After a day of parks, Catalan cuisine and modern art, it’s time to bring the noise with a night-long stretch at the ATP stage, interspersed only with a quick look at Devo ’s entertaining middle-aged-men-in-short-pants schtick and a scuttle past Cat Power’s lacklustre blues. The intention had been to also catch some shows in the Auditori venue, but its limited seating capacity meant hour-long queues just to get a ticket for the right to then join another snaking queue for the performance itself. With too many bands to see and too expansive of a city to explore to waste time standing in line, I had to give up on seeing Bill Callahan and Portishead’s second performance of the festival. The concert hall acoustics would’ve no doubt allowed Beth Gibbons’s voice to take on more of a ghostly hue, and on finishing with “We Carry On” the band invited the audience up onto the Auditori stage, so it was surely a special show and a shame to have missed it.

The evening kicks off with Six Organs Of Admittance singing the sun down, now at the end of their European tour and playing with a togetherness and understanding that was missing when I saw them at the start. This makes for an incendiary performance, Ben Chasny’s alternately intricate finger-picking and paint-peeling riffs in complete sync with drummer Alex Neilson’s expressive percussion, all washed over with Elisa Ambrogio’s waves of distortion and feedback. They start with live favourite “A Thousand Birds”, whose second half throws up swirls of splintered noise as Chasny & Ambrogio batter their guitars into submission. Chasny has recently said how he is drawn back to the noisier stuff that he made as a twenty-year-old, moving away from the all-acoustic explorations of earlier Six Organs material - and the evidence is certainly to be heard in his live performances, with Ambrogio’s instinctively free & unfettered playing the perfect springboard for Chasny to unleash his own six-stringed savagery.

Songs from most recent album “Shelter From The Ash” are interspersed with oldie “Black Needle Rhymes” before Chasny & partner Ambrogio harmonise through Fleetwood Mac’s “That’s Alright”, another staple of their recent performances. Chasny then provides some eye-of-the-hurricane calm, running through two of his most affecting songs, just his yearning falsetto and stellar playing keeping the large crowd captivated. This is the start of a four-song-suite of “School Of The Flower” material (happily my favourite Six Organs release) that closes the performance. The title track of that album is introduced as “School Of The Mick Flower” in tribute to the Vibracathedral Orchestra’s guitarist, Chasny urging us all to enrol, and it’s a treat to hear it played as it hasn’t featured in live sets for some time. All three band members conjure up a maelstrom of freerock that comes full circle, dissolving into Chasny’s repeating refrain before we’re comfortingly brought “Home”.

Setlist: Six Organs Of Admittance @ Primavera Sound 2008, Barcelona (30 May 2008)
A Thousand Birds
Strangled Road
Black Needle Rhymes
Shelter From The Ash
That’s Alright (Fleetwood Mac cover)
All You’ve Left
Words For Two
School Of The Flower
Home

Having heard lots of buzz around Autolux I’d almost taken it for granted that they would prove to be my ‘discovery of the festival’. And I would have really enjoyed their performance had I completely missed out on Sonic Youth 1985-1995. As it is I can’t get past the fact that every riff sounds like it has been plundered from the Noo Yoik noiseniks back catalogue, not really adding (to these ears) anything new to the formula. That they actually manage to sound like Sonic Youth is achievement in itself I suppose, and if Autolux succeed in turning a new generation onto the joys of “Evol” or “Sister” then they’re serving a beneficial & humanitarian purpose, but it does not compute that this is considered somehow new & exciting. Of course most art builds on a foundation of what has gone before, but the revivalist nature of a lot of alternative music released this decade seems to these aged ears to be a case of cheap knock-off rather than an assimilation of influences in the pursuit of creating something new. That said, Autolux do entertain and they’re certainly no fly-by-night phonies - they’ve been playing together since the start of this decade, and although not exactly prolific (they’ve one album to their name thus far) have built a sizeable fanbase (as evidenced by the large & enthusiastic crowd here). Carla Azar is a powerhouse drummer, and really propels the band along - remarkable given that a shattered elbow following a stage fall in 2002 resulted in the prognosis that she would probably never play drums again. Eight titanium screws later and she continues to pound the skins with ferocious dexterity.

Polvo are a band revered by many, original proponents of dissonant math rock, all bent notes and complex time signatures. They existed for much of the 90s before disbanding - now reformed for a series of ATP-related festivals. They score high on the math test (ouch!): high-school classmates with some of Superchunk, releases on Touch and Go, recorded by Bob Weston, yada yada… - but don’t really do it for me. I like a good big dumb riff to get a hold of, and this is a bit too knowingly complex and fiddly, venturing into that no-man’s-land where the borders between punk and prog are unclear. For sure they still know how to wield their axes with intent and there is Eastern-tinged melody to be found in their unorthodox tunings and fluid fretwork, but I guess I’m too much of a big dumb lunk to want to study this further.

Bristol-now-London duo Fuck Buttons are something I’ve been keen to see, and they don’t disappoint. The spirit of Suicide and a worthy history of noise bands inform the Fuck Buttons sound, and they have fun with turning it into the noize you can move to, be moved by. It has an elemental simplicity (and it seems eco-friendly too) which works well here under the stars by the sea. Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power stand hunched over their equipment, moving to the crystalline melodies submerged in the swarm of electronic noise, Power sometimes bashing out a tribal beat on a floor tom. While Hung seems pretty chilled behind his bank of old Casio keyboards, Power is the more animated, sticking the toy microphone into his mouth, screaming the distorted vocals while using both hands to shape the sound.

