This little patch of the interweb galaxy fell into disuse & disrepair for most of 2009. Not through a lack of will or best intentions, but due to a poisonous combination of block, perfectionist ambition (AKA fastidiousness), and an increasing paucity of ‘free’ time (time which I feel should be better spent listening / experiencing music, rather than writing about it afterwards). Nonetheless, I would like to keep this gnarled & weed-filled garden somewhat tended – one of the main motivations for planting it in the first place was so that I’d have some written record of my music-related experiences, something to (re)call on in years to come (when I’ve completely obliterated my memory).
So here’s to a bit more activity in 2010!
‘Tis of course the season for list-making, Best Of’s and the like. At this time it’s worth rehashing this old chestnut. Read with bated breath to see if it’s Animal Collective or Fever Ray that’ll make you a crazy fool for never having been interested in hearing them (yep, guilty as charged…).
Also worth checking out is the Village Voice’s review of the hyped alt. music genres of the past 10 years (thanks Plasmatron).
I readily admit to falling under the spell of (and still listening to) some of these, but thank fuck Crabcore hasn’t got its pincers into me. Take a look at these Emo berks.
And staying true to this being an unashamed place of Albini worship, here is my favourite music-related photo of 2009: Steve discovering that he really likes fish, picture courtesy of his new bride.
And the great man is not just the God of Guitar Skinng, Recorder-in-Chief and Nutter Butter cookie connoisseur – he’s a bloody philanthropist as well!
My first ever white Christmas also turned out to be the saddest, with the news of Vic Chesnutt’s death by suicide on 25 December. He was 45 years old. A car accident at age 18, which left him partially-paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, is often credited for sparking his true creative flowering, as during his convalescence he devoured literature & poetry and had to relearn how to play the guitar with fingers that didn’t work so good no more. I’d assumed that his physical disability was also responsible for his complex relationship with death and mortality, seemingly flailing out at it one moment, calmly inviting it in the next. But a look at this biography shows that the first of five (suicide-attempt-caused) comas happened in his 16th year – the man clearly struggled with pain most of his life, his quadriplegia providing the emotional torment with a tangible sting.
Emasculate me with your biology.
Bend me, break me, I’m worthless.
(from “Arthur Murray”, on “The Salesman & Bernadette”, 1998)
Although his name was one I’d seen bigged-up for some time – he was clearly a songwriter’s songwriter – my first acquaintance with his music was 2007’s “North Star Deserter”, his stark songs given added ferocity by a backing band of Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto and members of A Silver Mt. Zion. This is a collection of blackly humourous musings on the nature of death & decay, backed with the apocalyptic guitar hurricane and mournful strings of early GYBE!, and made me an instant convert to one of our time’s most unique voices. I was privileged to see him play in Amsterdam in early 2008 – so fragile and small in his wheelchair, the lay of his guitar looking uncomfortable, the strumming of his two working fingers seemingly painful – yet so defiant, spiky and larger than life. He, and the songs through which he laid his life & struggles bare, easily filled every nook of the Paradiso hall that night, ably supported by what he called “the greatest backing band in the world”. It felt as though everyone present in that old church was in tune to the fact that we were witnessing something special. When I look back on a life of amazing live music experiences, that night will always stand out.
Chesnutt certainly didn’t let his disability hold him back in sharing his songs with the wider world – he has released some 15+ albums, culminating in 2009’s “At The Cut” and “Skitter On Take-Off” (both released just a few months before his death). “At The Cut” again has Picciotto & the ASMZ’ers fleshing out Vic’s spare compositions. It is another set of literate dark-heart-on-sleeve contemplations, the stand-out track being “I’ve Flirted With You All My Life”, which Vic himself described as “a love song. It’s a suicide’s breakup song with death.” Although Vic’s multiple suicide attempts heightened the possibility that he could take himself away from us at any time, I had thought that the hope displayed in that song – “Oh Death, really, I’m not ready!” – meant that Vic had truly turned a corner, no longer wishing to die. It was a naïve thought – the struggle with manic depression is characterised by its peaks and troughs, following no linear path…
Why do I insist on drinking myself to the grave?
Why do I dream of a cozy coffin?
I had all these plans of great things to accomplish,
but I end up totally pathetic more than often. (from “Old Hotel”, on “The Salesman & Bernadette”, 1998)
It’s at times such as these that you wish that people like Vic could see themselves as the rest of the world sees them, not just how they see themselves. Listening to his self-confessionals it would seem he considered himself a coward, weak, invisible – something worthless, small & broken – yet all the tributes flowing in provide a completely contrary view, best encapsulated by this one quote: Vic was “a tiny giant of a man”. In the words of his great friend Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses, 50ft Wave): “what he left here is the sound of a life that pushed against its constraints, as all lives should. It’s the sound of someone on fire. It makes this planet better.”
You can listen to a 6 song sampler of Vic’s work with Picciotto/ASMZ here.
