Category Archives: Live!

Gig reviews

Genna Marabese
2
Dec

Tuesday 15th November 2011

Well, I’ve never seen THIS before.

There are more people on stage when this gig starts than there are in the crowd.

Even in my own extremely minor musical career I’ve never encountered this before.

By the end of a gig, sure, when everybody has enjoyed the band sufficiently and gone home, but nobody has the heart to tell the band.

There was a pub gig I played in 1990 where we started out with around twenty fairly enthusiastic punters. Two hours of blaring original metal later it was just the bar staff, and I’m pretty sure they were only still there because they wouldn’t have gotten paid otherwise. We even played an encore for the barman.

But this is the Bull And Gate in buzzin’ North London. Yeah, I know England are playing football on the telly, but seriously … if I can make the effort with a dose of the man-flu and a cough that would not sound out of place in a 60–a-day man then so can everybody else.

The gig is a Club Fandango promotion featuring four bands. Its the first act I’m here to see though, so its an 8.00 start in a freezing, near-deserted room for Genna Marabese.

A little research on that internet reveals an intriguing set of influences – Joanna Newsom, the Velvet Underground, Hole, and so on. And in this day and age there’s no excuse for going to a gig without checking out the songs, which I have done and they all sound amazing, intriguing and pretty much original.

GM’s set is superb. Six piece band perfectly complements her doomy yet hummable songs. There are echoes of the likes of Anna Calvi here, and lots of chord progressions that owe less to rock and more to East European folk music.

But … Genna and her band ROCK. And you can dance to them, which is always good.

The key here is the songs, which are ragged and garagey, dark and countrified.The band play a very important part in creating a unique sound – she definitely needs to keep a hold of them. There isn’t a weak song played tonight, which is most unusual for an artist at such an early stage of her career, but We Are Animal and Masquerade are contrasting standouts.

And she avoids all the cornier stereotypes of the alt.girl-fronted-rock genre – if you’re not careful you end up coming over like some horrible big-haired early eighties “alternative” harpy. Much as I like The Machine, for instance, their girl singer Florence does occasionally strays into Toyahland.

Genna Marabese reminds me of early Tom Waits  more than anyone else in terms of song structures and sound. Nearest female  comparison I can think of is Lene Lovich (slightly Gothy, punky singer with a Balkan origin who had three strange and wonderful hits back in 1979, the era when left-field music could still get in the charts. Lucky Number was her big hit)

Its a crowded market, sure, but Genna’s uniqueness should assure her a place in it. There is nobody who sounds quite like this. And I admired the way she and her band didn’t let the sparse crowd bother them and still put on a great show. At least one of the bands that followed didn’t seem to be bothered to be honest.

By the end of the set the crowd has increased to the point where we comfortably outnumber the band. One day we’ll be able to say we saw Genna Marabese before she was famous. And so should you.

Mind you, coming out tonight made sure that the bug really got a hold of me to the point where I didn’t go out again for more than a week. But, had I unfortunately not survived, at least the last gig I ever attended would have been worth it.

 

 

 

Colorama – Acid-folk with a psych twist.
24
Nov

Thursday November 10th, Slaughtered Lamb, LDN

I’ve never heard a band sound quite like Colorama.

Their website describes them as a psych folk / dream pop group, which sounds about right.

It is tempting for people to lump together all new bands without any screaming guitars in the “folk” category but that would do Colorama a grave disservice.

There are only surface similarities to the current folk revival scene, but this band is coming from a different direction entirely.

They sound unique in current music. There are elements of early 70s acid-folk – think Pentangle and the songs running through “The Wicker Man” – but there is also a psychedelic 60s element to the sound. Bandleader Carwyn Ellis’s singing adds yet another dimension, all yearning and pastoral.

The songs are beautiful slow-burning things that get into your head and under your skin. They’re split about 60/40 between Welsh and English. Now despite only speaking English I think I prefer the songs in Welsh – not understanding the lyrics lets me get lost in the music. I don’t understand German either, which is one of the major reasons I like Wagner. The composer that is, not the bloke off of X-Factor last year.

Colorama have been my late night listening of choice for most of what’s been an absolutely vile year on a personal level. The music has an unsentimental beauty that just draws you in.

I’ve been waiting a long time to see them live and tonight’s setting at The Slaughtered Lamb in Shoreditch is perfect. Basement room, people stood around at the bar or sat on sofas and armchairs.

There’s a red on black pentagram adorning the back of the stage, which seems to fit perfectly with Colorama’s sound.