Most of the set seems drawn from their “Street Horrrsing” album, although I think they may have played something new to finish. “Sweet Love For Planet Earth” is the highlight with its rainfall tinkle and pulsing drones building into a melodically abrasive shout out for help on behalf of this hunk of rock, Power howling into the microphone clenched in his jaws. For the rest, the tune-friendly, sometimes playful and at times downright-euphoric circuit-bent wall of buzzing synth sound makes for one upbeat noise party.

When news broke earlier in the year that drummer Chris Hakius had left Om I feared for the life of the mighty mantric metallers. Hakius and bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros had been friends & collaborators of some twenty years, playing in Sabbathian stoner-rock legends Sleep together before reconvening in 2004 for Om, and I couldn’t see how the band would survive the end of such a longstanding & close-knit connection. But Grandmaster Cisneros (he teaches chess when he is not captain of the shrine effulgent Om windship) quickly announced the continuation of the Om journey, and tonight he performs with new drummer Emil Amos (of Grails and Holy Sons).

The first thing that strikes me is just how good a bass-player Cisneros is - his fingers glide effortlessly over his Rickenbacker’s neck, the dextrous display somewhat incongruous with the bludgeoning vibrations that emenate from the speaker stacks. Early on, as I stand close to the stage, it feels as those vibrations will resonate inside my head to such an extent that it’ll explode, but I soon tune into the pre-dawn mantras, focusing only on the new rites of a Vedic sun to attend the blue horizon… The low-end barrage, cyclical rhythms, songs that seem to slow time, riffs fashioned from dark matter and chanted mysticisms (Julian Cope once called Cisneros’s lyrics “the kind of accessible pseudo-religious genius that started genuine religions”) all make for a meditative experience, albeit at arsequake volume - even if (to the uninitiated) the songs all sound the same. That Om plough the same groove is not something Cisneros denies: he talks of the music as being a singular continuous expression, with Om as merely the vessel that occasionally tunes into this one theme to make it tangible in our world (the 2004 debut album is aptly titled “Variations On A Theme”).

Second song is “To The Shrinebuilder”, arguably Om’s most propulsive song to date, Amos adding even more weight to it with his hard-hitting percussion (you can download a live version of this song, recorded in Canada in 2006, from Holy Mountain here). Amos definitely brings a new dimension to the Om sound, his dynamic drumming is expressive and powerful, so it will be interesting to see how this translates to future Om recordings. They close with the epic “At Giza”, many fans’ favourite of Om’s thematic variations, the crowd going wild for the breakdown in the middle where Cisneros’s bass note hangs in the air before the song slowly builds again into a glacially heavy groove, the coming of the sun and that blue horizon a couple of hours away yet…

Setlist: Om @ Primavera Sound 2008, Barcelona (30 May 2008)
Bhima’s Theme
To The Shrinebuilder
Kapila’s Theme
At Giza
(well this is what I think it was… it was late & muchos Estrella later, so any corrections welcome…)

On getting wind of this year’s Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona it immediately became an attend-at-all-costs kinda thing - three (presumably sunny) days of some of my favourite bands by the sea in one of my favourite cities being too good to resist. The incredible line-up that sucked me in included Portishead, Scout Niblett, Six Organs Of Admittance, Boris, Public Enemy performing “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back“, Om, Shipping News, Okkervil River, Bill Callahan, Kinski, Fuck Buttons… tickets were swiftly procured, so when Shellac were added to the bill a little while later I could barely contain myself.

The festival site is the Parc del Forum, a concrete ‘urban park’ built for the 2004 “Universal Forum of Cultures” and located in the northwest corner of the city at the end of the Avinguda Diagonal & Barcelona’s stretch of beaches. The five open-air stages and the indoor ‘Auditori’ concert hall are well-spaced so that moving from one to the other is easily done, without there being too much sound bleed from one to the other. The ATP stage (where most of my time is spent over the next few days) is particularly well-situated in the far corner of the site, a tree-lined avenue leading to the stage, which is flanked by a grassy knoll (from which the sea is visible) on one side and a bank of concrete seating on the other, meaning great views for (almost) all. 

An early arrival to ‘check-in’ means that I get to enjoy sitting in the sun listening to Portishead soundcheck, the views out over the industrialised section of Barcelona’s coastline suitably soundtracked by Portishead’s mechanical beats and spooky synths. Hearing snatches of the likes of “Glory Box” and “Sour Times” along with new favourites like “We Carry On” and “Machine Gun” mean that we’re all going to be in for a treat later that evening, and certainly gets the pulse racing for what is in store when the festival properly kicks off a few hours later.

I’ve only recently come to the finely-crafted soundworlds of Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie/Microphones - the brooding ‘organic’ odes to nature (in particular to the topography of his native Anacortes, Washington State) cut through with an almost playful folkpop sensibility mixed with lo-fi ‘anything goes’ experimentation. His recordings are often ambitious, densely-layered, inscrutable works, rounded out with contributions from any number of fleeting studio visitors, so I wondered how this sound would translate to his solo live performance.