The Six Strings That Drew Blood (Rowland Around In That Stuff)
To add to the anti-festive mood round NarcoAgent Towers, I learned on New Year’s Eve that Rowland S Howardhad passed away the day before. He’d fought a long battle against liver cancer, finally succumbing at age 50. For me Howard is one of the all-time greats of post-punk guitar – it’s his searing riffs that gave the swaggering, menacing The Birthday Party much of its swagger and menace. And what’s not to like about a man that listed his influences as “Hanging out with girls, smoking, fraternizing with girls, talking to girls on the telephone while smoking, smoking with girls.”
Howard joining proto-Birthday Party band The Boys Next Door in 1978 is credited with sparking that band’s transformation into something truly unique, and after the Party was over he pursued a varied solo career, collaborating with Lydia Lunch, Nikki Sudden, and also doing a stint in an early incarnation of Crime & The City Solution (after which he formed These Immortal Souls with other ex-Crims). His first solo album in 10 years – “Pop Crimes” – was released in late 2009. RIP.
Here’s the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party song “The Friend Catcher” performed live in Bremen, Germany sometime in 1982 (taken from “Live 1981-82“), as good a showcase as any for Rowland’s talent.
I’m by no means an experienced festival-goer. Despite having soiled with saliva the Reading & Glastonbury ad pages of my late 80s Melody Makers & NMEs, by the time I was in close enough proximity to attend one of those ‘holy grail’ festivals the line-ups didn’t hold enough interest to warrant spending three days in an increasing state of mud bespatterment. For me it has to be first & foremost about the music, maannn – I view as alien those who attend these events just for the ‘vibe’, wandering around dazed & confused, missing all the performances in lieu of some altered state of camaraderie. So when the deserving-of-huge-reward-in-the-afterlife Barry Hogan and Helen Cottage launched the inauguralAll Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2000, it was a dream come true – one of my favourite bands (Mogwai) choosing all of their favourite bands (amongst whom Shellac, Papa M, Wire, Sonic Youth, The For Carnation, Bardo Pond) to play in a seaside holiday camp where the punters had a proper roof over their heads, a plumbed-in toilet and self-catering facilities. That April weekend was one of the best of my life thus far, and subsequent ATP experiences (Shellac 2002, The Director’s Cut 2004, Slint 2005, Dirty Three 2007) similarly served up never-to-be-forgotten idyll on the English coast.
That the fine folks of ATP have over the years achieved the seemingly impossible by tempting out of retirement Slint, Television, My Bloody Valentine and now the Jesus Lizard, only adds to their legend, and to my mind you can’t have much better endorsement than that of the notoriously promoter-skeptical & festival-avoiding Steve Albini, who said “There are three things in the world that I endorse: Abbey Road Studios, Nutter Butter Sandwich Cookies and All Tomorrow’s Parties” (a somewhat healthier endorsement than that which appeared in the liner notes of Big Black’s “Songs About Fucking“: “Steve uses and endorses heroin”). Albini’s band Shellac are such regular ATP’ers that they’re now officially the “ATP house band”.
On the return journeys after those wonderful weekends there have always been daydream conversations about “if you were curating ATP…”.
In 2007 the organizers gave form to those daydreams, introducing the concept of “ATP vs the Fans“, where the ATP folk chose half the line-up and ticket holders collectively got to select the rest (via a voting system). That concept has been resurrected for one of the May weekends in 2009, this time with the stipulation that votes can only be cast for bands that have not previously played an ATP festival in the UK. After purchasing tickets, attendees each get to submit a wishlist of 10 acts – these votes are tallied into a master list and every two weeks the top 2 names on that list are approached to play the festival (should the top 2 prove unavailable then the next 2 are approached). Of course it is unreasonable to expect people to splash the cash without some initial enticement, and the organisers more than held up their end by announcing a (to me) mindblowing first few names for their portion of the bill: the reformation of the Jesus Lizard!!! the reformation of Sleep!!! Anti-Pop Consortium!!! Grails!!!
On the basis of those four alone this became a must-attend event for me, and tickets have duly been procured and votes cast. Excluding bands that have previously played these awesome festivals was a tough assignment, as so many of my favourites have already appeared, but in the end the difficulty was reducing the list down to just ten.
from top, l-r: Ganger (2000), Slint (2005), Camber Sands (2002), Múm (2005), Zeni Geva (2002), Dirty Three (2007), Camber Sands (2005), Boredoms (2004), Low (2002)
So now the wait in hope that I’m not too far out of step with the other attendees, and that at least some of my choices end up playing. So far no good, with only two of those choices – Future Of The Left and Jesu - scoring high enough to be proffered an invite (which FotL have duly accepted, still waiting on Mr JK Flesh). Of the current list of 100, only a handful of my choices are languishing in the lower reaches of the chart, so it seems I’ll have to rely on a ‘wildcard pick’ to see any more of my wishlist tread the Butlins boards in early May, but there is still plenty of time to go so I remain hopeful. None-the-less, with recent confirmations from Electric Wizard, Alan Sparhawk’s Retribution Gospel Choir and Qui, offers out to Neurosis, Killing Joke, Wolves In The Throneroom, Harvey Milk and Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, and faith in the further choices of the ATP curators, the line-up for “ATP: The Fans Strike Back” promises to be an awesome one and I’m already gleefully rubbing body parts in anticipation of my May trip to the wilds of Minehead!