The musicianship is astounding, on their records and also, as tonight proves, in a live setting. Any muso will tell you that is easy to amp it up to 11 and speed everything up on stage. If anything – and I wasn’t carrying a stopwatch so I can’t say for sure – Colorama slow it down. They’re not afraid of playing quietly, and thank God for that ‘cos these songs work best that way.

The band is currently a three-piece with guitars, drums and occasional forays into some weird and wonderful looking instruments that I’ve certainly never seen played live before, including an autoharp Its not a harp at all, as you can see. Its a zither, really. The campaign to reinstate the proper name begins here.

Colorama appear to be poised on the brink of a bit of success, at least in indie/alternative circles. The aforementioned folk revival in which we find ourselves can do them no harm. So if more people get to hear Colorama, I’ll happily put up with the presence any number of Whales and Sons and so on.

They have three albums /mini-albums out. Debut mini-album “Magic Lantern Show” is the most folky of the three. Full-length album “Box” gives more reign to the psychedelic side in places (check out “Candy Street” in particular, the best song Ray Davies never wrote) and they’ve just released “Colouring Book” which on the first couple of listens is well up to standard.

You should listen to this band. And go see them before they get too big. Next LDN gig is at Stokey Records Bar in Stoke Newington on Friday 9th December 2011.

Colorama website

 

 

 

Airborne Toxic Event and me. A love story.
18
Nov

5th November 2011, Shepherds Bush Empire, London

“This band means everything to us, its pretty much all we’ve got”

Every time I’ve seen The Airborne Toxic Event, singer Mikkel Jollett has said this towards the end of the gig.

If you’ve never seen the band then you may well think “Yeah, that’s bullshit” and I can see where you’re coming from – and I guess it has probably become an integral part of the show, like when Bruce Springsteen asks Miami Steve what time it is.

But you get the feeling that he means it.

The Airborne Toxic Event first came to my attention in November 2008 when they did a UK tour covering 30 gigs in 30 nights, including the more well-travelled cities but also places like Yeovil, Derby, Fife, Aldershot, Barrow In Furness, Dundee.

I’d be hard pressed to even GO to 30 gigs in 30 nights, even if they were all round the corner and I didn’t have to work.

I saw the band three times on that tour at their London residency, at gigs promoted by the excellent Club Fandango. (check out the video diary with a slightly bemused looking Steven Chen (guitar and keyboards) coming to terms with the UK)

Their first album had gotten a grey market UK release, forty minutes and ten tracks of sheer rock’n’roll genius, not a superfluous note or a wasted word.

The buzz got louder as to what a great live band they were. The crowd was bigger for each gig, and what a show they put on! In the tiny back room of the Dublin Castle in Camden they pounded out their songs of doomed love and big hooks. It was the closest I will ever get to seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Stone Pony, New Jersey.

And on the third night, when the singer jumped into the crowd for a bit of that old rock’n’roll down with the people stuff, he ignored all the adoring twenty-something girls, stuck his arm round my shoulders and the mike in my face, and I did the best I could to remember the words to “Gasoline”… Proud moment, although the cynical me did have room for the thought that he may have been trying to recreate the famous cover shot to “Born To Run”, and I was the only big fat brown man available.

Great band, great set of gigs.

So then through a series of personal mishaps on their part and having to leave the country for a while on my part (don’t ask), I went through 2009 and 2010 ATE-less. They cancelled a European tour in 2009 owing to ill-health and a couple of UK gigs too and I thought, well, that’s that. They’ve missed the boat now. Great band, fantastic album, at least we have the memories and they didn’t last long enough to get crap.

Early 2011. Back in the UK again, bit out of touch with music, scanning the TV listings and there on Sky Arts is a concert by The Airborne Toxic Event. At Disney Concert Hall (check name). Its lovely shot in B&W (check) with a choir and a marching band! There’s new songs! And a cover of the fabulous Magnetic Fields’ “The Book Of Love”!

Further investigation reveals a new album “All At Once” and, glory be, a UK tour ! They’re doing  a week of gigs in London, revisiting the smaller venues where they made their name locally. These gigs are sold out but I manage to get tickets for an intimate sit-down gig at the Drill Hall via Facebook.

And hearing them for the first time in stripped-down acoustic mode, its like listening to the songs again for the first time. They make so much sense sung quieter and less frenetically, and Mikkel’s extensive between-song yarns flesh out the story, which is, basically, that if a girl called Catherine hadn’t dumped him, all the great songs on the first album wouldn’t have been written.

Thank God for bad relationships. Happiness is overrated. At least when it comes to artists writing decent songs. But that’s a topic for another day…

So I seek out a ticket for any of the gigs in the rest of the week. I’m prepared to pay quite a lot.

