Weekend at Bernays'

Here's my review of the amazing Supernormal festival.  It's in the latest Nightshift, but you can read some extra stuff here that there wasn't room for.  Even bearing that in mind, there are some acts I saw but didn't write up - there's just so much to experience at SN, you need a whole magazine to capture it.  But, if by some miracle any reps from Grigg, Kelly & Sneddon, Bellies!, Kinlaw & Franco Franco, Jon Collin, Steph Horak, Handle, Roman Nose or Golden Oriole are reading, I enjoyed your sets; if anyone involved with Secret Power or Jessica Higgins are reading, sorry, not so much.

To get the pun in the title you'll need to visit the site and keep your eyes peeled.  My advice is to visit Supernormal next year regardless, it really is ace.

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 2-4/8/19

FRIDAY

We’ve attended our share of festivals, but Friday at Supernormal is the most delicate wristband application we’ve ever experienced.  There’s also a nice programme for £1, “or whatever you’ve got”.  Yes, once again, despite featuring acts that scream at us as vehemently as Wackford Squeers guest-hosting Infowars, and despite a queue to meet Satan in a caravan longer than that to meet Santa at Macy’s, Supernormal has proved itself to be the friendliest festival in existence.  Staff are constantly helpful, even the gloriously stoned barman who finds the names of all the drinks unfeasibly hilarious, and we’re treated as welcome guests rather than walking wallets.  In return, as if to prove that decency engenders decency, the audiences are some of the most receptive we’ve been part of.  Sarah Kenchington’s bike-propelled instruments, including ping-pong ball bagatelle percussion and aquatuba, are received so rapturously she visibly blushes, even considering malfunctions (her set mostly sounds like a Wookie in labour, which may or may not be the desired effect, but is quite an experience).  Similarly, we witness Ugandan wedding party musician Otim Alpha arrive on Sunday afternoon, clearly uncertain about the tiny shed onto which they’re unloading, only to see them beaming thirty minutes later as their Casio bangers instigate one of the most rapturous receptions of the weekend.

The performances begin on Friday afternoon with a slightly sparser crowd for late additions Nape Neck, whose mantric rants are no wave, but without the wave.  We especially enjoy their bassist marching on the spot like they’re in an am dram reading of Kipling’s “Boots”.  Rather more refined, but still intermittently serrated, is Bug Prentice, featuring Oxfordshire’s own Ally Craig on vocals and guitar, and guest bassist, Jenny from Lucy Leave.  The music is often twitchy and angular, but the true glory is Ally’s voice, a wry crooning rasp, like warm wind through ironic pampas.

Sealionwoman in the Barn brings forth waves of crepuscular jazz-folk, from just voice, double bass and all the reverb, finishing the set like Cocteau Twins at a funeral in a culvert, but it’s HAQ 123 who bring our first visual treat.  Despite two of their members being too young to get into most gigs with their ages combined, they play a sterling set of Sabbathy metal, enlivened by the presence of a fully berobed Death and some sort of rave Kermit.  They then announce an official stage-diving section after the set has finished, a revolutionary step forward in gig efficiency only a genius could come up with; these kids will probably be billionaires by the time they’re 35 (or underwater, depending on which predictive model is correct).

Sexton Ming’s Porridge Van, an act even more baroquely stupid than their name, ups the ante by starting with a doom glove puppet show we christen Punch & Jud0))), and moving on to full inscrutable mumbling noise panto, but set of the day award goes to Gwenifer Raymond, who, in sitting on a stool head down in concentration, has zero theatrical presence – unless you count hilariously swearing like a dyspeptic docker between numbers  -  but her beautiful tangles of guitar and banjo notes are stimulating enough on their own, conjuring images of Appalachian chase scenes and crazed blues arachnids spinning downhome Mandelbrots. 

Henge’s reverby stoner psych, with a whiff of classic longform rock as hinted by a Neil Young T-shirt, are probably the band most in the Supernormal wheelhouse, and are strong, with bonus points for an unexpected shakuhachi solo, and the singer’s white powdered face, instigating a game of Ghost Or Baker?  File them with Norwegians MoE who turn in a dirty chunky set we originally think of as amphetamine doom, before realising that’s just rock music –not everything needs a new genre name, even at Supernormal.  However, we’re not sure what to call Mark Vernon’s melancholy collage of old cassette messages and ambient tones, something like an 80s Scanner who could only pick up conversations by stealing answer machines and dictaphone tapes. He also adds some eerie Sea Devils dictats by talking whilst deflating a balloon into his mouth.  Sift on the tiny BEEF stage are equally spectral, telling a fractured tale of Northern Ireland border crossing ghosts, but the macabre atmosphere is undercut by the amusement of watching them squint at their scripts and remember that night time is generally dark.

