Live: Manu Chao @ Kentish Town Forum - 16 December
Written by: David Harrison
The Forum is packed full of people denying the Winter outside. The Latin vibe, mixed with the inter-rail generation is filling Kentish Town to its very brim. Music Towers struggles our way to the front, with people getting pretty stroppy till we get to all the funsters at the front.
Manu Chao these days is actually Radio Bemba Manu Chao’s Touring Band, and has been for the last few years. With gentle-giant Gambeat on bass, every time the the kick drum starts the crowd bouncing his thumping bass lines fuel the frenzy.
The storming guitar player, Madjid Fahem, curls his tongue like he should be in KISS. His ripspeed guitarism is better then anything those NY punks ever did though, with a flaming SG and his body twisting and turning in time with the music. When he switches to an acoustic, never have I seen a one-note solo been played so well, with an occasional lightspeed run.
In true British ignorance, I have no idea what any of the words are. Spanish, French Italian and Arabic mix about in pick and mix spendor. The outstretched hands in the air, from the front of The Forum, to the back, imply that hefty chunk of the audience do.
Tracks start taking a formula anthemic rally cry into reggae groove. Then a small break, fill or thumping of microphone into Manu’s chest. Then go mental as we are rocking out. Call and answer giant chants, and solo.
Watch ‘Me Llamen Calle’ bu Manu Chao:
So many elements are like a football match this evening - the layout of the band in a 4-3-1 formation, the amount of bald heads in the audience, the chanting, the crowd sweating buckets, with those call-and-answer chants reaching a frenzy.
Manu Chao himself kind of swans about, his clothing casually falling off. You can see a fair few faces lighting up as he shows off his Ladies’ Man credentials to this full house.
Last time they played a solo gig it was at Wembley Arena, and for Manu Chao and Radio Bemba this is a pretty intimate show. London has really have been missing out.
ALBUM: DeadMau5 - ‘At Play’
Written by: Shokrates The Finger
Dance music hasn’t always agreed with everyone at Music Towers. To this day, I still believe that whenever I go clubbing it fucks with my bodyclock.
I wake up the next day with a hangover as fierce as a pride of pissed-off lions, even if all I drank was Red Bull and over=priced bottled water. I get constipated for days. There is a residual throb that’s in my sinuses that that feels like someone’s going at my nostrils with an industrial milking machine, set to “udder buster” level.
But At Play by DeadMau5 makes me want to feel like I’ve gone through my personal clubland assault course. Listening to it makes me long for a mouth that doesn’t stop feeling dry even after 3 litres of water, for eyes that feel like we’re rubbing them with sandpaper every time we blink. It makes me want to stay up for four days straight, so stuffed full of cheap pills that we make a noise like a pack of tic-tacs when we walk down the street.
Listening to ‘Hey Baby’ is like having your best mate’s boyfriend whisper dirty talk in your ear when she’s in the same room as you. It borders on the pornographic, and no matter how much it gets your juices flowing, there’s something wrong about it. Whether it’s a case of “so-wrong-it’s-right”, or “plain downright wrong”, is something I can’t make up my mind on.
Watch DeadMAu5 perform live at the O2 Wireless Festival from this summer:
Then there’s the flat-pack instructo-techno of ‘This Is The Hook’. Oddly charming, it manages to keep the right side of toe-tappingly addictive without being overpowered by its vocal schtick - a disembodied Stephen Hawking-voice dissecting the various parts of a dance track.
The rest of the the record is chewy with house basslines and nightclub sleaze. Normally we’d find the juvenile lines of a track like ‘Afterhours’ (sample line: “Throw me down on the bar / should we do it in the car?” Urgh) too laughable for us to really mesh with DeadMau5‘ album, but it’s party season and common sense has deserted us. We just want something vivid and full of vigour to distract us from the prospect of having to spend a few days in the company of our closest relatives, and At Play does that and more. Pass the disco biscuits and get over here.
LIVE: ATP: Nightmare Before Christmas
Written by: David Harrison
When All Tomorrow’s Parties started this Christmas Festival, everyone said they were mad: “It’s Christmas time, do people want to go festivaling, what with the financial pressure, the weather, the location? Who wants to go to Minehead at this time of year?”
