MAIIANS/ KID KIN/ THE CRISIS PROJECT, Idiot King, MAO,
1/11/14
There are times when good sounds aren’t the same as good
music. The Crisis Project, a man from
Bristol with a rack of tech, certainly knows which buttons to punch and which
pots to twist to produce a tasty stutter, lurch or glitch, continually
derailing what might just be warm house tracks with inventive treatments a la
Funkstorung, but sometimes you just want him to stop and think about structure
for a moment. The second tune promises
hints of early Black Dog, but soon gets swamped by the tricks and twiddles,
until it’s more like watching a hardware tutorial than a gig. Make us feel as though you’re gifting us art,
not as though you’re selling us Kaos pads.
Kid Kin is almost the opposite, setting up surprisingly
simple rhythms and spicing them with cleanly elegant keyboard lines and swathes
of ultra-fuzz guitar crescendos. The
average Kid Kin track sounds like Mogwai jamming on the tension cues from a
mid-afternoon game show, which might have ended up an overbalanced mess if he
weren’t so adept at arrangement, constructing solid melodic edifices before
swamping them with a deluge of warm reverbed strumming. Some moments are overly nice, perhaps, but
even then we’re reminded of Angelo Badalamenti’s knack for studied kitsch
(ironically, as Twin Peaks was
projected behind Crisis Project, whereas Kid Kin gets the first 30 minutes of Labyrinth, which rather shoots down the
soaring sonic beauty).
Maiians, with their sleek yet bouncy double-drummer synth
instrumentals at first seem like an Oxford music throwback, melding The Evening
sand Sunnyvale with scrambled bits of The Egg.
Even bashing away in a dark basement there’s a seductive smoothness to
their music, taking the kick of funk, but cosmetically covering the sweat and
airbrushing out the solos, in a manner that recalls disco genius Arthur
Russell. Oxford has never been short of
the arch, the articulate and the impeccably measured – and we’re not just
talking about music – but it’s refreshing to see a band that takes controlled
eloquence and adds dancefloor nous. By
the end of an impressive set, our reference points have morphed: Maiians are
Tortoise at their warmest crossed with the sort of post-samba outfit you always
see perking up the runners half way along the London Marathon...which is far
more satisfying than pressing the machines that make the nice noises, as it
turns out.