On the Mixtapes page you’ll find a companion-compilation to the 2007 ATP which was curated by Dirty Three.
My votes went to :
Alasdair Roberts
Boduf Songs
Epic45
Future Of The Left
Jesu
Killdozer
Nadja
Scout Niblett
These New Puritans
The Young Gods
The votes of my unmarried female companion :
Aesop Rock
Alasdair Roberts
Boduf Songs
Epic45
Jesu
Killdozer
Nadja
Scout Niblett
Tunng
Whip / Timesbold
Last Saturday night (7 Feb) saw the kick-off of my 2009 gig ’season’ with Giant Sand’s performance in the Paradiso’s upstairs room. I’m not familiar with Howe Gelb’s work, knowing more about him from association (the kudos of some of my favourite female performers in Scout Niblett, Kristin Hersh and PJ Harvey, and the Giant Sand offshoots of Calexico and Friends Of Dean Martinez) than from his records – but his intuitive, virtuosic playing (on both guitar and piano) and personable good humour quickly won me over. Gelb’s ‘desert rock’ compositions are now fleshed-out by a trio of Danes (having married a Dane, Gelb splits his time between the Arizona desert and the more temperate climes of Aarhus), but the sound is still pure Americana, evoking not only the scrubby skree of the Sonoran Desert, but also Prohibition-era speakeasies, the red vinyl of diner booths, blood moons and lost highways. He wrenches some amazing sounds from his guitar, sometimes even to the obvious bemusement of his bandmates, and at times spews some squalling, corrosive riffs that Steve Albini would be proud to call his own.
In a tribute to Cramps frontman Lux Interior, who sadly died in the week, Gelb launches into a Duane Eddy-like surf-guitar riff, before reminiscing how Giant Sand opened for the Cramps in France on his first-ever European tour back in 1986. Gelb had smuggled two joints in the band of his Stetson, which were expropriated by Cramps drummer Nick Knox (although then graciously shared with their former owner), and the internationally-freighted weed, playing on European soil for the first time, in front of 3,000 people (up to that point having been used to audiences of around twenty people), and hanging with the Cramps (the Cramps!!) all made for an understandably unforgettable experience. Gelb, with his Richard Gere good looks, is in particularly good nick for his 52 years (he attributes this to the restorative powers of beer), something which is not lost on his female fans: after he educates us about the Galician saying “Os pementos de Padrón, uns pican e outros non” (the peppers of Padrón, some are hot and others not), someone upfront retorts “you’re hot!”, leaving him at a loss for words for the only time that evening. The gig closes with the band joined onstage by fellow desert-dweller Lonna Kelly, who’d played in support. The pregnant Kelly is the subject of some classic Gelb humour – joking about her waters breaking on stage: ”it’ll be just like SeaWorld: only the front two rows will get wet”. Kelly has an amazing voice, although unfortunately it suffers from not being distinctive enough – at times a dead ringer for Cat Power/Chan Marshall, at others it’s the Icelandic elven-tones of Björk or Múm’s Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir.
As this was my first live music experience of 2009 (not counting a visit earlier in the week to Amsterdam’s impressive Concertgebouw for a Wagner/Shostakovich ‘double-bill’), it caused me to reflect on the world-according-to-NarcoAgent best shows of 2008:
The year got off to a great start with an amazing performance by Vic Chesnutt, backed by various members of A Silver Mount Zion and Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto. Vic’s blackly humorous musings on mortality set the bar high, a height only reached again in late May with the powerhouse Primavera performance of Shellac (although Earth and other Primavera’sters Six Organs Of Admittance, Om, Fuck Buttons, Kinski and Scout Niblett all came close). Seeing the classic “Locust Abortion Technician”/”Hairway To Steven”-era line-up of Buttholes Surfers was a special treat, despite the presence of ”The Paul Green School Of Rock All Stars” threatening to drag the whole enterprise down into a farce unbecoming even of the Buttholes. There had initially been uncertainty over whether Paul Leary would make the cross-Atlantic journey, but make it he did, and make my night he did, he being one of the best goddamned guitarists I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing in action.
Mogwai in the atmospheric forest-enclosed amphitheatre of the Rivierenhof was a magical experience, but lacked a bit of the firepower I’ve come to expect from the Scottish Guitar Army. This was rectified two months later in the Melkweg where the volume was turned high and the jams were kicked out. Songs from “The Hawk Is Howling” made more of an impact this time round, particularly the mesmerising “Scotland’s Shame” and the triple-guitar-assault of ”Batcat” which closed the set in thunderous style. And they played “Christmas Steps”… ’nuff said. Setlist here.