For the first part of the set Elverum (on acoustic guitar) is joined by Julie Doiron (voice) of recently-reunited Canadian band Eric’s Trip (who are also playing the festival) and Fred Squire (electric guitar). The trio have recently recorded together (Mt. Eerie’s forthcoming “Lost Wisdom” album) and are therefore comfortably in-sync with each other & the material, but nonetheless fail to ignite - Elverum’s soft & measured mumble meshes well with Doiron’s Joni-Mitchell-esque voice but the songs seem to wander aimlessly before either ending abruptly or petering out sans any sense of resolution. Nonetheless, experiencing this pastoralism, beer-in-hand, under the sunny Spanish sky seems as good an introduction as any to the delights of this seaside festival. 

For the rest of the set Elverum is on his own, this time on electric guitar, and the material is of a doomier, gloomier bent. He gently coaxes distorted waves of sound from his guitar that better evoke the looming and vast natural landscapes that often serve as his muse, and the lyrics take on a darker existentialism than those brightened by the earlier presence of Doiron.

Mount Eerie’s current focus is on what Elverum has termed “Black Wooden” - ‘black metal using natural materials’ - and based on the darker drones of the second half of this performance I’m keen to discover what this talented-yet-frustratingly-oblique songwriter can make of such an appealing concept on forthcoming releases.

1988’s “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back” is widely considered to be Public Enemy’s (and hiphop’s) finest album, a reactionary barrage of sparse Bomb Squad beats, squealing sample stabs, and rhyme animal Chuck D’s we-ain’t-gonna-take-no-shit-from-the-Man lyrics. To say anticipation is running high is somewhat of an understatement. However, PE give over the first part of their slot to the recently reformed Bomb Squad, brothers Hank and Keith Shocklee playing a captivating set of “dub bass” (their take on dubstep, which they credit themselves for inventing!). Public Enemy finally take the stage to a rapturous reception from the crowd, Chuck D and Flavor Flav augmented by a full live band, DJ Lord and of course members of their Security Of The First World (Professor Griff would’ve been present too but for visa problems). “Bring The Noise” predictably gets us all into a frenzy, and as they take us through their landmark album the audience parties under the Spanish stars. Chuck D’s iconic bullhorn voice is as imposing as ever, Flavor cold lamps all over the big stage (”Yeah, Boooooooooy!”) and the S1Ws ‘dance’ in formation.

When they get to “Terminator X To The Edge Of Panic” Chuck D announces this (tour) as the first time they’re playing this in 15 years, and as original PE DJ Terminator X is long retired (apparently now an ostrich farmer!) it serves as a fitting tribute. But having given up so much of their slot to the Bomb Squad, PE only get as far as playing “She Watch Channel Zero?!”, before ending off with a quick run-through of some more recent crowd-pleasers (”911 Is A Joke”, “Welcome To The Terrordome” and new song “Just Like That”) - leaving me sorely disappointed at missing out on such classics as “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos” and my favourite PE song “Rebel Without A Pause”…

It’s then swiftly up to the CD Drome stage to catch the last part of Shipping News’s set, and man are they playing a blinder, ending with a massive version of “Paper Lanterns (Zero Return)”. When I’d seen them previously they’d played as a trio with Jason Noble on bass, but here he is freed up to double up the riffage by the presence of Todd Cook, Louisville’s hardest working bassist. It leaves me regretting not having caught their whole performance, particularly as they don’t tour very often - but that is the only downside to this excellent festival: there is just too much good stuff on to have any hope in catching it all.

Portishead are undoubtedly the main Primavera drawcard for many and so the amphitheatre-style Rockdelux stage is packed with expectant punters, by far the biggest crush of the day. The start is delayed (messing up my plans to catch most of both their set and Boris, who play elsewhere a little later). They eventually kick off with “Silence”, the first track off new album “Third” - the spoken-word sample intro to that song almost perfectly-appropriate (it’s Portuguese, rather than Spanish). Geoff Barrow hammers out the rolling beat on a floor tom, while the screens on either side of the stage flicker with grainy black & white close-ups of the action on stage. The new material’s emphasis on live instrumentation is clear here as the band are able to faultlessly recreate the sound of their new record. It is a thrill to see them live for the first time, but as they’re playing the following night (in the seated Auditori) I make the tough choice to depart as they launch into “Hunter” in order to catch the Japanese sludge monsters rumbling into life nearby. I later learn that I miss one of those one-off gig experiences as Chuck D joins Portishead on stage to spit a few rhymes over the staccato industrial beats of “Machine Gun”…

Boris, who are playing the nearby ATP Stage, threaten to do a Godzilla stomp all over Beth Gibbons’s fragile vocals as they open with the crunchy noise of “Statement” - they are LOUD, and with the addition of an extra guitarist (Ghost mainman Michio Kurihara) the sludgy, distorted wail of sound is even more dense than usual. In contrast to the last time I saw them, I’m unfortunately unable to engage with them tonight, their schizophrenic, scuzzy barrage of noise proving to be an impenetrable and distancing barrier. Instead I just marvel at the slight Wata & her masterful playing - she spews out massive riffs incongruous with her diminutive frame, barely moving as she propels the band forward. I recognise “Pink” and “Farewell” but the rest sadly congeals into an eardrum-assaulting morass, a messy mix of Motörhead, hair metal and punk rock that brings a slightly disappointing close to a wonderful first day.

Utrecht, one of Holland’s oldest cities and the spiritual home of Dutch modernist design (the birthplace of Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld and Dick Bruna), is also blessed with some great gig venues. The relatively small size of the city (population: 300,000) supports several perfectly-proportioned spaces (capacity: a couple of hundred at most) ideal for those ‘intimate’ shows I’d take over a stadium gig every time. So as a taster for the upcoming Primavera festival of delights in Barcelona (where both bands will play), in early May I twice made the 30 minute train journey to Utrecht to see Six Organs of Admittance (@ Poppodium EKKO) and Scout Niblett (@ Tivoli De Helling) do their thing.

