Bang 2003 - live reviews
THE MUSIC
KINGS OF LEON
VENUEEmpress Ballroom, Blackpool
DATEMay 2nd 2003
The glamour of the looming Empress Ballroom is only plaster-deep. It seems stuck on like the pink bit on an Iced Gem, majesty thwarted by the redolence of tea-dances and jumble sales. That old-lady funk (the funk of 40,000 years?) is itself masked tonight by the fug of testosterone through t-shirts. It’s so beery and Lancs-y as to make a Southern softy quake. This is a crowd that wears its balls on its sleeve. Afterwards some bloke walks along puking as he goes, leaving others to skid and swear in his wake. These boys party hard.
The rampant English-blokishness is dissipated somewhat by the magnificent, delightfully
manly Kings of Leon. Skinny of leg and lush of moustache, they play dusty, ramshackle rock’n’roll to make the devil spit and The Datsuns weep. Without fuss, without flounce, they are the genuine article, and it’s impossible to describe them without images of old Westerns crowding round the campfire. It’s heavy shit done with a feather touch - Bourbon rock, Mount Rushmore rock, immaculate Yankee road rock. You can’t be clever about this, although it isn’t dumb. It’s just. . .natural. Single ‘Molly’s Chambers’ has a sort of seismic cheek and they rip through it in one breath. They could be QOTSA divested of the unappealing prog pomp moments, all sunset warmth and colour. Pure escapism.
The Music, for all their freewheeling psychedelia, are a kennelled young pup. Not that they don’t create an atmosphere of fists-aloft freedom – the sprung floor heaves under pounding feet, the beats suggest there’s been a lorry full of drums overturned on the M62 and the unearthly voice of singer Robert Harvey sounds like youth filtered through a PA. There’s glory here, but it’s paddocked by a lack of imagination. The songs snowball, building momentum but melting into senselessness as they go. Harvey’s vocals start to sound like the cries of a particularly tuneful seagull, just skimming the consciousness, smudging into the background. Its pleading, incongruous beauty is hemmed in by pedestrian vocal lines, like the brightest pupil writing out
’the cat sat on the mat’ over and over. ‘Take The Long Road And Walk It’ has a terrific groove, as does ‘Getaway’ – you
can dance to them, it’s just that there’s nowhere upwards of the ground for your heart to go. They sometimes clip the fenders of spacerock, but seem to have a fear of floating.
The Music have vast scope but you can’t get lost in it. Your feet won’t leave the ground.
* * *
SUGABABES
VENUE
Guild Hall, Southampton
DATE1st April 2003
Sugababes have pulled off a comeback as gobsmacking as any in rock. Pop’s ephemeral nature forbids second chances – take the cheese, your mouse ass is done. When schoolmate Siobhan left and Scouser-than-thou ex-Atomic Kitten Heidi came, they perhaps crossed some kind of (production) line; but who cares if your orchid was grown in a greenhouse?
The professionalism hasn’t obliterated their ingenuousness. They look small, and they are. Their image is restrained cool – behind it they’re a hesitant huddle. Heidi grins. Mutya semi-scowls. Keisha gives it lots, the most at ease. They almost pass the charisma between them like the grey sisters passing the eye, but it doesn’t detract a bit. It’s the music that moves you, the way the songs fan out their feathers and strut. Like all the best pop it’s slick, dark, glossy and moody. Soul and invention in swathes, titanic synths and space-boot beats. It’s self-consciously Noughties but it refers to the 80s as instinctively as rock’n’roll refers to the 60s and 70s. Nothing gets you like this if you grew up in the 80s, its butterflies are always ready to unfurl in your guts. They aren’t really stars but the music is galactic, fulsome and shiver-bringing.
There are moments of real sass and sexiness – the swivelling pout of ‘Round Round’, a spike heel in the eye of innocence. That first fuss-inducing single ‘Overload’ puts sly teenage truths over beats and breaks that move like, y’know, trains. Lolita meets Freud. Yum. They haul a hapless lad onstage and serenade him with the hilarious, outrageous ‘Virgin Sexy’ (“
just thinking about it really scares me like Freddy”). They laughingly purr and cavort around him just this side of a lap-dance. Boy looks frightened to death. It’s power that any female in here over 16 either feels or soon will.