The last couple of months of the year didn’t disappoint - intimate shows by Nadja and Alexander Tucker highlighting the diverse possibilities of the electrified guitar, and Genius/GZA & Killah Priest duelling the iron mics for a run-through of “Liquid Swords”.
But it was the last-but-one gig of the year that also proved to be one of its best: the forged-in-the-pits-of-hell combination of Italian axe-wielders Ufomammut and Lento packed maximum riffs-per-square-inch in to the Deventer Burgerweeshuis. The youngsters of Lento (on their first outing beyond their homeland’s borders) mix dense riffing with stretches of melodic hardcore and ambience, sometimes sounding like an instrumental Isis.
Despite the calm-in-the-eye-of-the-hurricane ambient interludes, Lento had already damaged eardrums before the Ufomammut triumvirate took to the stage with their special brand of HEAVY, heady, heretical rock. That two-thirds of Ufomammut also comprise the Malleus art collective made for a captivating visual backdrop, all fire ‘n brimstone and psychedelic swirls, and the band played an awesome set of alternately hypnotic and crushing doom-metal.
Guitarist Poia gave a masterclass in controlled yet expansive riffing, showing that it’s not how many guitars you have in your arsenal but how you use ‘em, and bandmates Vita (drums) and Urlo (bass, moog, vocals) ably supported him in creating the vast, hallucinatory doomsludge, at times swimming in Hell’s molten pits, at times in interstellar overdrive. The members of Lento joined their mentors onstage for the final two songs, playing “The Overload” and “Down” from their collaborative “Supernaturals Record One”. Two drummers, bass, moog and too many guitars to count achieved the impossible in being even heavier than what had gone before!
You can listen to the whole of Ufomammut’s 2008 album “Idolum” on Last.fm here. The Ufomammut & Lento collaboration “Supernaturals Record One” can also be listened to here.
Ufomammut & Lento releases can be obtained directly from their label Supernatural Cat.
Although this time last year I relented to the whole end-of-year list thing, through a combination of laziness and principle I’ve decided to retire from that and instead focus on more practical list-making (e.g. “Top 5 Ways To Thread The Shoelaces Of My Work Shoes” or “Top 10 Items I Discovered In My Stool This Morning”). This is not to say I don’t very much enjoy trawling the various End Of Year Best Ofs that populate the interwebosphere every January – they are a great source of new listening inspiration, and can be a useful nudge in finally going ahead and procuring that ‘buzz’ album that you’ve been meaning to check out but haven’t yet got around to (but no, that Bon Iver chappie is not for me). Particularly those lists that attempt to add a little bit of context as to why a particular recording is worthy of attention, as opposed to those un-annotated lists which I myself was guilty of. This is one I like, or this… (and for group-compiled, consensus-based lists you could do worse that check thisone out).
But this does not mean I’m above trying to foist my questionable tastes on others…
Each year I make myself a “Best Of…” compilation, trying to encapsulate the best of that year’s listening (and live) experiences over the course of a couple of mastered CDs. And so in a rare act of magnanimous generosity, I’m making that compilation available here for your listening pleasure.
If you’d like an aurally-tangible run-through of the releases that caught my ear in 2008, right-click, ‘Save As’ and put ‘em on the portable music player of your choice . Hopefully you make some enjoyable discoveries (or at the very least supress those sociopathic thoughts for an hour or two – it works for me!).
This first NarcoAgent ‘podcast’ also marks the launch of the Mixtapes page where I’ll occasionally upload other collections for your listening pleasure.
Tracklistings & associated info to be found there too.
As far as interesting performance spaces go, German motorship Stubnitz outta Rostock must surely score near the top. A working 260-footer that traverses the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the inland waterways of Germany, it offers up a floating anarcho-industrial environment where the crew live & work, putting on live music shows. And they sure run a tight ship: friendly, well-organised, great sound and some great acts performing on a full & varied programme. There have been shows by the likes of Dälek, Mouthus, Spectre and Sensational during the Stubnitz’s temporary Amsterdam stopover, but it was back in late September when I was drawn across the water to the lysergic sounds of LSD March, the Japanese guitar-&-percussion duo proud to call the the surrounds of the mighty Himeji-jō home.
To reach the Stubnitz’s mooring on the NDSM Werf we catch one of the free ferries that run regularly from Centraal Station, transporting people and their bikes across the broad IJ that divides Amsterdam from its northern suburbs. The approach to the ship is across the wide plain where around at the same time a year previously a brutal battle took place between two robot armies. Arriving on the big open deck, the location of the ship’s mooring allows great views back over the water to central Amsterdam and its other northern wharves. You then descend down into the bar area, suitably retro-futuristic in its bare-metal Mad Maxiness.