The Six Organs Of Admittance show is the first proper of their European tour (following a special warm-up date in Latvia of all places) and unfortunately it shows. Drummer Alex Neilsen is rightly regarded as one of the best around but this night he lays it on too strong, filling in spaces that were best filled only with Ben Chasny & Elisa Ambrogio’s wailing twelve strings.

Listening to Chasny’s playing on record it is clear that he plays at a pace all of his own, not always beholden to what would be considered conventional timing or rhythm, and although Neilson is of course well-versed in improvisational drumming, too often they fail to quite mesh. But this is not to suggest that there are not moments of classic Six Organs transcendentalism: Ambrogio and Chasny transform “Hum A Silent Prayer” (on record, virtually acapella) into a droning noisechant and there are moments of blissed out freerock in “Black Needle Rhymes” when the three bandmembers connect. The “Shelter From The Ash” songs - like the title track, “Coming To Get You” and “Strangled Road” - are all tight , Neilson forced to be more economical by those songs’ relatively concise & conventional structures.

Unfortunately the performance is cut short due to the enforcement of a strict (public holiday) Monday night curfew (why don’t promoters/venues get the support acts on earlier if there is a danger that the headliner will have to play a constricted set?!). As I headed into the still-faintly-lit Dutch night I hoped that by the time they hit Barcelona the band will have better mindmelded, Neilsen taking a more subtle approach to fleshing out the twin-guitar cacophony of Chasny & Ambrogio, and I looked forward to the next Six Organs experience being all the more powerful for it.

Scout Niblett plays on the packed bill of Distorted Channel’s 5th birthday celebration (headlined by Health) so it’s another performance that ends too soon. But we get “Wolfie” after Scout asks the audience what we want to hear next, the reflective “Wet Road”, a TLC cover (”No Scrubs”), and she and drummer Kristian Goddard take us through “This Fool Can Die Now”’s best songs, closing with the monolithic desert rock of “Nevada”. Scout has also started a Shellac-style mid-set Q&A session, although the question quality was low, only eliciting the information that Scout likes dogs and isn’t particularly bothered when it comes to cats…

It is another intense & exposed performance from Scout (I’m sure she can’t do it any other way), heart on sleeve and amp turned up to the max. So with appetite suitably whet, bring on Barcelona!

Jason Molina + Okkervil River @ Crossing Border festival, Den Haag (23-Nov-2007)

I arrived too late to see anything much of Okkervil River, but lucked into catching a live radio session from Okkervil’s Will Sheff later on. Then scored front-row seats for Jason Molina’s solo set of electric blues. Molina, typically polite and humble, disappoints his hard core of Dutch fans (who identify themselves by their unanimous snappy correction of the MC’s mispronunciation of “Songs: Ohio“) by drawing from his last handful of releases and not playing any Songs: Ohia material. I too would love to hear him play some of his earliest songs - but Molina is a searcher, not looking back: this is a man who purportedly will play songs at nights like this that he wrote that same morning.

See Molina play “Memphis Moon” @ Crossing Border here

Qui + Future Of The Left @ Paradiso (bovenzaal), Amsterdam (26-Nov-2007)

Future Of The Left finally arrive in the fine city of Amsterdam and deliver another acerbic, eloquently nonsensical set of short sharp sonic slams. Although ostensibly the support act to Qui, they are demanded back by the baying crowd for an instrument-abusing & drum-kit-disassembling encore. And all my FotL-stalking bears fruit: this is the first time I’ve ever had a song devoted to me, the particularly appropriate “Small Bones Small Bodies”!

Better Bovine Than Equine? (gevelsteen, Leiden)

David Yow now prowls menacingly rather than the all-action style he was renowned for when playing with Jesus Lizard, but that adds a tension to his performance - the audience never sure if he will flail off the stage when Qui hit one of their riff-peaks. He only leaves stage once, probably less from intent than from the unbalancing effects of excessive alcohol consumption…

See Qui play “Today, Gestation” @ Paradiso here

Jesu + Fear Falls Burning @ Paradiso (bovenzaal), Amsterdam (05-Dec-2007)

Justin Broadrick is a supremely talented and influential musican - with a genre making-and-breaking history that takes in teenage inventor of grindcore (Napalm Death), a stint behind the kit with Head of David, the almighty mighty Godflesh, macro-dub infection (Ice, Techno Animal) and various breakbeat incarnations.
So yes, tonight I come to worship at the altar of JK Flesh, at his harmonics-bouncing-off-the-roof-of-hell guitar and his incredible way with machines. Jesu, the misty early morning light to Godflesh’s dark corners, is now a fully-fledged band, Broadrick augmented by longtime-collaborator Diarmuid Dalton on bass and drummer Ted Parsons, another with a special musical pedigree: Swans, Prong, Foetus, Godflesh amongst many (mostly dubbed-up) others. Parson pounds with precision and power, Broadrick’s programming filling in the spaces between and meshing perfectly with Parson’s biomechanical beats and Dalton’s low-end pulses. And then there is that guitar…

State-X / New Forms festival @ Pard van Troje, Den Haag (14&15-Dec-2007)

from top: Killl, Michael Gira, Scout Niblett, Sunn O)))