Then there’s ‘Freak Like Me’. There’s not that much dog in these pretty flowers, and your average ruffneck brotha would, you suspect, squish them like girly grapes. But the bravado of it
. . . the initial thrill is in the insouciance of the thievery, but more than that, it’s simply The Ride of the Bootleg Electrosoulclassic Valkyries. It’s almost too big to live up to live – it blows a fuse. That’s what a great pop song is, a neon flash recorded and never replicated.
Fearless and delicate, these are the mice that roar.
Bang 2003 - album reviews
THE POSTAL SERVICE
Give Up Sub PopLovely, dreamy Death Cab For Cutie collaborationWhen Americans do irony Brits get shamed. When Americans do whimsy it’s wonderful, and ought to make us wonder why we can’t do it without falling prey to the beast of twee. The Postal Service consist of Ben Gibbard from Seattle’s Death Cab For Cutie and the melodically-named Jimmy Tamborello of DNTEL; they’ve made a sweet and solid album that relaxes you as music made in laid-back circumstances does. The latter would every so often stick a load of delicate electro on a CD-R and post it from LA to the former, who would add melodies and vocals.
You have to love the simplicity of both scenario and record, even if the minimalist clickits and snappits of the beats wear you down after a while. No, but you really
have to love sumptuous opener ‘The District Sleeps Alone Tonight’, the barmy cod-techno closer ‘Natural Anthem’, the careless spot-on-ness that comes from spare-time no-pressure projects. The distinct whiff of Ben Folds Five sans cynicism and Future Bible Heroes without the repetitiveness. Oh, the wistful cuteness of it all, it’s enough to make you . . . almost spew but in a had-too-much-candy-floss way, rather than a had-too-much-Special-Brew way. If that’s not a recommendation I don’t know what is.
* * *
Whirlwind Heat
Do Rabbits Wonder?
Third Man Records/XL Recordings
Inspirations: Sonic Youth, The Fall, The Texas Chainsaw MassacreWhirlwind Heat, of Michigan, are the first signing to Jack White’s label Third Man, and naturally there are three of them. The number three, as has been well documented, is Jack White’s slave and his God. It is his life, universe and everything, and for good reason. There is something infinitely satisfying about a three, a trio or a triptych (see? That was one just then). There is strength in it, invincibility, as well as a wilful, stubborn out-of-step-ness. It has solidity and perversion. Inside a triangle – so deliciously angular and pointy – is magic. So if three is the formula behind the White Stripes’ sparse majesty, Whirlwind Heat obey a short yet baffling algebraic doodle scrawled in broken chalk.
Screeeeee.Of the album title, singer and Moog player David Swanson chirps “We all love rabbits – they’re so innocent, you just wonder what they’re thinking about.” Aw. Cute. And completely disingenuous. If there’s a less cute album released this year, prop your doors shut with shovels.
The open spaces of the pummelling songs let your discomfort roam free. The drone of ‘Tan’ is akin to placing an ear against an idling, upended lorry.
“Pretty pretty pretty pretty. . .” hisses David Swanson (do you need me to tell you this is sinister?), barged sideways by a bastard guitar. ‘Green’ becomes a ponderous choke, like a Norwegian death-metal track boiled down to its shreds. Swanson’s voice is that of a collegiate, bespectacled art-rocker possessed by a demon mandrake fiend that often wrestles the upper hand.
“Now she has matted hair! Now she has mangled!” he shrieks in ‘Yellow’ as though confronted with the lopsided, dead-eyed Sadako from the original Ring. (The colour-code system is due to a certain disdain for the conventional. . .yes.) Guitar lines thinly garrotte songs, only the wispy phantoms of tunes are allowed to move. There is more tightened violence and hardboard malice in this album than anything to do with rabbits should possess.
Despite its nastiness being describable almost only in terms of horror films, ‘Do Rabbits Wonder?’ exists in a sonic vacuum. It is strangling on the blood it coughed up when it was laughing – cos it is funny. In ‘Pink’ Swanson starts to sing like Mr Hanky The Christmas Poo being flushed away. But it is also deadly serious after the fashion of all art rock. It has a right to be – it is part of a proud tradition of precision flailing, and as such can stand grumpy and fearsome alongside Sonic Youth’s ‘GOO’ from whose cover art they took their name.
Rabbits. Good God.
