SKY:LARK/ SCREEN WIVES/ MASIRO, Idiot King, Cellar,
7/2/15
Depending on where you cast your gaze you can see any
number of representation of underground music in the media: glossy molls
swigging bottled lager and singing along with the next big thing; gorgeous
soft-focus festival folkies snapping each other on smart phones; rock-crazed
ne’er-do-wells spiralling into drug abuse; Swindon. But nothing sums it up for us better than the
sight of a man dressed only in his pants crawling round a basement stage,
trying to gaffer a bass drum back together.
Either side of this dose of literal DIY music, in a necessarily
curtailed set, London’s Screen Wives twist out an angular, Fugazoid hardcore
that kicks like a hoof to the solar plexus, but has room for cheeky, witty
little trills and paradiddles. The songs
are brief, the band hissing short bursts of noise into the venue like a
demented Glade Plugin.
Before that, Oxford’s Masiro had treated us to one of
their displays of sonic science. The twitchy, multi-part structure of their
music is always impressive, like a metal-flavoured Don Caballero, and even like
Primus without the schoolyard japes, but they always manage to bring in some
melodic or textural originality to save us from mere academic cleverness. The set is like a spiderweb from a fly’s
point of view: intricate, beautiful, sludgy, and completely deadly.
Intricate being one thing we wouldn’t accuse Sky:Lark of
trying for. Over a bed of unwavering feedback,
the trio thrash through dense repetitious snarling grooves something like
Motorhead with a krautrock fixation. The
best moments of the set are when the vocals bawl and screech over two note
unriffs like Finnish minimalists Circle crossed with Megadeth, and the worst
moments are when they stop. There’s the
odd snatch of fuzzy melody, but in essence theirs a brief onslaught of brash
noise, to finish a night of intriguing, exciting music...and not an iPad or a
crackpipe in sight.
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