An excellent two-night festival split across the multi-roomed Pard van Troje venue in The Hague. Catch the close of melodic Scottish indierockers The Twilight Sad’s set, before then being put through the wringer by Norweigian math-metal supergroup Killl with their strobe assault, eye-twisting backdrop and extremely precise (and loud!) power-electronics-augmented Viking riffage. The night ends with an uninspiring (DJ?)set from Aphex Twin, too populist in its intent but insufficiently groovesome to get the crowd going.
Night #2 starts with another superb Michael Gira performance (always in humble good (dark) humour), shining a cleansing, burning white light on all our failures and inadequacies . Unfortunately then have to make the difficult choice between Jesu and Scout Niblett, Scout winning through having been treated to Jesu in Amsterdam 10 days previously. She again delivers in spades, quickly winning over the first-timers with her powerful combination of kickass and fragile. It’s the first Scout gig I’ve seen where she doesn’t take a turn to bash at the drums, which disappoints some of us but ends up making for a powerful performance with her grungy guitar riffage well underpinned by Kristian Goddard’s hard-hitting drums.
The night ends with Sunn O)))’s pagan drone worship, their innards-massaging rumbles nicely filling the large space of the main venue.

Aesop Rock @ Melkweg, Amsterdam (05-Feb-2008)

Aesop, ably assisted by New York compadre Rob Sonic and DJ Big Whiz’s Wheels Of Steel, brings peace & good times to the Melkweg. By the closer “Daylight” he has the whole crowd signing along to his tongue-twisting rhymes, and before that we’re treated to plenty of songs from his recent “None Shall Pass” album and some amazing cuts from Big Whiz (when Aesop instructs him to “take us into outer space” in the midst of “Bring Back Pluto” he even adds some theremin caressing  to his dextrous fingerplay). Songs like “Fast Cars”, “39 Thieves” and “Commencement At The Obedience Academy” are all fist-pumpingly great, the animated skulls and bunnies of Jeremy Fish providing a suitably left-field backdrop.

Whip @ De Nieuwe Anita, Amsterdam (12-Feb-2008)

De Nieuwe Anita is the very definition of “gezellig“, a converted ground floor & basement apartment in a large residential block on a wide Amsterdam street, where you can have a beer while you get your hair cut. Whip brings his shy acoustic blues free-of-charge to the small appreciative crowd packed into the basement performance space (I later learn that Jason Merritt’s claustrophobia kicked in and left him messed up for a couple of days after). His “Atheist Lovesongs To God” release had him sounding like an early Palace-era Will Oldham, but his newer songs show him ploughing his own furrow.

Here is Whip’s cover version of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding”, from the “Bridging The Distance” benefit compilation on Arena Rock.

Whip - White Wedding

Pretty much the only thing I feared I’d be giving up on leaving London was the Big Smoke’s rich & varied live music scene. Sure, I still cast the occasional envious glance at The Luminaire’s programme of The Young Gods acoustic sets, Jason Molina Christmas parties and Stars Of The Lid supported by Boduf Songs (and reminisce how that great little venue was but a stone’s throw from my former lair), but my time in Holland so far has been packed full of excellent gigs. The beauty of this small country is that distances between cities are such that it is possible to go and see a show in a different city in the same travel time as it would take to get from one side of London to another - so I’ve already seen things in Amsterdam, Den Haag, Utrecht and Haarlem, and that list is only likely to grow (hopefully taking in Groningen’s Vera one of these days, which has a reputation as one of the best places to play anywhere in Europe). And the smaller hall upstairs at Paradiso, located in an old church but a space that can rock hard, has fast become one of my favourite venues.

So in another attempt at getting this site back up to speed, here is a (mainly visual) rundown of some of the great live experiences I’ve had in this country so far…

Six Organs Of Admittance @ Paradiso (bovenzaal), Amsterdam (14-Aug-2007)

I’ve written here about my first proper live experience in my new home, this highly-charged ritual of amplifier worship definitely one of my favourite shows of last year.

Future Of The Left @ Tivoli De Helling, Utrecht (04-Oct-2007)

The maiden out-of-town gig, to catch Future Of The Left on their first foray to continental Europe. Their energetically vicious stabs of sound and low-end punch quickly won over the crowd, many of whom were presumably encountering the band for the first time (FotL were supporting American punkrockers Against Me!)

Michael Gira @ Paradiso (bovenzaal), Amsterdam (15-Oct-2007)

That this show did not make my top gigs of ‘07 list is criminal oversight. Michael Gira is a living legend, and every performance of his that I have witnessed has been a special experience, none more so than this one. He invests his performances with genuine passion, his hollerin’ & boot-stampin’ making it seem as though he’s channeling a sold-his-soul bluesman playing in 1920’s dusty nowheresville. The set opens with Swans-song “I Am The Sun” and follows with a perfect mix of material covering further late-period Swans releases and all of Angels Of Light’s oeuvre. Gira wrly remarks that he wishes to “write spiritual songs, but I don’t have any”, but don’t worry Michael: as I’m sure the rest of this night’s audience would agree, despite the bleak and sometime hopeless nature of the subject matter, your performances reach right into one’s emotional core and are genuinely life-affirming.

Setlist: Michael Gira @ Paradiso (15 October 2007)
I Am The Sun
Promise Of Water
Nations
Failure
Lena’s Song
My Brother’s Man
She Lives!
Destroyer
My Sister Said
Sometimes I Dream I’m Hurting You
Rose Of Los Angeles
God Damn The Sun

Here is the encore “God Damn The Sun”, recorded live in Lisbon, Portugal in 2002 and taken from the (now out-of-print) “Living ‘02” release.