Well, we do! ATP choose unique artists to curate their festivals, picking their choices for the festival line-up. This weekend is being curated by the Melvins and Mike Patton, and so features a heavy dose of bands on Ipecac, the label owned and run by Mike Patton (of which the Melvins are on). And it’s not just the music that’s getting curated: the chalets everyone stays in have two channels of programmed TV specially picked by the festival organizers and the curators. Everyone I spoke to seem to catch Spider Baby, a very weird black and white film about a family of 60’s hotties gone totally psycho. The soundtrack was delivered wonderfully by Fantomas. Being back-to-back with Rosemary’s Baby, it had me bouncing about in the crowd of bearded men that seems to gather for ATP.
The road to Minehead and the surrounding area actually really gorgeous. For all Mike Patton’s jibes throughtout the festival, the north coast of Devon along the A39 is idyllic. If you ignore the fast food chains and endless slot machines, the Butlins where the festival is based is quite fancy. It has quite beautifully kept flora and forna, the buildings are all kept nice, it’s right on the beach, and although the weather is icy cold, it’s still sunny and all the gigs and bars are inside anyway.
King Buzzo, aka Buzz Osbourne, mainman of the Melvins, wins the award for most amount of times playing this weekend- 3 Melvin’s performances, 2 Fantomas‘ and a Porn (the band, rather then a carnal show) performance, plus a few Astoria shows before and after. His white ‘fro allows the lighting guys to get a chance to perfect the art of lighting his hair.
Isis deliver the 25 minutes of sound that induce both awe and love for them, before the third song reminds you of that there’s a bit too much of a formula going on: enter melody, enter storming riff, and enter a in-need-of-a-Lemsip voice, and one wanders off in search of a beer.
The Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio delivered a quadraphonic version of a Stockhausen’s avante garde music piece, KONTAKTE, of which out of the seeming improvised (but wasn’t by any means) plinks and plonks the Gong solo was by far my favourite bit. While it was very odd, with lots of chinstroking was in order, it was so good that Mike Patton himself rushed up to congratulate the performers when then finished.
Farmers Market delivered a blindingly complicated folk set, although we were spoilt on the Saturday night when the 10-piece Roma Gypsy band, Taraf De Haidouks, took to the stage. They were making a rare appearance on these shores, and they are so fast and so, so brilliant. What was unusual was instead of the usual Barbican-type audience, they had glowstick-welding circle-pit loonies. The crowd worked the band up into such a frenzy they took the show outside for ten minutes before the security moved them on.
The usually-alternative Melvins came across almost normal, in that they had songs with choruses and beginnings and ends. They seemed positively mainstream poised against the experimentation littered about the rest of the bill. Even with bass player, Jared Warren, taking his wig off and spending a good 15 minutes wandering about the audience, in some sort of tongue talking preacherman mode.
One of the best things about ATP festivals is that the partying never really ends; you only get a break when you can’t hack it anymore. I heard tales, from people holding their heads in shame, of a few bands playing a chalet with a full PA and drumkit, another shindig kicking off with a dry-ice machine. I, however, woke up at 5am, watching Star Trek and facing a cold journey back to London.
Gear: Korg Kaoss Pad KP3
Written by: David Harrison
Having got the Mini-KP pinched at Glastonbury was an excuse to head up to Kilburn and have a nose at around that DJ kit shop there. The Pioneer EFX 500 was my aim, priced at about £300. But Korg’s Kaos Pad KP3 has just been reduced to £230 - not only is it a bit more flexible, but it has some sampling tools too.
Out of the box, the Koas Pad KP3 is pretty easy, with sending and receiving a breeze through the mixing desk, and - Eureka! - 100-odd extra finger-controlled effects, available in glorious flashing red lights. The first change from the Mini KP is the power of the thing. The Mini KP always required a bunch of compensation on the channel you were mixing to equalise the levels. The KP3 is powered, over-powered if you want it to be, so if anything you’ll need to make sure that you aren’t going to blow away your last track in a spate of finger-powered enthusiasm.
The effects on the Mini KP and KP3 are pretty much the same: Sweeps, Flangers, are both fun sometimes. I find a little to much of the pad is ’swept’ quiet so these take a bit of getting used to. The EQ that appears on the KP3 is totally weird, and is very good at taking out the ranges - it’s too odd to be that useful. Delay is good for making some simple guitar sounds good. Matt Bellamy of Muse has one of these embedded in his guitar for that vert reason.
By far the effect that I most use are the Distortions. The perfect tool for my Lionel Richie/Slayer mix, everyone is reeling from, a one timed electric-storms is perfect for hiding what is lurking round the corner. In fact I love the Distortion so much, I used it to carry an entire set last weekend.
One small bugbear is that when selecting an effect, its default mode is off until the pad is pressed. Without the pad being pressed there is no sound. It needs an idiot-check, otherwise a simple distraction can become a disaster, as you miss your hundredth press down on the hold button.