* * *
SPIRITUALIZED
The Complete Works Part 1 Spaceman/AristaInspirations: The Velvet Underground, Jesus, H.Jason Pierce’s first redemptive floatings in space‘The Complete Works Part 1’ charts the early Nineties transition from the dopey dirges of Spacemen 3 to the intergalactic splendour of Spiritualized. As with any project ruled absolutely by the vision of one individual, the music of Spiritualized has taken many a voyage to the ends of its own rectum since S3 were flushed away. Of course space rock lends itself to this, being the sexier little sister of prog – it’s genetically inclined to bloat. But there are many more occasions in this collection where you can’t conceive of removing anything from a track. All is in its place, sprawlingly precise and spectacular – take out that minute tinkling in the background and it’s ruined.
The collection gathers scattered B-sides, fan-club-only flexi-discs and split singles; while compilations of this nature are generally just dribble trays for completists, this one is rather more appealing in and of itself. Containing every possible version of several tracks, it somehow manages to escape tedium. Boil-in-the-bag remixes these ain’t – they require a far more poncy term suggestive of infinite and daunting imagination that hasn’t been invented. Also it sounds less disjointed than most bundles of this sort do, the long tracks oozing over each other like one long sleepy sigh. Even the heavy blasts of brass and thunderous basslines don’t jar – everything is overtaken by eternal soothing. (Except ‘100 Bars’ which is quite chilling.) It sounds like the peace that descends among the smithereens of all your crockery after a howling fit of fuse-blowing frustration. Somehow rooted in breakdown, Spiritualized began by synthesising misery and bliss into shiny redemption, and have done that ever since.
At a time when the loutish grooves of baggy clutched culture by the crotch, Oasis on the way to give a less friendly squeeze, Jason Pierce was tinkering with stardust. This was eventually to lead to the refined, holy throbbings of ‘Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’ and the shattered stained-glass of ‘Let It Come Down’. It isn’t always interesting to listen to a band’s initial gropings towards themselves – it isn’t often beautiful. This is. Part 2 comes out later this year; allow yourself a troubled, lopsided smile.
Bang 2003 - Gonzales/Eels
Here are some extracts from features first published in Bang, summer 2003. Please email if you'd like to see any of these articles in full.Gonzales and the Canadian Content Collective. . .Being interviewed at by Gonzales is simultaneously compelling and bamboozling – he seems to eagerly reveal things off the top of his head whilst running on auto-manifesto-pilot. Digging frantically for the implication in sentences which zoom overhead, it doesn’t take long to get buried. These are statements that don’t leave much room for questions. That’s what self-belief is; you politely annex yourself because other people’s rules aren’t relevant. It goes all the way into easy dismissal of genre.
“I’m pretty lucky,” he shrugs, “because I have nothing resembling the benchmarks of hip-hop culture in my upbringing. What I liked about rap when I first heard it was the illusion of being more realistic because it was based on talking. We don’t normally sing to each other in the street. It’s good to be able to sing sometimes and rap sometimes, depending on how intimate I want to feel.”
Gonzales makes stunning pop music that is unfettered by genre expectations – the joy of it comes from his toying with whatever he likes. Conversely, he chooses to burden himself in other ways; he is his own manager. Thank the ‘heavy confidence base’. “I do it all myself. Even if my hand is shaking after a few phone calls, I can go back to the piano and go OK, this is why I’m doing it. I’ll have good and bad days with the business shit, but it’s always a perfect day at the piano.”
I boggle at this ability to compartmentalise. He grins.
“I have very intense brain control. Heh!”
* * *
Eels. . .I was booked to interview E about his fourth album ‘Souljacker’ on September 12, 2001. By the end of September 11 it had become impossible. It’s still on, said the PR, just don’t mention yesterday. All was lost in exploded context – how to not mention such a looming thing? How to discuss an album with that title? How to conduct anything so frivolous as a pop interview? I cancelled, bewildered. Today is the day after the fall of Baghdad, anarchy around the corner, and we’re drinking tea and munching biscuits. E’s indifference to conflict and anguish seems a sensible enough reaction to insanity. He’s endeared by the fact that Iraqis beat statues with their shoes to show their disgust. He’s into little things. His equilibrium is soothing.
How is he, then?
“It changes every coupla hours. One hour I’m like yeah, great and then it’s oh, shit. Heheh! You always hear about people who kill themselves and it’s like ‘God, I just talked to him yesterday, he seemed great!’ It’s amazing how quickly things can change. . .”
E has always been extraordinarily open about the deaths of his parents and the suicide of his sister within a few months. He dealt with it by writing the cheery, sepulchral ‘Electro-Shock Blues’, and by talking. Death hangs over every song he writes, but there’s more to him than that and I don’t intend to go over old ground. Yet within thirty seconds he’s gleefully riffing on doom. He’s not living up to a Death Dude persona; it seems it’s just what his mind tends towards. He rattles off sentences rapidly, punctuated with bubbles of laughter. I tell him about the September 11 thing. He shrugs.
