The Abyssinians played Band on the Wall on Friday. It is a vexing craziness how good they still sound.
Tobias Lindholm’s too-close-for-comfort pirate drama is about the effects of the titular hijacking on two men, the icy ball busting business bastard CEO who takes it on himself (against professional advice) to negotiate with the hijackers and the shaggy loveable ship’s cook whose slow fall into PTSD plays out kind of like Under Siege if the people who made Under Siege had any respect for life and death.
There’s a short stretch in the middle where it flirts with becoming a sort of socialist parable about European working classes and desperate ‘third world’ citizens being choked by corporate greed and vanity but smartly changes key to avoid such simplicity. The pirates (though they could perhaps have been better contextualised) are neither villainised nor glamourised and rather left as a violent but very human enigma. It’s a confident and affecting approach.
WHY?
The Kazimier, Liverpool
Tuesday 7th May 2013
It’s ten years ago in June that WHY?’s first album proper, Oaklandazulasylum, crept out on experimental hip-hop label Anticon. WHY? started out as another (mostly) solo project for the prolific Yoni Wolf. Yoni’s brother Josiah, Doug McDiarmid and a few of their Anticon cohorts guested on the first LP and the ensemble has grown exponentially over the years, walking on stage tonight a six-piece.
Wolf, Wolf and McDiarmid are joined by another Wolf, Josiah’s wife Liz with Sarah Winters and Ben Sloan rounding out the band but by no means making up the numbers. “This is our first time in Liverpool”, frontman Yoni deadpans, “What an honour it is to play on the stage where the fuckin’ Beatles started out or whatever.” (It is a certainty of pop history that The Beatles, never in their long career got around to playing the Kazimier.)
Opening with unexpected second-album track Waterfalls, they’re off to a decidely niche start. The songs with big choruses or singalong verses work well to get the crowd rapping along and punching the air and the subtler, more elaborate tracks are spectacular, especially accented by tonight’s relatively cosy surroundings. After a long instrumental jam at the end of These Few Presidents, the ringleader returns to the stage and needlessly points out “That was dope”. Two drum sets, keyboards, xylophones, guitars, bass, backing vocals and whistles are performed in a semi circle around the mostly-rapping-these-days Yoni. It’s a big, bright, confident sound that recalls the poppier end of reggae and The Beach Boys in their prime.
Yoni’s self-aware middle-class-problems and genuinely evocative absurdist poetry compete for lyrical attention and the contrast suggests a full-bodied honesty. While his brother chips in from behind the kit, partly reeling him in but mostly egging him on, Yoni-as-MC voices daft flights of fancy (subjects inc. a misheard heckle that absolutely wasn’t a reference to The Great Gatsby and an onstage realisation that he’d have made a decent madame in an Old West brothel - “I’d keep a gun in my garter”). It’s a charming and clearly lifelong double act that invites you into WHY?’s intimate on-stage semi-circle.
Future of the Left
Sound City ‘13 at Screendelica, Liverpool
Sat 4th May 2013
I didn’t see much of Sound City in the end. I got there about 6 on Friday where I saw Andrew Loog Oldham doing a book signing in the Brian Epstein (free bar), I saw a band called Toy (mediocre) at the Anglican Cathedral (incredible), watched an American band (quite good) in the Garage (brought to you by Tubourg), had a couple of Flying Dogs (delicious) in Maguire’s Bar (on Renshaw St, take your mates), saw a bit of Mr Scruff (reliable) in the Shipping Forecast (packed), took myself for a curry (lamb), had a nap (welcome) and woke up when Future of the Left (best band in the country) went on at 2 on Saturday morning in Screenadelica (great venue, shame about the name). All in all it was quite the treat.
I went to see oOoOO in Sheffield and had a wander around the suitably spooky Park Hill Flats.
Drew Pearce and Shane Black seem to have worked dead well together and wisely withdrew from the scope of The Avengers. Highlights include Ben Kingsley’s performance (particularly in the second half) and Jon Favreau’s nod to Vincent Vega. Some of the elements are a bit rushed and Rebecca Hall is unforgivably underused.
Tony Blair’s Top 5 Political Deaths
5. Robin Cook (2005)
4. Saddam Hussein (2006)
3. Slobodan Milošević (2006)
2. 9/11 victims (2001)
1. John Smith (1994)
Yo La Tengo at the Ritz
Picture nicked from stillunusual on Flickr.
Yo La Tengo
The Ritz, Manchester
21st March 2013
Yo La Tengo’s sound has always been consistently and gleefully eclectic. They build their songs layer-by-layer, drawing from a vast stockpile of musical and conceptual influences. Their output attests to a sincere and unrepressed pop geekery where genres and sub-genres are devoured and interpreted with rapturous triumph. Touring to support latest LP, Fade, this tour sees YLT playing two sets per show: the first a soothing and snug unplugged sort of affair, the second a smattering of classics and bangers that ends in about half an hour of terrifying guitar molestation. If you’re not a fan of Yo La Tengo, you probably should be.
Thirty years of being one of indie rock’s best loved bands apparently affords you more than a bit of good grace. The quieter first set impels a boozy Manchester crowd to shut the fuck up, the room brought to order by a swirling, hushed beauty. Fade dominates the first half, pitch perfect new songs like Ohm, Two Trains and I’ll Be Around punctuated and contextualised by the odd nod to the back-catalogue. Playing a load of new songs quietly could be a recipe for impatience and heckling but not a single attendee is unwilling to let the band make their own way through the gig.
