MOON HOOCH/ MARCO BENEVENTO/ TRAINROBBERS, Serious &
Academy Events, O2 Academy, 15/9/16
Trainrobbers are two rappers who join in for the last
SYLLABLES! It’s a technique that’s
admittedly quaintly OLD-FASHIONED! But
which swiftly becomes rather ANNOYING!
Their set is low-slung, slapdash AND SLOPPY! In the blunted style of icons from the early
to MID-NINETIES! By which we mean both
Cypress Hill and Trevor AND SIMON!
They’re not really very good, ACTUALLY!
When we say, “HALF!”, you say, “ARSED!”
As is so often the case, Marco Benevento doesn’t live up
to the promise of his opening number, a juggernaut of delay unit baggy groove
and barrelhouse joanna which is like a relentless melding of Flowered Up and
Lieutenant Pigeon. Had the trio stretched
this track out for 25 minutes, it would have been one of the greatest things
we’d seen all year. Still, the rest of
the set is still good honest fun, if a wee bit desperate to make an impact,
from the Screaming Lord Such-And-Such wacky suit and top hat to the simple
whoopalong vocals to the chunky knit reliability of the 70s boogie piano. We can’t call him a genius, but we do find a
place in our hearts for this Silly Billy Joel.
As an act that started out busking, Brooklyn’s Moon Hooch
likewise never miss an opportunity to please the crowd, and their double sax
and drums reproductions of dance music tropes with jazz inflections could
easily be designed for clickbait videos or tourist anecdotes (“We saw best musicians ever on the subway, must
have watched them for 90 seconds; we got this CD that we’ll literally never play!”). Except, cynicism aside, they are absolutely
astonishing, crafting a single non-stop hour of club music from full-throttle
honking and expertly placed breakdowns, with occasional forays into vintage
Michael Nyman arpeggiation (which might explain the snarling John Harle tone
often employed).
If the quick-switch tempos and the eye-popping circular
breathing spotlights have a sideshow feel to them, other sections are
incredibly subtle, one track placing an MF Doom style rap over tabla, and
another exploring the relationship between an Evan Parker skronk excursion and
a euphoric house anthem. There’s a taste
for the military-industrial dubstep rhythms of producers like Distance to leaven
the bouncy disco-funk, but it’s the long striated drone of the final track that
reveals the band’s truly experimental side.
Get people onside and dancing, and you can have them cnheering hands
aloft for the most leftfield noise sixty minutes later; this lesson is perhaps the
biggest thing Moon Hooch has taken from great electronica. Although making a sax sound like a 303 is
pretty good, too.