A large central opening down to the lower deck allows enjoyment of the sonic proceedings even when topping up on necessary lubricants. The stairs further down into the ship’s metal innards takes one past the back of the stage and round into the pipe-encovered belly, from where you can enjoy the performance from many different vantage points (two camerapeople up close shoot interesting views of the onstage events, broadcast to the TVs suspended in the corners of this metal maw).
First up is Ignatz, a Belgian guitarist extracting noisy blues out of his battered six-string, sitting cross-legged in front of an array of pedals. He evokes the dusty Depression-era blues when men would sell their souls at a deserted crossroads just to be able to play with style – but standing in all that steel, Bram Devens captured in close-up on the screens, the distorted electricity of it all makes for a weirdly futuristic experience. It’s feedback-drenched folk that traverses the Appalachian hills in some far-off future, akin to Flying Saucer Attack sweeping over the English moors.
LSD March’s opener is the highlight of the evening for me - desolate peals of spaghetti-western guitar, a rumbling storm of percussion, and Shinsuke Michishita’s mournful wail slowly drawing in to an eruption of metallic shards of noise. Michishita’s performance is consumed and restrained at the same time, even the slow delicate strums have a barely-suppressed force about them, before he loses himself in the anguished noise that closes the song. Michishita, his long black hair often completely covering his face, is accompanied by drummer Ikuro Takahashi (an alumnus of such luminaries as Fushitsusha, High Rise, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Nagisa Ni Te) who brings subtle accents to the songs with his expressive percussion, as well as providing the more explosive punctuations that anchor Michishita’s bashed chords.
The next song layers sparse riffs over an organic tribal beat, the two performers meshing to create a propulsive and compelling dirge that could soundtrack a crossing into the Yōkai-filled spirit world. The third and final song sees Takahashi leave his kit to display his prowess with a saxophone mouthpiece, a high-pitched squeal doing battle with Michishita’s waves of feedback scree, all captured in close-up on the surrounding screens.
Here is the first song from LSD March’s set, captured in the Museu do Chiado in Lisbon, a week before I saw them in Amsterdam.
Mogwai have a nice line in great venues. They give their acolytes the opportunity to see them in the grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, the back-to-roots basement-dive-vibe of the ICA, the faded seaside funpalace of Camber Sands, and most recently for me the open air stateliness (in SurroundSound!) of Somerset House. So it was to Antwerp for a long weekend that culminated in Mogwai playing the open-air amphitheatre (Openluchttheater) of the Rivierenhof, a large forested park to the east of the city.
Mogwai bring a particularly wet and windy August to a close by laying on arguably the best ’summer’ weekend of the year – Antwerp weekend (priority version).
Unfortunately, after a couple of days spent sampling the Bourgondian multitude of Belgian beers in glorious sunshine, rain is forecast for the evening of Mogwai’s performance. However on arrival in the park that threat looks far off, and although the clouds gather with purpose, support act Motek play to a glorious sunset - the sky an apocalyptic orange over the tall trees that surround this superb venue. There’s booze, food and even blow-up cushions to aid our comfort, it’s just a shame that there is a Mogwai-inconducive sound-level restriction on the Openluchttheater’s PA.
As the band launch into opener “The Precipice” the first drops of rain are felt, prompting the better-prepared amongst us to scrabble for their micropacked ponchos. But Murphy’s Law is repealed after just a few minutes, and although a few more droplets fall during another new song – “Scotland’s Shame” – it is only during the tram ride back to town that the ground properly gets a soaking.
New songs are interspersed with highlights from Mogwai’s thirteen-year existence, and I’m particularly happy to hear ancient artifact “Ithica 27Φ9″ played again, guitarist John Cummings and bassist Dominic Aitchison swapping instruments and the band concisely displaying their vice-like grasp of dynamics. They’re all obviously enjoying themselves a lot more than the night previous, a festival in Utrecht where they played in front of 500 Babyshambles fans – Stuart Braithwaite describes it as a “dispiriting experience” (anti-Babyshambles boo follows :)
During the guitar-and-lights assault of “Like Herod”, whose second half usually feels like the sudden arrival of a fierce storm, the wind picks up considerably, swirling through the dark looming trees that encircle us. New single “Batcat” follows, crunching guitars propelled along by the gusting wind, and is easily my favourite of the new songs that I hear for the first time tonight. Every Mogwai album needs its heavyweight anchor, and like “We’re No Here”, “Ratts Of The Capital”, “You Don’t Know Jesus”, and the heaven-and-hell ”My Father, My King” before it, this for me is Mogwai at their best, when they wield their guitars as weapons and threaten to bring it all down around us.
