The Attack on Congress

It's been a while since my last update, hasn't it?  Obvious reason: my publication has not been released for coming up to a year - no gigs to review, no venues to pay the advertising.

But, a little group of friends has just started an Album of the Fortnight project, where someone suggests an LP, and we all review it, so I thought I'd share my reviews, to stop this page being a complete desert.  The first is below, and we'll see how long the project lasts (this may end up being the only one, you know how big concepts often fall apart as soon as someone stops feeding the furnace).

Bear in mind these are brief, light-hearted thoughts for a private chat, not structured reviews for a critical publication, but I think this is kind of fun; I'll admit to being smugly proud of the last line.

If you want to hear the album, you may do so at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsJZpvEOleFoNj_6VKvlx8AezxZhLqAWR

UNIVERSAL CONGRESS OF - PROSPEROUS & QUALIFIED (SST)

Interesting to see track 3 is credited to a "J Ulmer" [the person who suggested this record in the group posted a picture of one of the vinyl labels].  I’m expecting that to be James Blood Ulmer, whose work veers between Ornette ecstasy and leaden muso blues clomping, and, pressing play on track one gives us a bit of both.  The slap bass is flat-footed and uninspiring, and could be chuntering away at the back of any number of functional bar room combos this minute (or, rather, this minute 2 years ago, when bar rooms were a thing), and the vocals are uninteresting, but the horns offer a stately circling motif at the start, big on the baritone, and some sprightly soloing later.  This could go either way.
 
Track two moves in the right direction, an itchy, wild-eyed punk funk with a walking bassline that couldn’t walk if its life depended on it, keeping up a paranoid jog for the duration.  This is the musical equivalent of the A Scanner Darkly character scrabbling around for imaginary insects.  What I like about it is the way it’s built on pretty generic material, but transforms into a psychotic sonic episode: loving the snare fills like cutlery avalanches, and the guitar like a kitchen knife stabbing randomly at a fantasised attacker.
 
“Hightime”, as well as being, frankly, a compound noun too far, is simply a jam.  There is a decent little horn part which pops up occasionally, but the pedal-seesawing guitar is a little charmless.  I do like the hollow production, especially the drum sound, which gives it a real loft jazz session air.
 
And, in these three tracks we have the whole LP encapsulated.  There are trudges through Sunday session blues workouts without much merit, there are longeurs where the improv drifts off the boil, but there are enough lightning spasms of near-free jazz spiralling or spare, other-worldly Eric Dolphy type heads to stop it getting entirely boring.
 
A pretty straight cover of “Mellow Down Easy”, with rusty razor harp blowing and beery backing vocals of the sort indulged in by late Fall, is surprisingly pleasing, if ultimately inessential.  No track is fully satisfying, they all have a jarring element: for example, the otherwise enticing merengue no wave spy noir freefall that is “Igor’s Blues” is marred by some charmless popping bass, and the boho travelogue of “Love Camp” really needs a swivel-pupilled Screamin’ Jay or a laconic Tom Waits on the vocals, not the hampered, self-conscious Philip Marlowe voiceover we get.
 
Whether these guys are prosperous, I couldn’t say, but they’re certainly qualified, with enough chops to make a vegan blanche, and they could really make an impact in an act with a strong creative hand at the tiller, whether that be straight gruff rocking or outré improvising, but as it is this LP is diverting and enjoyable without being particularly memorable or exciting.  Universal Congress?  Just an ornate way of saying fuck all.

Islet You Decide

BREAKING NEWS: The Florence Park darts final has been postponed!!!

ISLET, Divine Schism, Florence Park Community Ctr, 7/3/20

Along with Vic 20, Chip Taylor, Bellowhead, Jurassic 5 and Fixers (non-wankered version), Islet gave us one the truly classic Truck festival sets, a decade ago.  But, whilst that gig was a fractal disco performed by howling cultists, a psychedelic percussive clatter apparently intended to deter (or possibly invoke) demonic intervention, over the years they have slimmed in size, and become more refined.  The ritualistic impetus has survived though, as they enter the venue tonight from the back, prancing lightly and tolling sweetly sonorous bells, the effect of which is either fairy wonderland or Kesey mushroom fayre, depending on your outlook.  It’s certainly not the sort of thing one usually witnesses in an old-fashioned community centre, just next to the dartboard.  Euphonious though this is, we are glad when they take to the stage and prove they can be more than stoned and twee.  In fact, so sharp are they that they are able to salvage a potentially atmosphere-killing technical glitch with some smart improvised patter, and the rest of the performance is no less focussed. 

