Yucatan, You Can Jive...

Note: please do not put the words Christmas Special onto your gig poster, unless something special is actually going to happen.  And wearing a hat doesn't count.

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.