As soon as we hit the eye-of-the-storm with “Helicon 2″ and a cracked & fragile “Cody”, the wind dies away just as quickly as it had appeared…
The aforementioned mountain-mover “We’re No Here” is the last song of the night and ends in their customary feedback frenzy, the massed amps taking over from the restrained PA and giving us some proper Mogwai volume. John, always last to leave the stage (as the man charged with putting Part Chimp down on tape he must have armour-plated ears), is hailed with inflatable cushions – he ‘fights’ back, and then it’s over, and we’re in a dark forest at night. Into the trees…
The setlist can be found at the excellent brightlight! fansite here. And of course YouTube has some shaky handheld footage of a few of the songs…
Here is Mogwai in session for the Rob Da Bank show on BBC Radio 1 (18 August 2008), recorded live in the BBC’s Maida Vale studio:
The first half of the year has again sped by in a flash, and despite occasional protestations to the contrary I can’t resist the list-making urge, so here are the fifteen releases that most caught the ear in the first six months of 2008.
Moving to the Netherlands has by no means restricted access to ear-and-mind-blowingly good live music (and then there were the three days of auralpleasure in Barcelona). I’ve tried to write about most of it, but these slipped through the cracks…
Chesnutt is a songwriters’ songwriter, lauded by his peers around the world, but 2007’s “North Star Deserter” was the first time I’d been exposed to his darkly humourous confessionals on death & wanting to bring it closer. His ‘backing band’ on that album – most of A Silver Mt. Zion and Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto – are here tonight, throwing up squalls of howling Godspeed guitar and giving added pathos to Vic’s songs with mournful strings. After a rendition of “Debriefing” that threatens to blow the stained-glass out of the windows of this old church, they encore with a haunting “Ruby Tuesday”, Vic then remaining alone on stage to close, appropriately enough, with “Over”.
Here is a recording of “Ruby Tuesday” performed at The Button Factory, Dublin, Ireland on 01 Dec 2007. The whole show, courtesy of David Bell, is available at Internet Archive.
Hearing the pure tone of Dylan Carlson’s Telecaster ring out at a volume where the drone can be felt as well as heard is thrilling (thanks must go in part to the Effenaar’s good sound setup). The opener “Hung From The Moon” is aptly-named – the notes hang in the air, the band’s slow-motion playing evoking a pagan ritual performed under a ghostly moon. Where once Earth was a solo mission, now Carlson is orbited by a stellar set of fellow cosmonauts – Adrienne Davies’s drumming verges on stasis but is precise & powerful, Don McGreevy adds planet-weight low end, and although Steve Moore’s Wurlitzer keys and trombone blasts could nudge the whole enterprise towards the dreaded blackhole that is j&*z, he fortunately steers a more psychedelic course. “Ouroboros Is Broken“, introduced by Carlson as the first song he ever wrote, is a monolithic juggernaut, Carlson sometimes holding his guitar aloft as though it were an offering to the gods. Support act Sir Richard Bishop joins the band onstage to add his Eastern-inflected guitar to “The Bees Ate Honey From The Lion’s Skull”, before they end this performance (and this tour) with the encore of “Coda Maestoso in F-flat Minor”, like “Ouroboros…” another early song reworked in the new Earth aesthetic.
Here is “Ouroboros Is Broken“, live at the Point Ephémère, Paris (17 Feb 2006), taken from the “Live Europe 2006″ disc.
The current incarnation of the Cure looks a lot like one of the first, a stripped down rock band that delivers a guitar-heavy take on over 30 years of Robert Smith’s superlative songwriting. With no keyboard player, some of the keyboard parts are instead replicated by guitarist Porl Thomson, giving those songs an interesting twist. After a “Disintegration“-laden set, they treat us to three extended encores, the second drawn exclusively from “Three Imaginary Boys” and the first singles. To my delight (in a gloomy gothy kinda way of course) they finish (after playing for over three hours!) with my two favourite Cure songs – “Faith” and “A Forest”.
On my first exposure to TNP (supporting Liars in London last year) I wrote them off as nothing more than youthfully energetic Fall copyists, but then “Beat Pyramid” (with its arcana-referencing distillation of the best of early 80s post-punk) became one of my favourite albums of the year. They deliver on the magicks of the album live, their frenetic set unfortunately cut short by the Paradiso’s sloppy scheduling. Check out some video clips from the show here.
OK so I went off them when they took the honourable Touch and Go to court, but there was no chance of me passing up the opportunity to see the original Buttholes line-up play again for the first time since the 80s. Being joined by ‘the kids from the School of Rock ‘ lent an air of parody to it all, but they played their best songs, Gibby the megaphone-toting headmaster directing proceedings from behind the amazing Gibbytronix, and fuck it if Paul Leary ain’t one of the best goddamn guitarists I’ve had the pleasure of hearing (and now witnessing).
A live recording of their show at the Forum in London a couple of weeks later is available for purchase here.