Islet clearly have a love for the brief pop song form, no matter how obliquely they approach it, but despite this they share a trait with many krautrock acts, being simultaneously warm and organic, and sleek and other-worldly.  They’re proud to tell us that they’re soon to be supporting Foals – announcement embargo be damned! - but they have more in common with an avuncular Glass Animals.  The clipped bass, which could have come from an unknown Northern soul album by The Free Design, and the loose grooves on the stand-up drumkit make some of the tunes sound like early Ninja Tunes tracks refashioned from moss and houmous, whereas ethereal moments have more in common with one of Aphex’s selected ambient works.  There’s even a strange piece with lovely, liturgical vocals and cheeky synth, as if the Catholic church had created a new ceremony based on The Pepper’s novelty hit “Pepperbox”. Indeed the entire show, whilst never being precious, has a wonderfully hieratic feel.  Perhaps everyone at the gig is married now.  Perhaps we’re all converts, and just don’t yet know what to.  Perhaps, at the very least, the next darts league fixture might feel that tiny bit more significant.

Crack, Class A

This was a wonderful event.  Divine Schism have been right at the top of their promoting game for about 18 months now, got to as many of their gigs as you can...they;re normally reasonably priced, too.

HYPERDAWN/ KID KIN/ THE BOBO, Divine Schism, The Library, 12/2/20

By 2030, middle-aged hipsters will complain about two things: the disappointing appearance of tattoos on sagging street food and craft brew bloated flesh, and why their beloved tapes now sound rubbish, the permanence of both having been ill-considered, in different ways.  Still, there’s an aesthetic in the sounds of tape degradation that one can appreciate, even as it spoils once cherished recordings.  For example, new Oxford artist The Bobo utilises layers of fuzzy, twisted samples of their own voice as virtual accompanists, in a fashion that recalls that odd pre-emptive ghost track that occurs on some worn cassettes.  These enticing vocal pile-ups are joined by effected synth stabs, strewn brightly like scrunched sweet wrappers.  Tonight’s performance is a little hesitant, and could do with a touch more variation, but is often excellent in obscuring epic pop behind a glitchy sonic miasma, much in the way that Jenny Hval might: one track sounds like the pale spectre of a Kosheen banger wandering lost in a barrage of field artillery, which is something we’re eager to revisit.

Kid Kin is back to solo performance after a brief hiatus, and, in swapping guitar for keyboards, they have made their music cleaner and crisper than ever, a spick-and-span contemporary version of the sort of tuneful clinical lushness you’d find as instrumental beds for non-trailer cinema ads and corporate videos circa 1992.  As such, this is glossy music for shiny CDs, not scuzzy tapes, from the tricksy Detroit drum programming to the grown-up, ironed-shirt keyboard curlicues (one selection of near-cheesy piano flourishes is high-end easy listening made ruggedly cool – Richard Clayderman, you da man!).  One track reminds us of Boards Of Canada, so perhaps the set would sound even better recorded to VHS and left in the attic for a decade or so.

Salford duo Hyperdawn smash the outmoded into the modern, their tables laden with tiny sleek keyboards and digital triggers, alongside two huge reel-to-reel tape players.  This wonderful set can be thunderously huge or timid and tiny, but from vast sad looped choirs that sound like 10CC’s “I’m Not In Love” sung by bone-tired analogue banshees, to creamy lopsided R’n’B croons, it never moves far from melancholic melody lines that are a delicate as the long tape loops wound around a handy mike stand.  “Plastic” introduces a home-made string instrument, and comes off like Tom Waits’ backing band having a crack at Cocteau Twins, and “The End Of The World” features frenetic mike rubbing that could be an attempt to isolate and capture a single strand of feedback for a sonic lepidopterist’s specimen drawer.  The response from the spellbound crowd is simply, wow!  Not to mention, flutter.

Universal Credit

It's so pleasing to post a review to a record that is truly excellent.  Seek this one out, if you don't know it.

This differs a tiny bit from the published version, which refers to "downhearted" puppets, because the editor thought that "clinically depressed" might not be appreciated by all readers.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm fine with that, I'm not a "political correctness gone made" person, and I think it's important that editors consider what would be right for their readership, and the sensitivity in considering this issue reflects well on them.  However, as I know I didn't intend any malice in the usage, and as I don't think referring to a mental health diagnosis should be any different from alluding to physical conditions creatively - we've all read reviews that talk about "dead leg rhythms" or "sausage-fingered" guitarists or drummers "who must be deaf" etc.  Perhaps those should be made a ting of the past too. Anyway, if you have any thoughts either way, I'd be fascinated to hear them.  