Somebody on the fans forum has a spare for the Kings College gig and wants it to go to a fellow fan. I insist on payment, she refuses, so I end up buying her a drink in exchange for the ticket.

The gig is amazing, better than I have ever seen them play.

So up until April 2011 I had seen The Airborne Toxic Event five times for a grand total cost of £15.  Plus a pint of Guinness.

The ticket for Shepherds Bush Empire costs me more than the other five gigs combined – but the band is worth every penny, and then some.

A word about the songs. Lets be clear, there is nothing that original here. The Airborne Toxic Event are alchemists and mixers in the same way Blur and Oasis were. Mikkel knows exactly how to write a song, with the little pause before the whole song goes crazy – It is the utter conviction with which they play that makes the difference, its something that Springsteen has (obviously) and Dexys, and the Proclaimers, and the Hold Steady. None of those acts were particularly innovative, but they all bring a new freshness to the musical styles they plunder.

The stagecraft is superb – you do get that with American bands, they tend to be about putting on a show and less about being “too cool for school” than their British equivalents.

This is an excellent desktop backgroundmade by a far more dedicated fan than me and including some great shots of the gig, and a setlist also. Thanks Erfy. If that IS your real name… 8=)

No “Book Of Love” tonight which is a shame. They covered it before Peter Gabriel, and better than he did it. But check out the Magnetic Fields original , it’s the best version of the three.

And as for the encore… continuing the Brooce theme, they do an extended version of their chugging country rock anthem “Missy” incorporating snatches of “I’m On Fire”, ”I Fought The Law” and “Folsom Prison Blues”.

And its that triumvirate of Bruce, Clash and Cash that defines them, their influences and where they want to be.

There’s a genuine bond that exists between band and audience. I’ve never seen anybody else actually come down off the stage within five or ten minutes of the gig finishing for meet and greets, autographs and pictures. They do give the impression that they actually care about that stuff, and I’m still idealistic enough to think that’s important.

A quick word about the support band, Leeds’ The Chevin. Pretty standard anthemic indie but played well and vigorously and with enough in the songs to hold promise of things to come.

I reckon the best thing for them would be NOT to be hugely successful until the second album at least, lest they find themselves on the Big Pink path of premature expectation and end up writing a second album identical to the first.

In conclusion, as I type this I have by my side half a drumstick that drummer Daren Taylor tossed into the crowd at the end of the gig. Which I then got him to sign afterwards. I joke that it will be up on ebay tomorrow but we both know that I shall be treasuring it forever, along with the pick belonging to The War On Drugs and the setlists from The Broken Family Band. That’s right, setlists plural.

I should be way too old to get excited by that sort of thing – but there’s something about this band that turns me into a teenager again.

And ain’t that the whole function of rock music?

Los Campesinos! Camden, Sunday
16
Nov

In all of music history, there aren’t too many bands where ALL the members of the band have the same surname. The Ramones. The Osmonds. The Fureys and Davey Arthur – almost…

So what are the odds of seven – SEVEN!  – people in one band, completely unrelated to each other, having the same surname?!  Mad!

As if that wasn’t enough… Los Campesinos! all met at Cardiff University – but none of them are Welsh!

They’re a band I’ve only been vaguely aware of down the years – I only really knew their jolly-sounding “You, Me, Dancing” but I’ve heard great things about their live shows.

So – a couple of weeks ago I was on Twitter  and up pops a tweet from Los Campesinos! announcing a lunchtime warm-up gig for their UK tour at the Barfly in Camden. This is a first – a gig I attended because I was on twitter at the right time! And they’re only charging a fiver, which I really appreciate – they could easily have doubled that, given their cultish level of popularity, so hurrah for Los Campesinos!

I’m still quite tired and emotional from the previous evening spent watching Airborne Toxic Event (more on THAT in the next blog entry), and a lunchtime gig is not ideal but still…

Sunday in Camden is always a great place to be anyway. So I head over on the tube, full of families heading to Regent’s Park and the museums for a day out. The market is teeming, as always. Cooler than the West End, with better shops and better – and cheaper – food, it’s no wonder people congregate here on a Sunday.

Now, the core of the music I listen to is modern indie, broadly speaking, so I’m pretty used to being the Oldest Guy At The Gig. People generally assume I’m either a parent of one of the band or I’m selling drugs but under normal circumstances it’s the evening and it’s dark and nobody bats an eyelid.

This is slightly different.

Its daylight and there is a queue of about 200 students and teenagers down the Chalk Farm Road, with me at the end trying not to look dodgy. The queue starts shuffling forward like the bit at the end of the Benny Hill Show in slo-mo.