Michael Gira - God Damn The Sun (live in Lisbon)

Liars @ Melkweg, Amsterdam (30-Oct-2007)

My first experience of this legendary venue, and what an experience it was.  Angus Andrew seemed to be enjoying Amsterdam to its mind-altering fullest and was in fine showman form, he and his cohorts putting on a sensory assault of rhythmic noise and lights that overwhelmed some in the audience but delighted most (at their best Liars manage to channel the Cure, Bauhaus, Neubauten, and the Birthday Party, giving it all a post-modern/art-school twist, their live shows somewhere between pagan ritual and post-millennial dance party). The newest songs were blasted out fully-formed, unlike my first exposure to them months previously - and the trancey tribalism of the amazing “We Fenced Our Houses…” and “Let’s Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack” had the audience riveted in near-religious awe.

Mono + Future Of The Left @ Patronaat, Haarlem (09-Nov-2007)

Following another blistering bass-heavy set from FotL (albeit with the band themselves not seeming to enjoy themselves, unhappy with the Haarlemmers engagement & their own equipment troubles), I didn’t actually see headliners Mono, instead listening to their bombastic but sterile ‘compositions’ from the merch stand while politely grilling FotL’s Falco for Albini tidbits & the like…

Gravenhurst @ Paradiso (bovenzaal), Amsterdam (20-Nov-2007)

Nick Talbot’s Nick Drake-isms sometimes sit incongruously with the (post)rockier tack he has taken on Gravenhurst’s past two albums. The best songs this night (like “Down River”, “The Western Lands” and “Black Holes In The Sand”) are when he pulls back on the earnest and the band collectively let their hair down.

Part II to follow shortly with futher uninformative blatherings on Jason Molina, Qui, Jesu, the State-X / New Forms festival, Aesop Rock and Whip…

Having once been a relatively enthusiastic proponent of the end-of-year ‘best of’ list, a few years ago I stopped putting these together in favour of just creating an aural review of releases I particularly liked in the form of a CD compilation. I suppose I rejected the idea of trying to rank the year’s releases, to come up with the ‘best album’ of that particular year, as this was forcing me to evaluate the music on a critical/intellectual level that doesn’t work for me - for me music is about feeling; from wanting to bang my head or creep myself out, from getting goosebumps of euphoria to twinges of melancholy… But I suppose it is sacrilege for a music-related blog to come to the end of a year and not attempt some sort of round-up, so rather than create a ranked list justified by socio-political contexts or clever meta-musical references, these are the records (in no particular order) and live performances that have rocked / droned / folked up / brokebeat / hiphopped my world in 2007, that have made me feel…

Top 25 Albums of 2007

from top, l-r:

Magnolia Electric Co : “Sojourner” boxset (Secretly Canadian)

PJ Harvey : “White Chalk” (Island)

Angels Of Light : “We Are Him” (Young God)

Low : “Drums And Guns” (Sub Pop)

Liars : “Liars” (Mute)

Mammal : “Lonesome Drifter” (Animal Disguise)

Grinderman : “Grinderman” (Mute)

Boris with Michio Kurihara : “Rainbow” (Pedal/Drag City)

El-P : “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” (Definitive Jux)

Vic Chesnutt : “North Star Deserter” (Constellation)

Nina Nastasia & Jim White : “You Follow Me” (Fat Cat)

Om : “Pilgrimage” (Southern Lord)

Scout Niblett : “This Fool Can Die Now” (Too Pure)

Shellac : “Excellent Italian Greyhound” (Touch & Go)

Epic45 : “May Your Heart Be The Map” (Make Mine Music)

Magik Markers : “Boss” (Ecstatic Peace!)

MIA : “Kala” (XL)

Sigur Rós : “Hvarf-Heim” (EMI)

Stars Of The Lid : “And The Refinement Of Their Decline” (Kranky)

Jesu : “Conqueror” (HydraHead/Daymare)

Alela Diane : “The Pirate’s Gospel” (Holocene/Names/Fargo)

Six Organs Of Admittance : “Shelter From The Ash” (Drag City)

Bracken : “We Know About The Need” (Anticon)

Future Of The Left : “Curses” (Too Pure)

Earth : “Hibernaculum” (Southern Lord)

Top 5 EPs/Singles of 2007

l-r:

Efterklang : “Under Giant Trees” (Leaf)

Zonderhoof : “Zonderhoof” EP (Sound Devastation)

Joanna Newsom : “Joanna Newsom & The Ys Street Band” EP (Drag City)

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy : “Ask Forgiveness” EP (Drag City/Domino)

Jesu : “Sundown / Sunrise” EP (Aurora Borealis/Daymare)

Top 10 Gigs of 2007

Future Of The Left + Infants @ The Luminaire, London (10 March 2007)

Josh T Pearson @ ATP festival, Minehead (27 April 2007)

Nick Cave / Grinderman @ ATP festival, Minehead (28 April 2007)

Dirty Three @ ATP festival, Minehead (29 April 2007)

Scout Niblett @ Bush Hall, London (21 May 2007)

Isis + Boris @ Koko, London (02 July 2007)

Liars @ Madame Jo Jo’s, London (03 July 2007)

Six Organs Of Admittance @ Paradiso (bovenzaal), Amsterdam (12 August 2007)

Sonic Youth do “Daydream Nation” @ The Roundhouse, London (30 August 2007)

Jesu @ Paradiso (bovenzaal), Amsterdam (05 December 2007)

Correctly guess which picture was taken at which gig and I will send you a copy of my “Best of 2007″ 2CD compilation (once I’ve pulled my finger out of my ass and actually made the thing). Use the contact form on the Disclaimer page to submit your ‘entry’.

