The Pink Pounding

I'm moving furniture tonight, no time to chat.


ARIEL PINK/ BELONG/ THE WARM/ DIVINE COILS – Vacuous Pop, Port Mahon 7/6/06


Whilst we confess to not being able to tell the difference between Divine Coils and The Holiday Stabbings, we’re very happy to be back in their company whoever they are. Tonight their drone-centred music is based on bowed cymbal and heavily treated guitar playing (which seems to be a throwback to their old Fencott Disaster hardcore days in terms of hair waggling if not sound), and it flows over us in one long reverberant wash. What’s interesting is how much variation they can find in their explorations: last time we saw them it was in a forest of sound, full of peaks and troughs, whereas this time they’ve opted for a single sticky wave of feedback inflected tones that lays heavy on the stifling air. It may have stumbled a couple of times, but this improvised set is a pleasure. Richard James once went surfing on sine waves; tonight Divine Coils are surfing on molasses.

With two buzzing keyboards and a sprightly rock drummer, it’s easy to dismiss Tokyo visitors The Warm as a simple distillation of a droning synth band, a sort of Divide N By (X). A couple of numbers in, however, and their cheeky tunes and Juno 60 rave arpeggios start to creep in, whilst the drumming increases in intensity, and it’s clear that The Warm have a lot of ideas simmering away. They’re at their best when they find a little space, where the vocalist stops shouting and drops into a clunky hip hop style to let the humming synths do the talking. Surprises might not be high on their agenda, but there’s more than enough passion, wit and flagrant use of Korg’s wibbliest buttons to make up for that. Highly recommended.

Belong take us back to the textural immersion of Divine Coils, if not so successfully. Leaking white noise from laptop and guitar, they might be compared to Fennesz...but only in the way that every rock band in Wantage could be compared to Black Sabbath. Of course, it’s all lovely in its way, and it’s hard to dislike huge swathes of warm granular noise in any situation, but, like the projected films of light reflecting on water, it all feels uninspired and a teensy bit trite. Belong’s music can engulf you like a warm bath, which is a nice way to spend 25 minutes, but who ever gave a bath a good review?

Ariel Pink appear to consist of a keyboard player, a (surprisingly decent) bassist, some sort of hideous Camp Cobain vocalist figure in a grotesque cardigan, and some backing tracks of breezy 80s AM pop. Well, that’s OK. Everyone likes breezy AM pop, don’t they? Well, not when it sounds like it’s played by tipsy bears wearing oven gloves, no. It’s hard to put into cold hard text just how badly this show fails, but unless you relish the thought of Tiffany castoffs played by Twizz Twangle’s deafened offspring you’d best steer clear. The live mixing element is potentially interesting, as parts of the song drop out unexpectedly whilst random noises are pushed to LED burning limits, but it really needs a better sound system to have any hope of working. The irony is that the songs, so far as we can tell, are pleasant (if featherlight) little toetappers but they’re so subsumed in wilful ineptitude, trying to pick out the compositions is like a tedious game of aural Where’s Wally. These are either spectacularly clumsy musicians or self-conscious experimenters who are trying too hard in all the wrong areas. Vacuous Pop, indeed...