Now, indie fans are a pretty friendly bunch. They can be a bit quiescent, leading to a slightly dull audience reaction, but on the other hand you’d be hard pressed to start a fight. An incident at the bar illustrates this. There’s three of us waiting to be served. The barman, working on the principle of age before beauty – points to me. I say “no – he was first” and point to the chap on the end. He in turn points to the guy next to him, who then points to me again.

This could have ended in jostling, maybe even fisticuffs at a metal gig but indie kids are not natural fighters and have a strong sense of irony if nothing else. We all smile and nod wryly at each other. Morrissey would be proud.

And I get served first in the end anyway. Hah!

So, the band play a blistering, tight set of around an hour (couldn’t swear to it, who puts a stopwatch on a gig?)

I really like this band. I really like singer Gareth Campesinos!’s onstage banter, funny and sarcastic but also – crucially – just a little bit self-effacing.

Always good to see an articulate and funny frontman, not quite in the Steven Adams league but then who is?

I’m not familiar with the band’s oeuvre but odd lyrics filter through making me keen to check out the back catalogue. There’s intelligence here as well as tunes.

Quite a few from the new album “Hello Sadness” (yeah, the Morrissey vacuum has been well and truly filled here)

They play their Hit (“You! Me! Dancing!”) somewhat reluctantly, with singer Gareth informing the crowd that “we have to play this – its like if you went to see the Dandy Warhols and they didn’t play Bohemian Like You”. Well, not quite, mate. The Dandy Warhols don’t really have any songs other than that one. Whereas Los Camps! are well on their way to creating a really good body of work.

And the importance of the words is recognised by the band in that you can hear every bloody word Gareth sings / says.

These lyrics are unique. There are echoes of Morrissey, the Broken Family Band “and The Beautiful South (no greater praise imho). Hard to pick anything out specifically but the odd phrase leaps out at you causing a “Huh? What did he say”? reaction. Always a good thing.

The tunes are sometimes not all that, but with the lyrics and the sheer drive of a band with huge numbers helps create a groove which gets them through just fine.

Three quid for a Subway Italian Salami and a bottle of water.

Two pounds for a diet coke.

Five pounds for a Los Campesinos! Gig? Priceless.

Setlist

By Your Hand

Romance Is Boring

Death To Los Campesinos!

Life Is A Long Time

A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show me State; or Letters From Me To Charlotte

Songs About your Girlfriend

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

Straight In at 101

To Tundra

Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1

The Black Bird, The Dark Slope

You! Me! Dancing!

The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future

Hello Sadness

Baby I Got The Death Rattle

Katie Malco – The Lexington
9
Nov

Friday 4th November, 2011

First act on at the Lexington last Friday was Katie Malco.

Her voice sounds like honey soaked in whisky. Her songs occupy the same territory as Sarabeth Tucek and Laura Veirs (to these ears). All doe-eyes and wistful and melancholy. She’s left-handed but plays a right-handed guitar much like that other great doe-eyed musician, Paul McCartney did, at least in the early days.

There aren’t many punters in this early at the Lexington. Can’t believe all the hipster HerNameIsCalla fans have something better to do than get here early for the supports. Heck, school finishes around 4 in the afternoon, doesn’t it?

So Katie plays her beautiful songs to a solo guitar and an audience of maybe twenty people, mainly sitting down. She charmingly forgets the words to some Bob Dylan song or other but so what?

Robert Plant famously forgot the words to Stairway To bloody Heaven at Knebworth in 1978, possibly the most famous rock song ever written at that time (and number one in John Peel’s inaugural Festive 50 in 1976, fact lovers.  You think I had to look that up? Hah ! I remember TAPING the show at the time !). And he wrote the bugger!

Katie remembers her own songs fine though, and you can tell that this is what she really wants to do, her own stuff. Although her other cover is interesting (a cover of a mate’s song, whose name I  didn’t catch unfortunately) and I get why people want to do covers early on, I’d say she’d be better sticking to her own excellent material..

Or failing that, do the Abba and Zeppelin covers that she alluded to towards the end of her set … (Knowing Me Knowing You or Immigrant Song could work … just sayin’ … )

I downloaded her debut 5-track EP off of bandcamp, and its loverly.  Best £2.50 I’ve spent all week.

http://katiemalco.bandcamp.com/album/four-goodbyes

Forthcoming gig with Katie givineg her Courtney Love as her band play a set of Hole covers this Saturday at Brixton Windmill (supporting the Cash-In Pumpkins 8=) ), which I am gutted to be missing … ( I need to put in an appearance at home every now and then or the Wife will forget who I am)

Go see her soon.