Chat Lines

Today's entry is dedicated to Oxford music photographer Johnny Moto. Not that he's dead. Or, I guess he might be, he doesn't check in with me every hour, so how would I know? God, I hope he's OK. No, hang on, let's assume he is.

Anyway, Mr Moto gave me a pen when I was writing my first review of this year and the venue was so damned cold the ink froze solid in my ballpoint. I never gave it back. Anyway, whilst writing this review I dropped said pen and said Johnny trod on it. He was so apologetic he bought me two new pens! So, now I'm in his debt to the tune of three pens (and each pen rather niftily had four differently coloured nibs, so perhaps it's more like twelve pens - although they were short pens, so let's call it six on aggregate). Still, he's dead now, so I suppose I'm off the hook...


CATS IN PARIS/ UTE/ COLOUREDS, Pindrop, Cellar, 16/9/10

The surprising thing about electro duo Coloureds – aside from the hand-crafted face masks that make them look like Ray Harryhausen’s Michael Myers maquettes – is how much contemporary club music seeps through their distorted, jittery IDM. Just as Funkstorung a decade ago took hip hop rhythms and twisted them into Wire pleasing glitchfests, so Coloureds seem to have taken garage and funky as their base metals, to be experimented upon ruthlessly. The music is all about texture, and there isn’t much in the way of theme or melody (although the odd arpeggio recalls Orbital, and a scuzzy three note organ breakdown sounds as though Philip Glass tried to create one of his scores on an Etch-a-sketch), but the rhythmic intensities, the subtle twists and the theatrical performance make this set musically captivating as well as pummellingly excoriating.

We’ve vacillated in our opinion of local trio Ute, and tonight we find ourselves doing so mid-set. The first half is all keening vocal lines and twitchy semi-acoustic rock, and it’s fine, but apart from the excellently regimental drumming, doesn’t truly excite us: at its best it’s Radiohead enveloping Robert Wyatt, but at its worst it sounds like a generic copy of any lightly groovy artrockers (and does the refrain “Psycho killer” suggest anyone, hmmm?). But then, suddenly they win us over again, with loud and well thought out rock songs, one boasting a bass that impersonates a truck burping, and one which is a manic grunge thrash, like a skiffle Mudhoney. Most importantly, the vocals switch from annoying self-conscious wheedle, to an effective growl that drops into unexpected valleys of delicate harmonising. If this gig were a football match, you’d assume the half time talk had been ruthlessly galvanising.

Manchester’s Cats In Paris also rise in our estimations, but this is probably because it took us two songs to calibrate ourselves. What does one make of their maximalist maelstroms, where jazz funk bass meets keyboards from a budget ELP and vocals from a literary EMF? But, once the fluent violin came in, the power of the rhythm section became apparent, and the joyful refrain “This is modern British cooking” had invaded our mind, we decided their Zappa child grab bag of pop oddity was something to be cherished, and in retrospect the fact that opener “Chopchopchopchopchop” sounded like a mixture between “O Superman”, the theme from Let’s Pretend and Flaming Lips made perfect sense. They didn’t fulfil the promoter’s description of their sound as “electro spazz swing”. They surpassed it.