 

Indoctrinating In Sects

This is a great record, go out and buy it.

BUG PRENTICE – THE WAY IT CRUMBLES (Self-released)

“I wish that we could live in a library”, dream Bug Prentice on the woozy, melancholic “Spoons”, summing up an album that likes to sneak up on life from the far side, from a point of thoughtful academia or fanboy geekery.  Over 38 minutes, we pick up lyrical references to a drunk Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray’s films, Cole Porter and Kurt Vonnegut.  “Angular Spirals” doesn’t seem to be riffing on anything specific, but sounds more like a Vorticist lonely hearts column than your average pop song: the narrators of these songs seem more comfortable away from the action, immersed in scholarly footnotes, DVD extras and bottomless YouTube rabbit holes.

So it’s astonishing how emotionally direct this record is.  Ally Craig might be delivering lyrics consisting of compact, absurd vignettes (“Ceilidh Dancer”) or just dicking about (hipster grunge parody “Moustache”), but his gorgeous, dry, delicate voice, like the smoked out ghost of Jeff Buckley, makes it seem like he’s whispering soul-drenched secrets.  The music also gives the songs visceral immediacy: the guitar plays elastic mandelbrot blues that’s somewhere between John Renbourne, Thurston Moore and James Blood Ulmer, whilst the rhythm section hide subtly in the background for long periods, before erupting into hefty Slint-shaped blasts.  If one song sums the record up, it’s “Nebraska Admiral”, a beautiful brooding lament that teeters on the edge of atonality but which has the cornballiest, music-halliest opening couplet you’ll hear all year, sounding like mid-90s Kristin Hersh with lyrics by Ian Dury.   If you’ve seen Ally live, you’ll know he can wrench the sentimental core from an Ivor Cutler piece and reveal the unsuspected profundity in a song from The Muppets, so this mixture of cabaret schmaltz and surreal sincerity should come as no surprise.  This is one of the best Oxford albums in recent times, but be prepared to put some work in, The Way It Crumbles is one tough cookie. 

The Musician's A Prentice

The Doctor Who Decide Your Destiny series is atrocious. God, how hard can it be to do a Choose Your Own Adventure riff on the Dr? Who ever heard of a solo role play book where you can't bloody die? Rubbish.

I know, I should spend less time in charity shops.


BUG PRENTICE – Demo

“Ceilidh Dancer”, the opening track on this new set of demos tells of a man who “gave away the punchline” to a joke. To us that’s solid gold proof that Ally Craig doesn’t write autobiographically: if there’s one man we can’t imagine giving away the punchline to a joke, it’s Ally. Even when he’d got to the end of the joke, he’d keep the pay off secret, we imagine. So this is another selection of the mysterious, deeply intriguing little songs we’ve come to expect from Craig, with the addition of a rhythm section. Lyrically they’re as obtuse as his last batch, and musically they totter about always at the edge of over-balancing, like a girl trying out her Mum’s stilettos.

It takes a short while to get used to Ally with a noisy band, as we’re so used to his solo acoustic performances, but what we lose in intimacy we gain in intricacy, Ally’s wonderfully frail yet powerful voice flitting across “Ceilidh Dancer” like an injured insect, awkward yet still soaring. On “Nebraska Admiral” the vocals are even better, finding a space in the husky delivery between a dinky nursery rhyme and a yearning Broadway ballad – although he does rhyme “asking” with “Nebraskan”, which should probably be illegal.

If the band doesn’t add a huge amount to “Nebraska Admiral”, they sound fantastic on “Lovitz Vs Dick”, leaping up from a sedate intro to huge crunchy blocks of guitar that remind us unexpectedly of They Might Be Giants’ “Ana Ng”, then drifting back into a hazy lope, before the second half in which Ally’s chicken peck guitar strumming is underpinned by bouncy toms. Aside from sounding like a bad restaurant chain that specialises in kid’s parties and runny carbonara, “Chicago Baxters” is the only track that doesn’t wholly convince us as a composition, although we love the image it brings to mind of Sonic Youth playing a lounge ballad. If this were a random demo that had popped into the in box, we’d be pretty excited. As it is, judging from past experience, we can comfortably expect some more fantastic, elastic misshaped rock music from this outfit. The prentice work has been done, we’re waiting for the masterpiece, now.