And so I finally get myself up-to-date… I’ve heard some great new music over the past couple of months - Mammal (Big Black ketamine blues!), two new Six Organs Of Admittance releases, Jesu’s fully-formed “Pale Sketches“, finally tracking down the 2-disc Japanese issue of Sunn O))) & Boris’s “Altar” collaboration, and finding myself liking Sigur Rós’s “Hvarf-Heim” a lot more than I felt inclined to - but here are the albums that particularly tickled my fancy in November & December:

November - Magik Markers : “Boss” (Ecstatic Peace!)

The first inkling I got of Magik Markers‘ potential power was on seeing Elisa Ambrogio doing her axe-wielding schoolmistress thing as part of Six Organs Of Admittance, spewing sheets of noise over Ben Chasny’s intricate guitar lines. While I at first wondered whether she could actually play, I was soon bowled over by her instinctive and natural style, effortlessly building towering walls of sound. ”Axis Mundi” kicks things off with just such a piece of tortured guitar, the feedback looping into Pete Nolan’s driving beat - a better opening to an album I haven’t heard in a while. Elisa then sets the writhing sexual tone of many of these songs with the downright dirty: “I left my stink like a mink’s dead gland / All over your mouth, all over your hand“, her words bringing “the blood and violence of religion and nature” to this “Night Of The Hunter“-referencing love song.

I’ve heard “Boss” referred to as sounding like Sonic Youth, probably due to Lee Ranaldo’s presence (he produces and adds his inimitable guitar to a few tracks) and its release on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label - and sure “Body Rot” has Sonic Youth all over it, sounding like “Catholic Block” with Elisa channeling Kim Gordon - but for the rest this is uniquely-created guitar music that challenges as much as it rocks. I’ve got the impression that there are those that feel Magic Markers have sold themselves out by making a ‘commercial’ album, that they’ve reined in what makes them special (they are an apparently formidable live experience, with numerous limited CD-R releases trying to capture this exhilarating & obliterating freeform noise assault), but to these ears (still not having heard - or seen - any of their other work) this is one of the year’s best rock releases, with sufficient bouts of barely-controlled guitar noise juxtaposed with the brittle piano of “Empty Bottles” and ethereal pluckings of “Bad Dream/Hartford’s Best Suite”.

“Last Of The Lemach Line” slithers along like the blue snake in the Garden Of Eden, sucking you into that place where sex, religion and violence meet, Elisa doing Patti-Smith-at-the-pulpit before she turns cracked torch singer on “Empty Bottles”, multi-instrumentalist Nolan’s piano glowing with a wabi-sabi beauty.
“Four/The Ballad Of Harry Angstrom” and album closer ”Circle” lazily recycle “Lemach Line”’s vocal melody but work as further showcases for Ambrogio’s primal rhymes and Calvinist/Crowley-esque intonations, with the gentle “Bad Dream/Hartford’s Beat Suite” providing a melancholic interlude with its musings on death and severed thumbs.

Magik Markers have apparently released some 30 recordings over CD-Rs, cassettes and the occasional ‘proper’ factory-pressed slab of vinyl or CD, relentlessly documenting their evolution. If “Boss” showcases their current maturation into a beast near the top of rock’s food chain, now it is time for me to excitedly delve into the Magik Markers pre-history and wallow in their primal soup…

December - Alela Diane : “The Pirate’s Gospel” (Holoscene Music)

It was during a Michael Gira show at Paradiso when between songs he pointed to the pretty girl standing in front of me and asked: “Are you Alela Diane?”, and on receiving a shy nod confidently predicted to the audience that she would “be a star”. This certainly piqued my interest, coming from the man who ‘discovered’ Devendra Banhart and introduced me to the amazing Low by way of a glowing recommendation in one of his open letters. It was not a week later that I chanced upon Dutch TV show “Vrije Geluiden” to see Ms Diane performing three of her songs live in the studio, and capitivating they certainly were. It has taken me a while to track down her album “The Pirate’s Gospel” in which time it has popped up on many “Best of 2007″ lists, most notably scoring the #1 spot on Rough Trade’s end of year list. This album was actually first released in 2004 in a handmade edition of 650, Alela herself “sewing lace and paper bags for the case, drawing golden ships, lettering ink, and burning each CD”, before Holoscene Music approached her to release a resequenced version in the US in late 2006 and in Europe & Australia in 2007.

Sharing her Nevada City hometown with friend Joanna Newsom, there is a certain similarity with “The Milk-Eyed Mender” in that this album feels like the work of rare talent (like Alasdair Roberts too), taking centuries of folk music and creating something that is fresh, natural and interesting while still being authentically rooted in the tradition. The meditative songs are about loneliness, wanderlust, (broken) family, religion, displacement and heartache, and have that timeless quality about them instrinsic to all folk musics. “The Rifle” could soundtrack an elegaic Western, “The Pirate’s Gospel” is a sea-chanty for the landlocked Nevada mountains, and “Foreign Tongue” a stark lament on being alone in a foreign place, written when she embarked on a “journey of solitude” in Europe. The rest of the album weaves in elements of gospel and blues along with the trance-like folk picking, all intertwined in her strong sometimes haunting voice. The bonus tracks on the European release, “Heavy Walls” and “Gipsy Eyes” are well worth inclusion, so seek it out from Names via Rough Trade or Fargo.