By directing a track through it, you can sample about 30 seconds using the KP3’s Sampel tools. It’s then possible to take out slices of the section, and remix the track on the fly. This is very easy to use, and is all saved on the standard SD memory Stick.
However, I would of liked the KP3 on start up to remember the last loaded samples and tools, as loading up the KP3 can be a bit fiddly. I have found my workflow disturbed, and have to make a little book of notes to remind me what all my settings were. The actual sampling buttons are a little deep and are not as responsive as an MPC, so can be easy to mis-hit. I’ve been using it to layer up guitar riffs, and the extra millimetre of button seems to get in my way.
The machine has a microphone jack, so you can sing straight into and effect your voice a bit like Mike Patton, and of course it has the obligatory MIDI in and out.
In total, the sharpening of the sampling tools, and maybe some odder FX like pitch or robot, are welcome additions, as it does OD on sweeps and flanges. I wouldn’t mind it doing a couple of things less, but also a little better - either lose the sample function and have a few hundred more effects, or lose all the synth sounds and sharpen up the sampling.
The nearer to £200 you can get it, the closer it is to an utter bargain. And to be honest, the Mini KP isn’t that much of a difference and at half the price it is a total bargain.
LIVE: Airbourne & Stone Gods @ London Astoria - 28 November
Written by: David Harrison
London’s Astoria is on it’s last legs. It’s almost time to switch off the lights and call in the wrecking ball. I was just passing the place and found myself thinking: “Airbourne are on tonight…might be the last chance to go there…” The venue is full of proper old skool characters, the smell of denim and leather and overpriced canned lager. I even saw ‘a’ girl!
First on is Sounds and Fury, looking like every axeman Guitar Hero ever shat out. They really throw their hearts into it, but sadly nobody in the audience can bring themselves to bang their head, or even sway a little bit. They just stand there, wondering when some good music might come over the PA.
Next up on support are Stone Gods, currently sitting astride the rung of their own personal ‘can we headline yet?’ ladder. Coming across one-part Def Leppard and one-part really-chugging-and-hard-dirty-riffage, guitarist Dan Hawkins is the only person all night that doesn’t seem to pretending. He stands, slender in the corner, delivering storming string twizzling while the singer, Richie Edwards, acts like he has ‘arrived’. Hawkins is the star of the evening by miles, and he never said a word, barely looking up from behind his hair.
It’s their second night on the trot here at the Astoria, and Airbourne have almost sold out both. Are we really that deprived of AC/DC here in the UK that these jokers can get away with this? Everybody seems quite excited by the whole thing, while I look on baffled. I swear their last london gig was the Borderline, and it was just an ‘okay‘ show, with their then-support act Skirtbox seeming a more exciting prospect. A more enthusiastic hack enthuses to me that “this everything that I’m about”, while I’m just confused. Has a little brain bug taken over these people’s minds?
Airbourne’s frontman, Joel O’Keefe, screams at us for bleeding hours. No smiles, no sense of Irony, no thanks that he has upscaled from the Borderline - nope, Joel O’Keefe and his headbanging buddies seem to act like they are actually are AC/DC.
The crowd is happy, outside in the smoking corner. People accept Airbourne are a ‘AC/DC but cheaper’ ticket. Fair point, but I just can’t get any sense of fun out of it. It’s just wholesale rip-off, fronted by a long-haired James Blunt lookalike. Some say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but to me this band feel like a leech, taking every stylistic nuance, and distilling it into a cynical money-making project, aimed squarely at AC/DC fans’ wallets. It’s no surprise that the best track of the night is a cover of ‘Whole Lot Of Rosie’, to which Hawkins returns to the stage to join in.
Go on - watch it if you don’t believe me:
Airbourne might have 8 Marshall stacks on stage, but you can see only 2 of them are mic’d up. The guy screeches a fake, ear-busting banshee noise all evening, even when he talks, not once dropping the horrid stolen veneer. Airbourne are the trade description of pretentious.
pre.ten.tious
/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [pri-ten-shuhs] Show IPA Pronunciation–adjective
1. full of pretense or pretension.
2. characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.
3. making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious
4. This ruddy Airbourne band that do my head in, I still have a headache.
ALBUM: The John Henrys - ‘Sweet As The Grain’
Written by: Hugh Platt
Country Music frightens me. You know that scene in Terminator 2 where he walks into the bar, beats that guy up, melts his face on the kitchen hob and nicks his threads? Country music was playing in the background. Not to mention every brain-scarring psycho moment in Deliverance - remember the kid with the banjo? Exactly. Country music is the twangy veneer on nasty things.
