Future Days Festival: Vicar Street Saturday June 14th
June 17, 2008 by Darragh McCausland
Filed under Reviews
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!
Poor Richie was hopping around like a maniac for the first few songs of his set. It was a bit uncomfortable until he settled down.
The pointless techno song is genius, too. It’s just a weapon he keeps in his arsenal, in case a set needs three minutes of pointless techno at any point. Used to perfection that night.
Excellent night’s entertainment all in all.
Missed the lot. Commence flagellation with barbed wire….now.
Does this count for writing these days?
A journalist that doesn’t study or at least listen to any of the bands music before jumping to an obvious conclusion that they “sound like animal collective”? Just like any electonic act sounds like Aphex twin. Any indie act sound like animal collective and so on and so on. Lets refer to wikipedia for my facts. Oh brill if i wanted to read wikipedia I’d go there.
Whoever wrote this article must think they are of a higher calibre of indie kid as he refers to the other usual types of kids that wear cardigans or hair-slides, obviously he’s so much cooler than them cos he’s been to a Dan Deacon gig, probaly didn’t even pay in either unlike the other kids.
In the long run, it’s very tiring to read a review where the only act the writer can refer to is Animal Collective when they clearly don’t know much outside their infatuation with above band. Try widening your horizons and then write again, until then don’t bother.
Hi there tonneofnails! Did you call yourself that because you were going to come down on me like a tonne of nails, or do you just like nails? Or maybe its your Emo nickname on myspace.
1: I don’t think all indie sounds like animal collective, but I think that bands who sound like animal collective sound like animal collective. High places sounded ridiculously derivative of animal collective from where I was sitting. The sampled rhythms they used live have crept into a lot of new indie since Strawberry Jam and Person Pitch (Panda Bear).
2: Wikipedia: Err, what’s with the hating on wikipedia? Last time I checked it was a good one stop shop for finding out small pieces of general information on things I don’t know about. I was hardly going to write a fucking academic treatise on White Williams, or represent them in court (for crimes against music maybe haha) so I didn’t think it was necessary to phone up their record company to verify the veracity of the few shreds of information I found out about them on Wikipedia.
3: Indie Kids. Jesus, this was a gentle poke at a tribe that I pretty much belong to. I own many’s a cardigan and have also worn the odd slide in my hair. However, it would appear that affectionate humour only works with people who haven’t had a sense of humour bypass.
4: Animal Collective again: I don’t just refer to animal collective. They happened to spring into my mind though. I wonder why? Anyway, I also referred to Spaceman 3, Suicide and Mogwai, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and the mighty Jar Jar Binks who is supporting Lenny Kravitz in Phoenix park.
To sum up and defend what I wrote above. It was a blog about a gig I was going to anyway. I didn’t owe it to anybody to research High Places and White Williams before I went. I wrote my impressions. It’s a blog. It’s meant to be fairly humorous and flippant. If, on the other hand, I was contractually obliged to review this objectively for a major newspaper or a print magazine then maybe some of your points would be valid. All I can say to you here is chill out man.
Clearly T.O.N. can’t chill Darragh. He was too angry to even spell properly:
Any indie act sound (should be ’sounds’)
lets (should be ‘let’s’)
probaly (should be ‘probably’).
i (should be ‘I’).
Anger is never an excuse for sloppy grammar.
Hype Places were a bit dodgy. Animal Collective are spreading as an influence. Deerhunter indeed did not sound or look like Animal Collective.
I still don’t like the song Phil Lynott past the point where it stops being observation and starts being adoration. Anyone who has spent any time listening to Phillo and practicing cycles of three will agree I feel.
Sounds like ‘ton of shite’ is a member of one of the bands you bagged…great review of the show..and no, you don’t owe it to anyone to research any of these ten a penny derivative US indy bands who are playing 30 shows a week to empty venues in Dublin, just because they are support acts at a gig you’ve reviewed. To suggest you should is ludicrous in the extreme.
Underworld do sound a bit like Aphex Twin though
My cat’s breath smells like catfood
Hi Darragh, I remember when you wrote about The Shins’ “Chutes Too Narrow”. I went on to buy it and you were right it is amazingly good. Hope you’re doing well.
These comment bits could be like the letters page in the NME, you’d always have someone write in - often in crayon - to take a journalist to task over something (”Was [INSERT NAME OF JOURNALIST HERE] even at the same gig as me??” etc), and the complaint would be dismissed with a withering aside. But not here! Long live the internet!
I like Tonneofnails use of the phrase “a higher calibre of indie”. I’m going to use that one.
Ciarán, like I said somehere else it’s cool to see you knocking around analogue. Will I see you out some night? Do come to gift, the night my girlfriend DJs in Spy and which I have been shamelessly plugging on me own blog (cos I’m obviously completely impartial here on Analogue, ahem). You’re a higher calibre of music critic. Now in retrospect maybe I was a little harsh on High Places Tonneofnails, but music journalism should not be about retrospect, it should be about the dizzy moment. Otherwise, it would not be called music journalism, it would merely be called ’scribbledy dibbledy shite on a stick’
Oh yes I’ll come along, I’ll arrange it via your blog maybe. No, I think you dealt with the complaint quite well, don’t get me wrong. It made me think how horrible it will be when someone takes me up over something I write here! I’m scared already.