The second half is out of the gate with the earnest lover’s rock of Stupid Things ahead of classics Moby Octopad and Autumn Sweater. Perched effortlessly between deliberate composed stability and freak flag flyin’ delirium, the twangy steady rhythmn section keeps the songs accessible while the lead guitar pisses and whines in glorious frustration. Rock history notes that the band have never been the most comfortabe in the spotlight and at times they seem so locked into each other that watching them perform can err towards the voyeuristic. It’s particuarly appreciated, then, when they treat us to the odd nostalgic anecdote from an undeniably interesting career.
The three-piece moves around the stage, switching instruments and taking turns at taking the reigns and their obvious affection for playing together prevents the democratic fluidity from being showy or distracting. In the second half of the second set, Before We Run, Nothing to Hide and Double Dare are bled into a ripping megajam, a more-or-less single warped guitar solo runs throughout and could run on all night and you wouldn’t be arsed.
Ohm is revisted before the end, it’s amped-up reworking a simple piece of evidence of the versatility of YLT’s writing - nothing is lost in either approach, the song just builds and contorts, it’s mood and message both apparently universally fitting. The encore consists of a couple of covers (Alternative TV and William DeVaughn because of course Alternative TV and William DeVaughn) and a polite, solicited request from the front row (the heavingly sexy From a Motel 6). The band smile humbly, say a gentle thank you each and exit to loving applause.
Jodrell Bank
Dinosaur Jr. at the Ritz
After I saw Almost Famous and started reading up on Lester Bangs I made an embarrassing foray into music journalism. It somehow lasted several years and (almost directly) took me to lots of foreign countries. I stopped because I realised that my opinion on rock and roll is meaningless and that I’m not a very good writer yet.
I have recently become too cheap to pay for gig tickets and so, with my tail wagging limply between my legs, I went cap in hand to an editor friend and asked if I could start reviewing gigs again. He said that yes, I could.
Dinosaur Jr.
The Ritz, Manchester
Friday, 2 February 2013
It’d be naive to expect any great surprises from a band in their 29th year together, and Dinosaur Jr. have never strayed too far from their early era-defining set-up. As the reformed Pixies coasted on their greatest hits and the remaining members of Nirvana rocked ghoulish benefit gig wank jams with a never-less-cool Paul McCartney, their contemparies in Dino Jr (reunited in 2005) kept their heads down and released three of their best albums yet.
Caution is always advised when you see a legendary act, some of the most disappointing gigs you’ll ever go to will be farted out by some of the once-best artists. But tonight it’s hard to imagine mosh-pit favourites like Freak Scene and Watch The Corners ever sounding better, the band’s complacent command of their (professional, if not personal) shit has them breeze through some of the most influential anthems of their genre as though they were sending pointless texts on a lunch break. This unlikely second act of the Dinosaur Jr. story is yielding peerlessly crucial new material and has the band appearing fresher and tighter than you expect they ever did back in the egos and barneys horse and buggy days.
The dinosaurs of the audience co-exist peacefully enough with the juniors. An apparently fashionable grunge revival adds a bit of energy to said mosh-pit and amongst the last train dad’s night out crowd are scattered a bunch of on-trend natty young’uns, unjustifiably shouting out for ‘old stuff’. This reunion of the orignal DJ line-up has now lasted longer than its initial run, making a good portion of tonight’s punters too young to remember even 2007’s comeback statement ‘Beyond’.
The band play with all three members downstage: the notorious prima donna J Mascis on the left, buried under long white hippy hair that changes colour with the disco lights, dominating his Jazzmaster with a detached Gen X cool; bassist and occasional frontman Lou Barlow is to the right, looking somehow younger than he did ten years ago as he hops about with an infectious chirp and a few quips to the crowd; between the two, Murph’s fuss-free balls-out approach proves a literal and symbolic ballast to his legendarily temperamental mates (he must be shattered).
An hour and a half flies by with more-or-less a nod to every album, including a welcome banger from Mascis and Barlow’s high-school hardcore band Deep Wound, “This is a song about not wanting to go to college!” Barlow redundantly grins before ripping shit out of his bass and shouting “I don’t want to go to college” lots of times over the course of about 80 seconds. He again takes the lead on new album instaclassic Rude, a by turns jaunty and creepy pop song with a melody so ethereally familiar that you must have heard it in the womb or something. Mascis, though, is the predidictable centre of attention, his fuzzed out psych-folk histrionics and half-asleep Neil Young drawl steering the gig, the band and, arguably, 30 years of American alt-rock.
http://wirelessmag.co.uk
Ill Communication No. 4181
Sounds ‘good’ like, where do I ‘sign’? Also, I am a convicted ‘sex offender’, do you foresee any ‘problem’ with that?
Denis Johnson is my new hero. My boy Nathan got me his Train Dreams for Christmas. It’s an enormous era-spanning lyrical bit of literary fiction that chronicles the life of Robert Grainier which runs parallel to the advancement of America and the creeping decline of small frontier towns. Johnson’s minimalist realism is rich with philosophy, spirituality and mystery. And he does it in 128 pages. It’s a fucking triumph.
