Thribbed for her Pleasure

When people die we often say they had a good innings.  It's a cricket analogy.  But, by extension, when someone dies at 17, we don't say they had a lacklustre innings.  When a baby does we don't all shout "out for a duck!", do we?  Double standards.

KIRAN LEONARD/ DEAR LAIKA/ AIDEN CANADAY, Divine Schism, Florence Park Community Centre, 6/3/22

Aiden Canaday, who is both opening act and part of the promotion team, explains the otherwise inscrutable ‘Colour of a Lion’ by noting that his songs are mostly about “people who I love who are dead”, making him the sentimental, symbolist  EJ Thribb. Delivered with a tentative, lightly quavering voice over guitar plucks, accordion wheezes or stabs at the venue’s janky old joanna, the songs might often seem undercooked, but deliver unexpected moments of beauty, and we’ll take that over practised consistency any day. All too swiftly, the set is over. So, farewell, then, Aiden. “I left out the chorus, because I don’t know how to play it,” that was your catchphrase.  

Two of Kiran Leonard’s Trespass On Foot band perform as Dear Laika before the main event. Their set enacts a battle between songwriting and production, light and melodic keyboard songs being subjected to the sorts of extreme delay, flutter, and distortion that make William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops sound like smooth lift Muzak. There’s a track that sounds like the wistful ghost of Laurie Anderson on a malfunctioning transistor radio, one that sounds like a cyborg choir singing John Tavener, and one that sounds like Aimee Mann produced by a puckish, shitfaced King Tubby. There are times when you wish that the treatments were less extreme, and times you fear the songs aren’t all strong enough to survive without them, but it’s hard not to love a piece that sounds like ‘Pyramid Song’ with random interventions by Vangelis (puckish and shit-faced, naturally).

The tones are more earthy for Leonard’s band, consisting of a trio of guitars, a cittern, and arco double bass. The opening is wonderful, a chamber Godspeed You Black Emperor! piece with frantically strummed chords coming in fizzing waves, like a spring tide filled with Alka-Seltzer. This is followed by almost whimsically abstract folk, in the vein of The Incredible String Band, before a third track comes in with a vocal line so strong and sinewy it could have been borrowed from sources as diverse as a sixteenth-century Norfolk crabber’s song to a lost Maxïmo Park single. The set is as eclectic as it is enthralling, with Leonard playing unusual but still folky guitar lines like a Vorticist Richard Thompson, and boasting a surprise bass solo that’s all gruff harmonics and seagull laments. By the time the night finishes with an epic, hypnotic track built on a simple bass motif that’s like a recreation of the Fire: Walk With Me pink room music recreated a at west country barndance, all you can do is close your eyes and sway like a loon.  So, farewell then, dignity...