Or, just ignore that self-regarding waffle and buy the album.  Did I mention that it's excellent?

LUCY LEAVE – EVERYONE IS DOING SO WELL (Divine Schism)

“We’re different, you can tell by looking at thumbs!”.  It sounds like a slogan from a rejected SEGA ad campaign, but it’s the outro refrain of one of the many excellent tracks on Lucy leave’s second album (if refrain is the right word for what sounds like three clinically depressed Sesame Street characters intoning a disappointing mindfulness mantra out of time with each other).  In a way, “Thumbs” typifies the album, by taking a nice neat, compact pop tune – in this case a chunky bass-led Sebadoh saunter – and pushing it off balance.  Whether it’s a sudden scribble of Frith/Kaiser guitar notes, an awkward falsetto croon, overblown freak-out recorder flurries or an inscrutable lyric (“alluvial fiasco!”), each track seems to contain one element which at first appears designed to commit musical sabotage, but which turns out to make perfect sense after a few listens.

From the opener, “Talking Heads” – which doesn’t sound like Talking Heads at all, more like Aerial M playing Yo La Tengo -  to the closer “Grandma 2”, a self-effacing Blur song which ends by quoting a 20s novelty jazz tune, listening to Everyone Is Doing So Well is like tripping up and stumbling headlong through the town, never quite falling, never regaining equilibrium, confused yet strangely exultant.  As with previous Lucy Leave releases, there will be those who find this record unnecessarily oblique, too understatedly asymmetrical, and conclude that the band is scrappy and can’t play – news update: they can play like motherfuckers – but for those of us who would edit the fuzzball abandon of “Gymnastics Club” into the prom scene of every John Hughes movie, this album is mysterious, ludic and quite, quite wonderful.  We love it.  You can tell.  Look at our raised thumbs.

Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But Parent

This is a bit late, I was without wifi over Christmas.  I'd love to say this was because I was visiting relatives in far-flung Bogota, or something exciting, but actually the phone line got cut when snipping down ivy.  Happy new year, and that.

MOTHER/ FLAT LAGER, Engage Events, Wheatsheaf, 14/12/19

Bands can spend thousands procuring industry advice on how to conduct themselves, from stage presentation to the minutiae of social media communications, but we will suggest Flat Lager’s approach as a pretty solid one, and won’t even send you an invoice: bundle onstage looking like a dog’s dinner that even the dog has turned its nose up at, wear a T-shirt reading simply “EAT SHIT”, and dive straight into a punky bunfight of a track which is basically “Louie Louie”.  The band’s take on grin-wearing garagey punk includes some almost funky drums, and jerky switches that they don’t always hit, but which work all the same, so that they mostly resemble EMF trying to become Fontaines DC.  Good solid fun in other words, even if the energy dips in the middle of the set. Our band brand consultancy would further advise them to go offstage having leapt about whilst nicking “I Wanna Be Your Dog”...but seems they’ve worked that out themselves.

Mother have also thought about their presentation, coming onto a dark stage lit by two long and slightly wobbly looking tube lights, possibly left over from the time Blue Peter taught us how to recreate Luc Besson’s Subway. Still, the set dressing is the only negative in 45 minutes of lovely, taut, serrated rock.  Each song seems to leap off the stage like a spawn-hungry salmon flinging itself up a waterfall, vocal melodies engaging and straightforward, like those of vintage Ride, and the music concrete-heavy but light on its feet.  The rhythm section, featuring Easter Island Statues and Max Blansjaar drummer Thomas Hitch, is incredibly powerful, bringing a supple groove to the songs – imagine Big Audio Dynamite or Tackhead with the hip hop dialled down and Jimmy Page riffs filling the gaps.  There are perhaps moments when the vocals could have a little more character, but this is music of heft and texture, rather than pop storytelling, so it’s no biggy (and, if in doubt, bring out a megaphone).  Mother have already come on impressively since we saw them 6 months ago, and a brand new song is tonight’s highpoint, so it’s not too hard to imagine them as serious contenders in 2020.  Screw the brand, let’s make some noise.

And Mick Navigate?

Let's be honest, there are so many childhood TV references in here, the review might as well have been written by Peter Kay, but I still like it.  There are some amazing photos of the night, by Fyrefly Pothography, which I'm sure you could locate online if were less lazy than I.

