its introduction.

Daedelus is at his best cutting up samples of unusual sounds and blending them into chaotic collages rather than a concentration of a single style. Unfortunately this is made all too clear on tracks such as ‘Hrs:Mins:Sec’ and ‘Bass In It’ which due to their sparse use of this skill cause him to shoot wide of the left-field hip-hop that he successfully produces on the track ‘Touchstone’.

But these weaker moments only serve to emboss the albums highpoints, tracks such as ‘If We Should’ where doppler-esque glissando is cut short by synths sighing beneath Laura Darlington’s ambient vocals. Also the catchy ‘Make It So’ and the albums opener ‘Fair Weather Friends’ both feature the same endearingly optimistic beat.
It’s Daedelus’ willingness to introduce soundscapes paved with everything from samba drumbeats to electronic bleeps and cut-ups of noise turned music that redeem this album from the more forgettable tracks that unfortunately score through the continuity of its better tracks…

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRJ2YvRv3N4]

Vetiver: Crawdaddy June 8th

After a weekend of bombast and electro-shock, Vetiver provided the perfect Sunday night soother.

The vaguely hippieish filled out Crawdaddy last night, as these Devendra Banhart collaborators took to the stage to promote their latest album Thing of the Past. It’s a collection of covers, remoulded in Vetiver’s americana heavy, country blues style and includes tracks as diverse as Hawkwind’s ‘Hurry On Sundown’ and Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘The Swimming Song’. However despite crowd requests, which prompted groans from the band, the rollicking Hawkind track wasn’t played. Instead Vetiver took it easy.

Their sound is so mellow and soft that as soon as those fingers start plucking you can just imagine you’re sitting on a porch, beer in hand, watching the sunset, while in the background the cicadas creak and the wireless gurlges in the kitchen. Their music lulls you with a gentle sway. It’s not the most amazing sound ever, nor the most exciting, however it could claim to be the easiest to listen to. Yet this overriding sense of peace that descends upon the gig dosen’t overwhelm the music itself. ‘Been So Long’ and ‘Luna Sea’ stand out as prime examples of well crafted songs that although they fit into the mood of the concert also entirely transcend it. Their quality allows them to stand alone, isolated from the set. It is this that makes Vetiver worth listening to.

Vetiver’s Thing of the Past is out now

America’s Most Haunted

In my inbox this morning was a heartwarming Monday-morning surprise. Analogue under-rated indie favourites The Antlers are free-releasing a new EP, New York Hospitals to coincide with the NY-based After The Jump Fest this 21st of June. In ringleader Pete Silberman’s own press-released words the EP consists of “Two covers from New York-ish bands from around 1999 surround an original, entitled “Sylvia (An Introduction)”, intended to introduce the focus of the soon to be completed Hospice LP.” Last time we talked, Silberman chatted about his burgeoning My Bloody Valentine affections, and their influence can be heard seeping through the EP, as the three songs absolutely drip with reverb and ethereal vocals. Yet the New Yorker’s high-frequency vocals and increasingly orchestral compositions lend a particularly singular sound to a record with more cover material than original.

“Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing”, from the Magnetic Fields seminal 69 Lovesongs filters the song through some Mazzy Star aesthetics to spectral effect (get used to thesaurus-ized versions of the word “haunted” for this blog entry… comes up quite a bit). It is a deceivingly hopeful opener, and one look at the lyrics set the song up for an impending darkness. Silberman’s lyrics complete the Herculean challenge of matching the haunted chill Merritt’s own words invoke with second song “Sylvia (Introduction)”. He sings in his Elliot Smith-like vibrato ostensibly about Sylvia Plath (It made you crawl under that house/And stick your head under the stove), possibly from the point of view of Ted Hughes. Rather though, it seems like a personal allegory for a Plath-like person in his own life, and the spectres they carry through their lives. Their inability to cope with mortality at an early age “makes you sting/…makes you want to kill“, and Silberman, or Silberman’s character struggles to understand his Sylvia’s morose pain. Set against the same sea of reverb “Sylvia (Introduction)” is otherworldly enough to keep Yvette Fielding in business.

The closing Yo La Tengo cover, “Tears In Your Eyes” from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out acts as a sort of desperate attempt to save the aforementioned Sylvia, with it’s assurances that “Darkness always turns into the Dawn.” A beautiful rendition, if not somewhat unmemorable, rounds a short EP off with the commendable feat of actually engaging with the source material of the songs Silberman has produced here, and is a promising opening salvo from forthcoming sixth album Hospice. Mind you, if it’s this macabre in the New York Hospital, I’ll be needing a much bigger thesaurus for the Hospice…

Get the EP here.

To Protect and Entertain, In Party We Trust…

Ed Banger parties have a reputation for being a bit wild, and last night’s sets at Transmission in The Button Factory from label head Busy P and DJ Mehdi were not about to break the mould. Playing to a packed and wildly enthusiastic crowd, the Ed Banger head honcho took over from local boy Arveene shortly before 1am, and, opening with Sebastian’s Motor and Mr Oizo’s latest, Z, things got off to a rocking start.

Ed Banger has come in for its fair share of criticism recently, on account of a couple of lacklustre releases and the label’s extended association with the seemingly less popular US electro scene, but when you find yourself in an atmosphere of such reckless abandon, surrounded by people having this much fun, it’s difficult not to join in.

DJ Mehdi took over an hour and a half later and gave a set that lived up to his delirious standards. Looking slightly surly before the gig, as soon as he hit the decks out came that mile-wide smile, as he sang along to the tracks he was playing with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning. His set encompassed the expected Ed Banger/Institubes/Boys Noize Records fare, together with other French stalwarts such as Daft Punk (until recently managed by one Pedro Winter, aka Busy P), as well as taking in influences from further afield, such as the Baltimore-inspired Be from Steve Angello and Laidback Luke, and Debonair Samir’s original Baltimore anthem Samir’s Theme.

The last time I saw Busy P and Mehdi on the same bill was a few days before Christmas in 2006, and, given the date, the crowd wasn’t huge. While a few characters surrounded the decks, the stage was full of dancing girls, with the odd stray male being promptly removed by security. This time around, a much bigger, and largely male, crowd ascended towards the stage, again meeting the same fate, all except for two girls who were called specifically to stay on stage by one of the DJs. What a life they lead.

The night closed in a slightly bizarre fashion – while Mehdi’s show in October with A-Trak ended with Junior Senior’s irritating Move Your Feet, the last track played this time around was The Buggles’ “classic” Video Killed the Radio Star. I scoff now, but maybe in three decades Junior Senior will be held in the same regard that The Buggles are today. Shortly after the music stopped, the fire alarms went off for an uncomfortably long time, prompting cries of “I’m in love the disco sirens” … Well, maybe it was just me. Midfield General is playing Andrew’s Lane in a few weeks time, maybe I’ll have someone to sing along with me then. Anyway, fire alarms blaring, P and Mehdi were led out of The Button Factory through hordes of adoring fans, male and female. After the reaction the two DJs had last night, one can only imagine how well a full Ed Banger lineup would go down on these shores. The guys themselves might like the venue, but I doubt The Button Factory could hold the multitudes that would flock to such an event.

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