Except The John Henrys don’t play up to my self-created stereotype. At all. The Canadian five-piece have about as much darkness to them as an over-enthusiastic children’s TV presenter, locked in Dr Smile’s House of Happy Pills.
The John Henrys play ‘Thought Yourself Lucky’ live:
Their 60’s shake-shuffle and hazy blues might not be enough for me to get over my fear and prejudice of all things country, but in amongst all that twanging I hear an album that smells like the first whiff of a fresh whiskey bottle, rather than the glum final dregs. The John Henrys are Good Time Boys, not Good Ol’ Boys, and foo to you if you can’t enjoy a bit of that.
‘Sweet As The Grain’ came out today on True North Records. For more info, check out their official website and their MySpace page.
EP: Kono Michi & The Stone Ghost Collective - ‘The Grey Eulogy EP’
Written by: Hugh Platt
I love Christmas. Society takes a step back from all the bollocks it preaches for the rest of the year (Don’t Drink So Much. Don’t Eat So Much. Stop Snogging Random Strangers You Meet In the Pub. Be Miserable. Be Quiet.) and instead everyone acts like they should (Drinking Too Much. Eating Too Much. Enjoying Mistletoe Too Much. Having Fun. Singing Songs). Big Coats! Mulled wine! Presents! The slim hope of snow! Dr Who Xmas Specials! And the record industry slowly grinding to a halt as everyone starts chucking up Best Ofs and re-releases for the Christmas rush. Meaning we get to spend more time with our feet up, listening to the records we think we like, rather than those we think we ought to cover. Yes, Christmas is a good thing.
Another reason to celebrate this Winter (well, if you live in The North, that is), is because Kono Michi and The Stone Ghost Collective are embarking on a mini-tour to promote their new collaborative release, The Grey Eulogy EP. Four tracks book-ended by covers of ‘The Look Of Love’ and ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’, it’s at once both wintry and warming. With both acts solid staples of Shark Batter Records, their covers were never going to be straightforward. ‘The Look Of Love’ slips from a whispering murmur to the edge of ghostly nervousness, as opposed to the retching sweetness of the Bacharach original. ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ pairs an unexpected outback twang with Kono Michi’s violin, and the addition of Brendan McAndrew of The Stone Ghost Collective on vocals - sounding like a young Tom Waits if he existed solely on a diet of honey and lemon - suprises us by finding a new spin to put on a song we thought well and truly spun out.
Kono Michi & The Stone Ghost Collective hang out and practice in France and Switzerland:
It’s with the two original tracks that the EP crackles and pops though. The title-track, described by the band as a “death-bed ballad”, mixes maudlin lyricism with a warmly uplifting melody, mulling over its sense of mortality. It feels right that we’re listening to it now, during the onset of Winter, with the song feeling delicately crisp, rather than glum and grey.
‘War Correspondence’ reminds us a bit of long-forgotten LA-electrolocists, Snake River Conspiracy¸ only without that boring obsession with making bad covers of The Smiths. Combining a killer chorus of “You lie on your back / it’s a mortar attack”, it manages to be robotic without having to sound like a cheap automated sex-product (Goldfrapp: take note). It’s addictive like an arcade game that you can’t stop pumping pound coins in till you’ve blown your bus fare home. A genuine contender for Track of the Year.
‘The Grey Eulogy EP’ by Kono Michi and The Stone Ghost Collective is out now on Shark Batter Records. They’re on a micro-tour of the north of the UK from tomorrow - get yourself here to see if there’s a date near you.
Live: The Sea @ The Dublin Castle - 21 November
Written by: David Harrison
In the 20 years I have known him, my mate Tom has never once said:
“So-and-so are playing the Dublin Castle - want to come along?”
“Yep, I will meet you there,” I reply, somewhat stunned.
The band in question is The Sea, playing at the Dublin Castle in Camden - and Tom loves them. Their search engine-proof moniker means I walk blind into the venue, and was pleased to see nothing but a guitar amp and drumkit on stage. The Sea are just one man bashing pigskins, and his brother twisting strings on a Rickenbacker plugged into a scuzzy vox.
We later discover that not five minutes before they are due on stage, a fellow cornered the guitarist, Peter Chisolm in the toilet. “Give me coke, skinny indie kid,” he ordered. Upon finding that this skinny indie kid had none he proceed to punch him a few times in the face.