“Doesn’t faze me, that kind of stuff. All these bands that cancel their tours, they’re a bunch of pussies. I was in London on the 11th, hosting a show on XFM called Hijack – hehuh! That was already awkward. There was a rumour at one point in the day that another plane was headed for the West End. So we were all like, this is it! We got a bunch of beer, hehuheh, and started thinking “so this is how it’s gonna end’. . .”
* * *
Bang 2003 - The Cardigans/Mclusky
The Cardigans. . .This album strikes me as very sad, I say. There’s a moment of silence (there’s a difference between those and pauses).
“Maybe . . .” grumps guitarist-songwriter Peter Svensson at last.
“At least it’s not angry, like ‘Gran Turismo’,” says Nina, perhaps a little defensive. “It wasn’t angry, but it was dark and hopeless. This one is dark and hopeful. We tried to make it a bit sunny, and I think we managed, but maybe we’re a bit more attracted to melancholy.”
Magnus: “Some of the early stuff [was] a bit quirky, funny in a way. This time it’s more stripped-down, Nina’s vocals don’t have any gadgets. Maybe that’s why it sounds less humorous, less fun.”
Magnus, I’ve been reading your recording diary (at www.thecardigans.com). It’s great. “It’s stupid,” he smiles, inaccurately. I think more bands should do it. Anyway, at one point you relate how you all sat and listened to all your work. “It all started up with ‘Emmerdale’ where we all had some good laughs . . . Then came ‘Life’, which we laughed even more at.” Do you dismiss your early work?
“I’m quite impressed with it,” says Peter, from his teenage-telly-watching slump-spot on the sofa. “I wouldn’t know how to do it today. The first album is almost ten years ago, we were really young. So maybe it's difficult to relate to. . .”
* * * Mclusky’s Guide to Cardiff
Matt Harding (native Cardiff boy) and Andy Falkous (adoptive, from Newcastle) of cerebral punk fucks Mclusky discuss where to find hot women and warm sandwiches in the constantly evolving Welsh capital.
SANDWICHES
Andy: “La Mina on Albany Road. Great secret recipe Mina sandwich. There comes a time in a man’s life when he’s gotta upgrade from Gregg’s. It’s the pissed generous uncle of Greek baguette shops on that side of that road. It’s very friendly. The queue can vary. The staff aren’t too tall. One thing though, if you can put this in the article – this happens in a lot of sandwich places. They put the napkin in with the sandwich, so you pull out the sandwich and the napkin’s all covered in sauce. What fucking good is that?” (Further discourse on German and American sandwiches, petrol station sandwiches, likelihood of Bang readers being catering experts or indeed university professors)
VENUES
Andy: “Clwb Ifor Bach. Did you once have to prove you could speak Welsh to get in? There was a scheme where you had to declare at least that you were attempting to learn the Welsh language in order to get membership. They don’t do that anymore. As long as you miss the acid jazz nights the Welsh Club is fabulous. It’s quite cool for a club, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned, you don’t want to be in this big hot cauldron of a place.”
Matt: “I don’t think I’ve ever pulled in the Welsh Club, so I avoid it unless we play there.”
Andy: “A simple agenda, simply expressed.”
PUBS
Matt: “I hate pubs. I’ve never pulled in the pub.”
Andy: “A wide, wide agenda.”
Matt: “I don’t like pubs cos I don’t drink. I don’t drink cos I don’t like pubs. That’s how I feel about it.”
Andy: “The Rummer Tavern would be more of a favourite if it was closer, but it’s alright. It’s next door to Subway’s, but their sandwiches can be a little tasteless. Rummer’s good, you walk in there, you don’t feel intimidated by satin, you don’t feel like some Australian’s going to come and challenge you to an arm wrestle. You don’t get trouble in there, or people dissing sandwiches. It’s a bit like a tunnel, but without the bad bits of a tunnel. It’s also where Murry The Hump split up. It’s the oldest pub selling records in the world. It was originally designed by King John II. And they do bottles of red wine for six quid.”
Matt: “I’d like to thank the Philharmonic. Thanks to the Philly for good times, 1996 to 1998, and thanks to the guys from the STD clinic for all the good treatment, 1996 to 1998.”
Andy: “Note to record company – sex sells.”
* * *
