Look, I changed the colours. Go, me.
MY MEGA-MELODIC ALL-DAYER, Port Mahon
Promoting gigs is often more a matter of blind hope than financial certainty, but hosting over nine hours of lo-fi performance on Bank Holiday Saturday is simply commercial suicide. Still, we popped along for the first half of My Analogue and Melodic Oxford’s marathon, and discovered some gems, even though we’re pretty sure we were the only non-performing audience member for at least half the time. Dave Griffiths in acoustic mode raised eyebrows from the off, revealing emotional subtleties in his voice rarely evident in Witches’ sonic maelstrom. Arresting, but we still live for sonic maelstroms round here. Proffering rustic guitar strums augmented with frail melodica and glockenspiel, Blanket was never likely to satiate this particular need, but their featherweight pastoralia was lovely. Rather gorgeous on the ear it may be, but trying to actually focus on the music and criticise it proves as tricky as climbing a rice paper staircase. Things fare better on their evocative (and reasonably priced) album.
When Robh Hokum takes to the stage with his acoustic he seems even more awkward than Blanket’s singer, who had the air of a five year old forced to play an angel in the Infants’ Nativity. Quick stage school tip: “I’m this close to vomiting” isn’t an ideal greeting. However, once he starts singing his Americana-brushed songs, any concerns are forgotten. His tiny nylon strung guitar and high reedy voice are so thin and delicate it sounds like someone’s spinning a Depression era 78 onstage, to surprisingly engrossing effect.
Twee will rock you! Synth-poppers Life With Bears have grabbed the guitars to become Socks & Shoes for some inept three chord proto-punk with childlike lyrics, something like The Shaggs meets Rod, Jane & Freddy. It’s bloody great fun, but probably not much else. HIV apologise for their offensive name, but they needn’t worry, their tedious improv rock is offensive enough on its own, a dire mirror image of The Evenings’ brilliance, which is tragic as the members are in wonderful bands too numerous to mention. Some light-hearted unpretentious banter softens the blow, but HIV could have internet moles feverishly typing “Clique”. Caps lock on, naturally. Warbly crooner Wolf Tracks is so ear-manglingly awful we’re ecstatic that we catch a few minutes of Onions For Eyes before departure, and leaving during their carny roustabout 2 Unlimited cover makes us want to stay awhile. Which, after over five hours in The Port, is really the biggest compliment we can give this intriguing, if uneven festival.
Showing posts with label My Analogue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label My Analogue. Show all posts
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
A Good Hard Rogeting
Two points of interest about this review:
1) I don't know of whom I was thinking at the time, but having since heard a decent amount of The Sensational Alex harvey Band, I reckon they're pretty ace.
2) My ex-editor at BBC Oxford disliked this review so much he parodied it in an online review of Foxes! a few weeks later: "There was no chicanery here, it was just three bonhomie types all coeval physically and mentally. They peeled back the patina of the night and enticed the salmagundi of striplings to take their caution and defenestrate it. The lead singer may have been a hobbledehoy - there was something of that about the whole band - but I still found it daedal and not in the slightest rebarbative. Sorry if I've been a little fustian but they deserve the effort". Absolutely wonderful stuff, I was proper chuffed (although "bonhomie" isn't an adjective, and you can't really peel back a patina, if you're reading, Tim).
EMMY THE GREAT/FOXES!, My Analogue, Port Mahon, 6/06
It was once said of Clinic that they make the music that might spring up if The Beatles were wiped from the musical annals, reference points leaping from scratchy blues and lush Phil Spectorisms to Velvet Underground chug and new wave irascibility. A similar thing could be said of newish local act, Foxes! Their set is a rough mix of lindyhopping naivete, ebullient garage bash and no wave loft experiment as performed by local oddballs at some fleabitten village fete. In other words, hugely entertaining, if a tiny bit messy round the edges, with a surprising ear for a tune in evidence, too. John, Paul, George and who?
If ever there was a frustrating genre moniker, it’s “anti-folk”. Coined in earnest, we dare say, but generally read by gig-goers nowadays as “acoustic performer with minimal vocal ability and possible funny trousers”. Despite a couple of breathy quirks in the vocals we’re pleased to announce that London’s Emmy The Great is a long way from this deadening bunch, and is really a straightforward and enormously talented poetic singer-songwriter, who manages to keep a tired and parboiled Port audience in rapt attention. There are a few oddities in the subject matter, but the structure and delivery is as traditionally intimate as any old folkie’s. Imagine a cubist Michelle Shocked.
Admittedly, lines like “a million shadows will all become pregnant or diseased” are more intriguing than they are, err, good, but the majority of Emmy’s compositions are lucid and lovable, and she pulls off the golden songwriter’s trick of sounding completely original and universally relevant at the same time. It’s often patronising to call a performer “charming”, especially if they’re female, but Emmy’s charming set was less like a performance and more like a friendly musical chat in which one participant just happened to stand at the front of the room. Unlike The Sensational Alex Harvey Band or The Legendary Pete Fryer, Emmy The Great has picked up an adjective that we’re not arguing with at all.
1) I don't know of whom I was thinking at the time, but having since heard a decent amount of The Sensational Alex harvey Band, I reckon they're pretty ace.
2) My ex-editor at BBC Oxford disliked this review so much he parodied it in an online review of Foxes! a few weeks later: "There was no chicanery here, it was just three bonhomie types all coeval physically and mentally. They peeled back the patina of the night and enticed the salmagundi of striplings to take their caution and defenestrate it. The lead singer may have been a hobbledehoy - there was something of that about the whole band - but I still found it daedal and not in the slightest rebarbative. Sorry if I've been a little fustian but they deserve the effort". Absolutely wonderful stuff, I was proper chuffed (although "bonhomie" isn't an adjective, and you can't really peel back a patina, if you're reading, Tim).
EMMY THE GREAT/FOXES!, My Analogue, Port Mahon, 6/06
It was once said of Clinic that they make the music that might spring up if The Beatles were wiped from the musical annals, reference points leaping from scratchy blues and lush Phil Spectorisms to Velvet Underground chug and new wave irascibility. A similar thing could be said of newish local act, Foxes! Their set is a rough mix of lindyhopping naivete, ebullient garage bash and no wave loft experiment as performed by local oddballs at some fleabitten village fete. In other words, hugely entertaining, if a tiny bit messy round the edges, with a surprising ear for a tune in evidence, too. John, Paul, George and who?
If ever there was a frustrating genre moniker, it’s “anti-folk”. Coined in earnest, we dare say, but generally read by gig-goers nowadays as “acoustic performer with minimal vocal ability and possible funny trousers”. Despite a couple of breathy quirks in the vocals we’re pleased to announce that London’s Emmy The Great is a long way from this deadening bunch, and is really a straightforward and enormously talented poetic singer-songwriter, who manages to keep a tired and parboiled Port audience in rapt attention. There are a few oddities in the subject matter, but the structure and delivery is as traditionally intimate as any old folkie’s. Imagine a cubist Michelle Shocked.
Admittedly, lines like “a million shadows will all become pregnant or diseased” are more intriguing than they are, err, good, but the majority of Emmy’s compositions are lucid and lovable, and she pulls off the golden songwriter’s trick of sounding completely original and universally relevant at the same time. It’s often patronising to call a performer “charming”, especially if they’re female, but Emmy’s charming set was less like a performance and more like a friendly musical chat in which one participant just happened to stand at the front of the room. Unlike The Sensational Alex Harvey Band or The Legendary Pete Fryer, Emmy The Great has picked up an adjective that we’re not arguing with at all.
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