Which is why a dazed Peter Chisholm joins his brother, Alex, on stage. “This song goes out to the man who just gave me a black eye’” he syas, and lunges into a guitar frenzy. A hard-hitting bluesathon of riff rings out, and the room fills up. A lot of miserable old blokes shuffle around at the back, and optimistic teenage girls bounce around up front - always a sign of record company interest (or a paedophile ring).
It’s only 8:30pm, and The Sea are shamelessly riffing and drum filling away. If I’m being lazy, it is quite like early White Stripes, before Meg had that breakdown, and Jack turned into a humourless git that wrote wishy washy Bond themes. They have calls of Dan Sartain, Robert Johnson, and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick’. The set creates a warm feeling like sausage & mash might, but instead it is made up of guitar riff porn and killer drum fillers.
However, listening to their MySpace page the next day, I’m not feeling the same raw fuzzed-out feel I got from the live show. It feels all a bit indie-twee, and seems to be missing its critical edge. Someone put Albini to work on it, and the world shall see peace in our time.
For more noises from The Sea, go check out their MySpace page.
Live: Kenan Bell @ Hoxton Bar & Grill - 19 November
Written by: Hugh Platt
I know fuck all about hip hop. Okay, so I’ve got a few albums lying about here and there from acts both American and British, but I’d be a big fat lying fucker if I pretended they weren’t tokenistic inclusions in my record collection. There’s some Task Force nestling up against some Phi Life Cypher, but it’s got an inch of dust on it. It’s just stuff to play at parties when you want to mug off the responsibility of DJ’ing to go drink’n'flirt with the hot girls in the kitchen.
I’m might know jack shit about hip hop, but I know when I’m having a good time. And on Wednesday night at the Hoxton Bar & Grill, that’s exactly what Kenan Bell made me have. It’s hard to enjoy anything at the Hoxton Bar & Grill. It has the stupidest name of any venue ever. It has the worst bar staff and bar prices in London, a city famed for it’s shittiness of both. It’s always too hot inside, the venue always feels too empty as the ceiling is far too high, and the tiny stage that’s too high up never does anyone any favours.
It certainly doesn’t Kenan Bell and his band any at first once they take to. Intermittently pleading and berating the crowd for not gathering at the foot of the stage, and about how in debt this tour has made them, the Californian and his cohorts seems somewhat indifferent of the fact that London is crunching to a recession-frozen halt. We’re all broke these days, chaps, and moaning about how hard done by you feel will hardly engender you to a be-credit-crunched crowd.
Watch Kenan Bell and his giant sunglasses playing performing ‘Enjoy’:
They’re saved by a gradually swelling crowd, and the fact that there’s talent in his songs, rather than the sub-standard self-aggrandisement I expect from hip hop. Tracks like ‘Save Your Life’, ‘Good Day’ and ‘Enjoy’ manage to be engaging without being unbearably “positive”. You know what I mean - those positive-thinking positive-message types who seem to see the stage as theit platform to preach from, rather than to entertain from. Kenan Bell sidesteps this with hooks that still feel like they’re tugging on my ears when I’m on the tube ride home.
Seeing as the biggest impact the UK urban scene has had on me recently is that they had to abandon their own awards ceremony descended into a mass brawl, it’s a little sad that I’ve had to look across the Atlantic to find something that’s made me want to investigate hip hop again. But if it means exposure to more acts like Kenan Bell, well, I’m all for it.
For more info on Kenan Bell, go check out his Official Website. Alternatively, go check out his MySpace page.
Single: Selfish C**t - ‘England Made Me II’
Written by: David Harrison
Selfish C**t never had a name for radio. It was always such an abrasive name that I found it was difficult to them seriously, dismissing them as a bunch of attention-seeking skinny-jeans types.
But ‘England Made Me II’, their latest single, is just too bloody good. First up (thank God), it isn’t a cover of the Black Box Recorder song. Instead it kicks off with a US-style preacher vocal that doesn’t reconcile with the title at all, but then the car-crash smash of guitars kick in and send you flying into the nearest ditch.
Calling on the ghost of McClusky, 80’s Matchbox, The Cramps, Sex Pistols and all things that are fucking great in low-fi rock n roll, Selfish C**t have made a bastard brilliant record. It might just be one riff all the way through, but who gives a toss? It’s better then that 700 billion dollar Chinese Democracy record, and probably only took about ten minutes to record as to boot.
Splendid - carry on.
‘England Made Me II’ by Selfish Cunt is ount on December 1st on Sparrow’s Tear Records. For more info, go check out the band’s MySpace page.