Since returning from sunny Spain, the ’summer’ skies over Amsterdam have been largely grey and precipitative. So it was fortunate that the very start of the month threw up a suberb summer’s evening for the kickoff of the “Westerpark” outdoor concert series with a performance by Radiohead. The Westerpark – as the name suggests – is a park just to the west of Amsterdam’s centre, built around an old gasworks, with the concert venue being a fenced-off portion of the park. I’ve long been keen to see Radiohead play, but the chance was remote given a natural aversion to paying steep ticket prices to be squashed into a group of tens of thousands. But the Dutch are an enterprising lot, and thousands more of us arrived in the park with blankets and picnic provisions, people planting themselves down around the enclosure and able to enjoy Radiohead’s performance at least as much as those 15,000 souls who’d forked over the good part of €60 to be a captive market to expensive beer and jostle for space in the throng.
I’m not particularly enamoured of “In Rainbows”, which they get through in its entireity during a long set – but there are plenty of crowd pleasers (and me-pleasers when it comes to the “Kid A” material) like “The National Anthem”, “Street Spirit”, “Karma Police”, “There There” and “How To Disappear Completely”. Chilling out with friends, in the sun, in the park, Amsterdam throws up another great & gezellig gig-going experience. The perfect weather highlights that the light only leaves the sky at well past 11pm, and during “Lucky” when Thom Yorke sings “It’s gonna be a glorious day” he couldn’t be more right.
Setlist: Radiohead @ Westerpark, Amsterdam (01 July 2008)
Bodysnatchers
All I Need
The National Anthem
15 Step
Lucky
Nude
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
There There
The Gloaming
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Idioteque
Faust Arp
Videotape
Just
Bangers And Mash
Everything In Its Right Place
Reckoner
House Of Cards
Climbing Up The Walls
A Wolf At The Door
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Karma Police
Supercollider
How To Disappear Completely
Planet Telex
Having earlier enjoyed one of Antonio Gaudi’s many awe-inspiring modernist structures - the dragon-topped ‘house of bones‘ that is Casa Batlló – my final day of Primavera began in another architectural gem: the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Edifici Fòrum concert hall, which serves as the Auditori stage. Its limited capacity had meant hour-long queues on previousdays (and would later also stymie access to the Throbbing Gristle and Young Marble Giants performances), but Scout Niblett’s early start and relative anonymity ensured easy-enough access.
The Auditori stage is imposingly widescreen for the two-piece of Scout and drummer Kristian Goddard, but they proved that they are not daunted by such environs when supporting The Stooges at London’s Royal Festival Hall last year (as part of the Jarvis Cocker-curated Meltdown festival). And as soon as Scout unleashes her expressive voice on the traditional couplets that make up the intro to “Do You Want To Be Buried With My People?”, it becomes apparent that this is a perfect venue for her - the excellent concert-hall acoustics giving wings to her already soaring voice. She never fails to surprise with her choice of covers and follows “Good To Me” (with its bizarre woodstockhenge hair metal intro) by making TLC’s “No Scrubs” her own. Scout is all about the highs and lows of being under love’s spell, and in “Hide And Seek” she references the sweetheart fever that seems to afflict her, going from sparse and melancholic love song to attaining Nirvana.
“Kiss” gets the biggest cheer of the set so far, unsurprising as it’s the closest thing Scout has had to a ‘hit single’ (helped by the appearance of the Bonnie Prince William of Oldham on the recorded version).
The pastfew times I’ve seen Scout Niblett play I’ve been left unfulfilled when she fails to take a turn behind the drumkit, but tonight she delivers by temporarily ejecting Goddard and enthusiastically beating out “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death”… We’re all gonna die! We don’t know when… We don’t know how…
The rest of the songs are all Niblett highlights – some more favourites from “This Fool Can Die Now” sandwiched between two diamonds from her first album. “Wet Road” yearns with love unfulfilled, while “Miss My Lion” is the perfect closer, Scout stomping and wailing to superbly crunching riffs.
Setlist: Scout Niblett @ Primavera Sound 2008, Barcelona (01 June 2008)
Do You Want To Be Buried With My People?
Good To Me
No Scrubs
Kidnapped By Neptune
Hide And Seek
Hot To Death
Kiss
Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death
Wet Road
Nevada
Let Thine Heart Be Warmed
Miss My Lion
Leaving the Auditori I’m happy to see that the rain that had niggled throughout the day has pissed off (only to return with a vengeance at the very end of the festival). There’s only enough time to catch Devastationsend their set with a menacing, noisy “Rosa”, played with that scuzzy louche cool that seems peculiar to Australians-in-Berlin (cf. Nick Cave “The Heroin Years”, Angus Andrew of Liars). Their most recent album “Yes, U” blows hot and cold for me but here I find the swamp monster that lurks within their bombastic baroque-goth.
