Supernormal 2017 Pt 3

Sunday starts quietly, as Sundays should.  Hapsburg Braganza is a solo electric guitar act, elegant, misty and minimal - think Papa M meets Roger Eno – and Pon Pon proffer softly malleted drums, subtle electronics, guitar and breathy vocals, as if someone had detuned a shy ghost.  It’s pleasant, but perhaps too reticent, and may have fared better on one of the more intimate stages.  Sharron Kraus’ extended treatments of dark, dark hearted folk songs are also understated, but immediately captivating, proving once again that trad songwriting goes to eldritch places metal would never dare.  Some soft, loamy recorder playing offers tiny fragments of light. 

We called Bruxa Maria pummelling?  Well, some parts of Cattle’s performance are like sandpaper rubbed against the face by an angry Judoon, but unlike so many rock cudgellers, they know when the barrage must end, and space be found to give the songs shape.  So, there is room for some electronics-benighted death sax, a chilling a cappella section for the howling vocalist, who appears to have been possessed by a constipated demon, and surprisingly funky business from the dual drummers (ESG cowbell patterns are this year’s vocal delay unit, popping up in multiple acts).  Made perfect by a summer school session of Crowdsurfing For The Under Eights.

Mary Ocher is notable for two reasons.  One, she and her band are clad in what appear to be Earth, Wind & Fire stage outfits modelled from spaghetti, two her quirky, chirpily bouncy music is so varied, moving from a quiet synth opener to dessicated funk via unhingedly jolly library music not a million miles away from Syd Dale, and some raven-stalking that’s come straight from “Venus In Furs”.  All this with a delicately stentorian voice that makes us think of an anti-matter Nana Mouskouri.  Jesus, we’ve not thought of Nana Mouskouri in thirty years, Supernormal does strange things to the mind.

Olivia Norris presents a short dance/mime piece, in which she contorts herself awkwardly across the barn in an unnerving white mask, before erupting into an unexpected drag club mime to barely remembered Britsoul pipsqueak Roachford – it’s like 80s child nightmare fodder Noseybonk scripted by a horny Beckett.  Not all the extra-musical elements are worth the effort, though.  The Dream Machine turns out to be an old van that we’re invited to paint, which works out as ugly and pointless as you’d expect, whilst Happy Birthday Pig Face Christus is merely 4 people chanting the menu items from the catering vans in a pseudo-religious style and giggling smugly, and we should have woken them from their complacency with a chipotle enema.

A tribute band isn’t the usual Supernormal fare, but when it consists of songs from Pink Floyd’s The Wall lovingly eviscerated in a style that recalls V/Vm, The Residents and Ween, it begins to make more sense.  The Stallion have horrifically pitch-shifted vocals, and the ugliest projections it is possible to make with a cracked copy of Doom and a Roger Waters mask.  The slogan “you’re fucking with The Stallion” regularly flashes in queasy fluorescent text; we rather feel the opposite...

*Zoviet:France* beam in fizzing, hissing tones, like messages from a distant nebula, where it’s always 1997.  Sonically dated this may be, but it is utterly beguiling, and the shifting tones float like clouds scudding behind waving trees as night falls whilst you lie on your back in a field (and we’d know).

MXLX starts his cheaply insistent industrial set as John Carpenter playing Godflesh, and ends it as Alec Empire weeping incoherently outside his ex’s wedding reception, before being carried from the tent by a small throng of listeners.  That’s the Supernormal experience all over, moving from the absurd to the dramatic, before ending in budget valediction.  You should definitely get a ticket next year.  Don’t hang about though, there is a big community of people already planning their 2018 visit. Not least two Nightshift writers and a nice man from the midlands.

The Sharron Nights

Morning, morning, Jameson here.

No, it's not, it's me. And it's lunchtime. Sorry, as soon as I started typing, Derek Jameson popped into my head, how unpleasant.

Anyway, here's a review. To be honest, this is a deadline day review, and I think it reads like it. Sorry about that, Nightshift and Kraus deserve more, to be frank. But I'm a busy and/or lazy man, what are you going to do?


SHARRON KRAUS – THE WOODY NIGHTSHADE (Strange Attractors Audio House)


The sleevenotes to this new CD are a paean to the album format, eroded and endangered in our MP3 playlist era. We couldn’t agree more, but, like those scientists who try to explain how miniscule a fraction of the universe’s lifespan human beings have existed in, we would expect a folk singer to be unconcerned with a format that has been around for only fifty odd years, a tiny fragment of the history of song.

But this is definitely an LP, not a random selection of songs, and it’s a record with a constant, misty atmosphere. Kraus’ voice high and delightfully reedy, but it lends itself more to ghostly melody than cracking out a rousing folk narrative: her allusive singing and vaguely evocative lyrics are more Bert Jansch than Norma Waterson. There are even hints of PJ Harvey’s recent recordings. Musically it’s ethereal and unsettling too, from the keening feedback that opens the album to the woozily plucked strings on “Two Brothers” that sound like a weary traveller pushing through a dense forest: it’s like the sound a night at the Twin Peaks Folk Club. All drums on the record are reverbed and stately like the faded memory of percussion, the washed out toms of the title track a resigned, slow walk to the gallows (roll over, Berlioz).

Individually these songs may not be startling, and it’s certain that Kraus couldn’t challenge Spiers & Boden for the Oxford oral tradition trophy, but The Woody Nightshade is a gorgeous, immersive listen, that you want to start again as soon as it’s finished...which is about the best definition of a good album we can think of.