Here is album track “The Rifle” recorded for a Daytrotter Session at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas (March 2007).

Alela Diane - The Rifle (Daytrotter Session)

Thanks to the fine folks at Daytrotter. Check out Daytrotter Sessions from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Marissa Nadler, Castanets, Nina Nastasia, Okkervil River and many more. See here for another Alela Diane live session on MOKB/SIRIUS radio.

Compared to the relatively barren (for me) musical months of August and September, October was the veritable muthalode: releases by Om (Floyd-esque pursuit of the transcendental Ur-drone), PJ Harvey (bleak piano-led English Gothic), Qui (the Return of Yow!), and Wooden Shjips (retrotastic distorto-organ-rock) all caught the ear, but it was the newest recordings of two favourite performers that got locked in some winner-takes-all deathmatch before I realised “hey, we’re all winners” and wimped out on the decision by making them both ‘albumi of the month’.

Future of The Left : “Curses” (Too Pure)

It has been exciting following this band from their first London show in September 2006 (this being the first official Future Of The Left show - the previous few were ’secretly’ performed under aliases: Mooks of Passim, Guerilla Press, Dead Redneck…) through to catching them in 3 different Dutch cities in the past three months as they embarked on the first Future Of The Left tour of Europe. Back in late 2006 they arrived pretty much fully-formed, having obviously spent a lot of time nurturing & perfecting their songs before unleashing them on the public - most of the songs on “Curses” were part of the live set pretty much from the beginning, with only the keyboard stompers first appearing in March. So these songs are like old friends, and far from tiring of their company now that I can spin them whenever I want I am like the proverbial cat (Colin? Chicken?) that got the cream.

Opening with the storming “The Lord Hates A Coward”, the album starts in turbo-charged high gear and only lets the foot off the pedal for the closing Noel Coward-esque “The Contrarian”. This out-of-character last song aside, the album pummels the listener with sledgehammer bass, piston-pounding drums and guitar that could cut through steel. Like Shellac (the band they’re most often compared to), Future Of The Left have a wonderful ability to create dynamic tension in their songs through the removal and re-addition of one of the three instruments, Kelson Mathias’s phat bass and Jack Egglestone’s precision beats often providing the granite foundation to the song before Andy Falkous comes in to spew molten guitar or keyboard riffs and his (mostly uninterpretable) lyrical bile over the proceedings. And despite the words being seemingly mostly meaningless they are strung together in such a literary way that makes ‘em unforgetable: you have tall tales of a Devil Thumb, Jack’s pretty pussy, Atlantis rendered badly in oil paints, tiny exo-skeletons and uninteresting ostriches, and get to ponder whether it’s better to be bovine than equine (which I first heard as “better porkfat than eggwhite” and which still made some kinda sense), hedgehog than porcupine, half-cut than borderline…

“Fuck The Countryside Alliance” owes the most to Shellac with its undulating bassline and spare beat, and is also Falco’s most easily decipherable lyric - an anti-Conservative diatribe, a call to arms against the wealthy country gentry, the screams of “take a man to his nightmares in a Landrover” eerily chilling (but funny too: like Killdozer or Shellac, and of course mclusky, FotL’s black sense of humour successfully shines through the music, without ever being a joke that one could tire of).
“Suddenly It’s A Folk Song” will soon be appearing on a double A-side release of punky new wave gloriousness with “Manchasm”, both songs deserving of tearing up the ‘independent’ airwaves (if such a thing still exists) - “Folk Song” in particular is a perfect pop song in the sense that Pixies and Nirvana wrote pop songs, music that can have populous appeal without comprimising the song’s (or the band’s) integrity.
“adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood” is one of my favourite songs of the year, moving with a minimalist punkfunk strut that Gang of Four would be proud of and mixing a mammoth riff & Rawhide with arguably the first ever usage of the word “paradiddle” in a song lyric.

I couldn’t help myself wondering though how great these songs would sound recorded over at Electrical Audio, but Falco gave me a fairly compelling reason as to why that is likely to remain a ‘what if?’. And I rudely suggested that the gaps between songs could’ve been a bit longer (so as to allow the listener a momentary breather & to reflect on the gem that had just passed) only to learn that the gaps are the result of hours of intense intra-band debate. I should learn not to question the Mighty Falcotron. Grow into your body happily!!!

Hear live versions of the album’s first three songs at the bottom of this post.

Scout Niblett : “This Fool Can Die Now” (Too Pure) 

Scout Niblett rocks so damn hard, but can rock so sweetly soft too. It is this wide dynamic - the highs & lows of someone who wears her emotions on her sleeve - helped by the sparseness of the instrumentation (usually just electric guitar, sometimes accompanied by drums), that makes Scout’s live performances so affecting. New songs like “Nevada”, “Let Thine Heart Be Warmed”, “Do You Want To Be Buried With My People?” and “Kiss“ have really captured my imagination over the past twelve months or so, and so (like with Future Of The Left) I couldn’t wait to have the recorded versions in my sweaty stumps, to pore & paw over to my heart’s desire. With Steve Albini charged with capturing it all on tape, and the Bonnie ‘Prince’ hillBilly-ing on four of the songs, it was going to be brilliant.

So it is disappointing that “