It’s then over to the Estrella Damm stage to see Okkervil River, who’d drawn one of the biggest crowds I’d yet experienced at Primavera. The opening salvo of “The President’s Dead / Black” sets the tone for the upbeat crowd-pleasing show that is to follow. My first hearing of Okkervil River was “Black Sheep Boy“, the melancholy of the Tim Hardin-inspired tracks appealing to me most (and I’m a sucker for the William Schaffartwork too) - so l found last year’s “The Stage Names” initially too ‘big band’ with Sheff’s sometimes tortured words incongruous to the upbeat backing, but here under a grey Barcelona sky those songs proved much more infectious. Halfway through, Sheff introduces “It Ends With A Fall” as a tribute to The Wrens guitarist Charles Bissell (playing his last show with the band) – then jokingly fires him on stage. The rest of the performance rocks energetically, hitting a peak with “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe” flowing straight into “For Real”, which really gets the audience jumping. They end with early song “Westfall” sung in Spanish, a fitting finale which the local fans really take to heart.
Setlist: Okkervil River @ Primavera Sound 2008, Barcelona (01 June 2008)
The President’s Dead
Black
A Hand To Take A Hold Of The Scene
The Latest Toughs
A Girl In Port
It Ends With A Fall
John Allan Smith Sails
Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe
For Real
Unless It’s Kicks
Westfall (Spanish version)
Dirty Projectors have created a lot of buzz over the past year, Dave Longstreth built up as some sort of weird genius. It’s not for me – maybe it’s too wilfully obscure or just too pop - but they provide some minutes of distraction, if not just for bassist Angel Deradoorian crooning melodies wearing what looked to be denim jogging shorts…
Back to the well-visited ATP stage for Kinski, who sometimes come across as Sonic Youth from an alternate dimension – Chris Martin the floppy-haired guitar virtuoso, Lucy Atkinson the hard rockin’ female bassist, guitarist/flautist Matthew Reid-Schwartz in the Lee Ranaldo role, and Barret Wilke providing the Shelley-esque pounding. And sure Kinski are heavily indebted to their East Coast brethren (song titles like “Daydream Intonation” all but give it away), but these Seattle Sub Pop-ers also mix in a healthy dose of psych-kraut-space rock that coalesces into a riff-heavy brew that somehow stands apart from most of the post/psych/kraut/space-rock that abounds in these times.
Inbetween songs it’s announced that today is bassist Atkinson’s birthday which causes the audience to break into a Spanish-accented “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear… erm.. Kinski!!” The band clearly enjoys themselves, as do we all.
After catching a few songs by saxophone-fronted rock-’n-sample band Menomena (who appeal on first hearing, despite giving such prominence to that feared symbol of all things j&!z), it’s a quickmarch back down to the ATP stage to secure a prime position for being showered in the minimalist-rock-greatness that is Shellac. I’m glad it’s not too hard to get a good vantage point upfront early on, because I later turn to see the crowd massed into all the available space, tailing up the path back to the main festival site. They come because Shellac is the best godamn live band I & many others here have ever had the pleasure of sharing a room with. Prior to their performance I’d been quite open to the idea that Shellac would not necessarily produce the highlight of my weekend – there’d certainly been othercontenders – but who was I kidding? That perfect blend of mass, velocity and time knocks me over every time.
It’s the first time I’ve seen them rock under the stars (a rare opportunity as Shellac generally have a dislike of festivals, except when the fine folk at ATP are involved) and the experience is just as powerful (even if Steve Albini and Bob Weston are without their custom cabinets, making do instead with more prosaic Marshall and Ampeg stacks).
For all their precision, each show is an improvised performance - no setlists, Albini’s vocal adlibbing & caustic wit (in “Prayer To God” he exhorts Baby Jesus to “do your fuckin’ job for once”), taking questions from the crowd (this time unsuccessfully handled by Scout Niblett). And we get to hear a new song, sung by Weston and sounding like classic early ’90s-vintage Shellac (another new song appears in Paris about a week later – could it be we’ll be seeing a new Shellac album before the end of the world?!). It’s an amazing set, surely making new acolytes in the crowd of thousands, and (like all Shellac performances I’ve witnessed) words won’t do it justice…
Setlist: Shellac @ Primavera Sound 2008, Barcelona (01 June 2008)
Ghosts
My Black Ass
Copper
Paco
In A Minute
Squirrel Song
(new song with Bob on vocals)
Prayer To God
Killers
Steady As She Goes
Wingwalker
End Of Radio
Watch Song
Spoke
Les Savy Fav are talked up as a crazy live experience (some would go so far as to crown them best live band around – heretics!) and sure enough vocalist Tim Harrington gives the crowd their money’s worth - first appearing disguised as a plant before stripping down to a multicoloured leotard and jumping into the audience, running up and down the concrete steps to the right of the ATP stage. The rest of the band rock efficiently behind Harrington’s antics, but it seems to me that Les Savy Fav’s appeal must be more in their moon-howlin’ mad frontman than in their tunes – and in contrast to the masterclass of masa, velocidad & tiempo that went before this only entertains superficially. So it is halfway through their set that I decide to call time on Primavera Sound 2008, heading into the balmy Barcelona night, off to dream my sweet Albini dreams…