PADDY STEER/ MANDRAKE HANDSHAKE, Upcycled Sounds, Tap Social Movement 8/11/19

Whilst good bands can survive with awful names – Fuck Buttons?  Prefab Sprout?  The bloody Beatles? – it’s always nice when saying the name out loud doesn’t make you want to immediately apologise, or change your entire social circle out of shame.  For this reason, we are glad that one of the most interesting Oxford bands to arise in the last year are no longer called (shudder) Knobblehead.  Fortunately, the newly christened Mandrake Handshake are still an expansive ramshackle collective with a fine line in hypnotic slowburns and they still have a man who looks like James Acaster in a Grant Wood painting on tambourine and unsettling falsetto.  Some of their early furry freak bothering has been judiciously pruned, and they now ride gloriously sleek, machine-oiled psych grooves into the sunset, like Stereolab with the Marxism and Cluster replaced by mescaline and granola. 

By contrast, Paddy Steer couldn’t be messier, looking like a half-mad shaman mage who is kept in the basement of Flourish & Blotts and only let out after closing to catch scampering pamphlets, sitting amongst vast electronic devices that couldn’t look more home-made if he’d glued macaroni to the edges.  Musically it’s also a slapdash bricolage, fat Egyptian Lover basslines snaking through Jean Jacques Perrey bloop-showers whilst floppy, funky drums try vainly to hold things together. Sometimes it sounds like three “Rockit” era Herbie Hancocks obliviously occupying the same point in space time, and sometimes it sounds like a half drunk Daft Punk jamming with Old Gregg, but it is never less than spell-binding.  If some pieces resemble a confused man in a Gallifreyan collar trying to invoke the early 80s with barely recalled themes to Sorry, Roobarb and Kick Start played on broken machinery, well, perhaps that’s exactly what they are, but whether the drastic envelopes applied to sequenced riffs and sudden spasms of spring reverb are uncontrolled or artfully assembled it’s a trip.  Join us in the crowd when he next comes to town – we’ll be the ones in the home-sculpted papier mache Metal Mickey head-dress.

Are Fronds Eclectic? (No, They're Mostly The Same Solo For Hours)

Quite an interesting review, this one.  In short, I felt that the Bevis Frond were quite dull, and seemed to play for an eternity.  I suspect my response was coloured by the fact the only thing I know about them in advance was an LP with Anton Barbeau, and his concise psych-pop songs aren't really indicative of what they do.  Still, they were so likeable on stage, and I respected their approach to dredging up old songs for fans and merch pricing so much, I effectively gave them a positive review...or at least tempered by bile.  Birds Of Hell were honestly great, though, and Shotgun Six are worth a visit.

THE BEVIS FROND/ BIRDS OF HELL/ SHOTGUN SIX, Divine Schism, The Jericho, 26/9/19

Local heavy psych favourites Shotgun Six deal in glassy-eyed riffing, and their main technique is to keep riffing until one of them starts hitting a big gong (not to be confused with hitting a gig bong, though this may also be relevant).  For all their New York cool, what they most resemble is a 60s London blues basement band gone wild.  They’re effectively The Yardbirds, if the yard were a prison yard and the birds were being forced to trudge round it until they’d walked off their heroic drug intake.

“This song’s set in the future.  And Great Yarmouth”.  The epic followed by the bathetic, it’s a perfect summation of Norwich’s Birds Of Hell, who spend 30 minutes squeezing huge emotions into cheap synthesised pop songs, and the bulges where they won’t fit make for fascinating listening.  “Spiderman’s Let Himself Go” is a melancholic rant about life on minimum wage delivered over the sort of cheeky tune Moogieman might come up with in a pensive moment, whereas “Practice Punching My hands, Son” is a breezy ambient wash coupled with an impassioned meditation on the complexities of masculinity that could have been penned by Idles.  It ends with a tossed off gag, which suddenly defuses the tension, as does the fact the vocalist looks like Cheech Marin with Heidi’s hairdresser.  This is the sort of excellent set you want to watch again as soon as it’s finished, to catch the subtleties you missed.

Less of a danger with The Bevis Frond, where one could pop to the bar, the loo and the local Co-Op, and return to find them on the same solo.  For theirs is psychedelia of the Keep On Chuggin’ school, exemplified by expansive blues-based rockers something like Hawkwind down the Sunday afternoon pub jam, where you might be forgiven for thinking a long solo exists to let one of them visit the carvery.  Not that we’re saying long-form rock and adept fretboard flightpaths are bad things, and the band does it with an affable effortlessness it’s impossible to dislike, but the best moment of the set is “He’d Be A Diamond”, a lovely little folky jangle that sounds like Richard Thompson trying to get on the C86 compilation.  Frankly, though, a cult band like this has bought the right to do whatever they want; when was the last time you heard an act with a discography stretching back over 30 years say “we’re going to do a new one” and get a rousing cheer?  So chug on, dear Fronds, you’ve earned it.