Cock and Bull TV is one of those good ideas. They are an online music show, is the crux of it, but the shows consist of live recordings and interviews with the bands therein, and to make that happen, they put on free gigs in Shebeen. If you can’t guess my attitude to free gigs, click ‘June’ in the sidebar there, and then ‘July’ and ‘August’.
I’ve watched some of the videos from the older ones. Wounds is good.
Squarehead is too.
Now, the interviews are obviously more RTE teen presenter than ultimate exposition of authorial intentions or anything. But still.
So episode 4 was being filmed in Shebeen, with Sacred Animals, Tieranniesaur and Girls Names.
Sacred Animals were first, fresh from the whole ‘one of the most blogged-about bands in the world’ thing, which seems like an anomaly that might keep popping up, given that Adebisi Shank had the same honour when Nialler included them on the MAP thing. Always dangerous being the favourite.
The confusing thing with Sacred Animals for me is that they’re patently good. There’s a purity to the sound, and it sounds tight and talented as you could hope for. And it’s even pretty original, though Radiohead is a comparison it’s probably impossible to shake without going death metal. But it doesn’t grab me. The melodies just don’t seem to resolve into anything memorable, and the songs don’t really go anywhere. It’s frustrating, because if they did, they’d instantly be a good band. Everything else in place. But instead, it just feels like waiting through elegant-sounding music. Maybe on another night, in another mood.
Tieranniesaur, on the other hand, isn’t elegant sounding at all. With a comedic short-people-in-front, tall-people-at-the-back arrangement on stage, they make surprisingly meaty music for a Popical Island supergroup of sorts. The lyrics might be twee every now and then, but the musical touchstones aren’t twee at all – Jackson Five, AC/DC and Cassandra’s band from Wayne’s World, from where I was standing. They’re lots of fun, and in a different scenario (without cameras and the not-quite-into-it-enough Girls Names/Sacred Animals/Cock and Bull crowd), there would have been every danger of a dance party breaking out. As expected, Sketch from Popical Island #1 was the most fun, with something approaching gang vocals for the word ‘bollocks’, but there isn’t a song without a hook, and it is worth a note in my head anyway that ‘shambly’ isn’t a word that could apply to them at all.
Then it was 11.15pm and I had to leave for the bus. Girls Names, some day.
Falling behind. I could throw out the ‘so busy’ excuse – writing for various print things and editing a print thing in college (print being similar to a blog but on actual paper, if you’ve never encountered it) – but that’s mostly crap, I just sleep too much. Coming up soon, though, a 5,200 word Kevin Barnes interview transcript and maybe some new form of Irish music exposition gimmick.
Anyway, I went to see Hunter-Gatherer’s 7″ launch in Whelans. Missed Ilex, which is a bad thing because Ilex is really good, heady, beat-counting electronica from my memories of her, and seeing her again would have been nice. Arrived in time to see Meljoann though.
Meljoann’s an interesting one. She seemed, as people do every now and then, to come out of nowhere, making what Nialler was calling skweee and what (according to Meljoann in the last Totally Dublin – one of those ‘various print things’) Glasgow calls aquacrunk and America calls ‘post-Dilla’. Bristol calls it wonky, I think. Thinking about where she sits, musically, is a good thought experiment. She’s heavily into 80s and 90s R’n'B, in too deep for it to be dismissed as ironic even if it was, and that shows through. But she’s au fait with all this stumble-beat electronica coming out at the moment too. Is she knocking around the halls of what the current face of electronic music is putting out, or is she a strange hipster iteration of retro black pop?
She’s probably neither. She doesn’t exactly have her shit as watertight live as might be ideal, but she’s still someone to watch, musically. Her voice is great and her ideas are good. To me, it seemed like she came from somewhere completely outside the Dublin Osaka-y electronic scene and seemed to be isolated, but apparently there’s lots of this stuff. That’s a good thing, I think, and Meljoann’d make a good leader for it if she reduced the amount of time between songs.
Then there was Hunter-Gatherer. In the admittedly extremely microcosmic Dublin scene worldview I possess, he’s already at the top of the pile as far as electronic music goes, and I Dreamed I Was A Footstep In The Trail Of A Murderer is one of the best Irish albums of the last while. His live shows are always incredibly intense, but it always feels like there’s one thing missing that stops it being the fully great experience it could be, and it’s never Hunter-Gatherer’s fault.
This time it was crowd talk. But outside of that, the bass was all-consuming, the screen for the visuals made him look a bit like a ghost before the visuals started, the visuals when they started were just the right type of nonconfluential, I felt, and the songs are, obviously, great. Some day I will see Hunter-Gatherer at six am in a pitch black empty section of piping in Berlin or something, and it will be the greatest gig ever. For now, these shows are more than enough to keep showing up to.
There I am, standing outside the Academy at 2.42pm, eating an apple that’s serving as a replacement for breakfast in case I need food to avoid freaking out. I’m about to meet and interview Kevin Barnes. If you want my opinion on Kevin Barnes, it’s here and here. If you don’t know who he is, he’s basically of Montreal, although you have pretty much no excuse for not knowing that.
A guy walks past me to the door with a paper bag. There are arms sticking out of it. I ask him if he’s going in, walk in with him and proceed to make small talk.
“Did you buy some arms?”
“Yeah man. 2 euro store. Some fake arms, some fake blood. And these silver gorilla masks. Gotta take advantage of the local plenty you know?”
This was David Barnes, Kevin Barnes’ brother, who did almost all of their cover art and had an excellent website full of other stuff before he took it down. I didn’t know that at the time or I would have had a bit of a fawn. Anecdote over.
—
Several hours later I show up to the actual gig, skillfully avoiding having to see Planet Parade. There’s a guy shouting at the bouncers after being kicked out already, within the first song. Good work MCD.
The first thing to notice about this gig relative to past of Montreal gigs is that it’s all a live band now. Where once there was a murkily-mixed backing track of programmed bass and drums, there are now talented musicians. The members who’ve been around forever have obviously had the Elephant 6 ramshackle shaken out of them at some point since the last tour. The most obvious new member is , K Ishibashi who plays violin, guitar, keyboards and bass, if I recall correctly, and also does a wicked impression of Kevin Barnes’ falsetto that leaves The Late BP Helium free stage-left to do the harmonies in a range he’s more comfortable with while he vogues and plays a double-neck guitar.
It’s strange seeing of Montreal now. Hissing Fauna was Hissing Fauna (and – get this, oM fans who are as lax in their study as I seem to be – Barnes pronounces it Fowna). The subsequent albums are, by every scientific standard, less good. But Skeletal Lamping rewarded patience, even if the urge to perform some sonic surgery to remove the ‘I’m a motherfucking headliner’ bit from the otherwise lovely Wicked Wisdom is strong as ever. And False Priest, dripped as it is in the affected falsetto sex squeal thing and confused as it might sound, is just as intriguing once you realise what it is that he’s actually saying.
They’re a better band now than they’ve ever been before, to see live. And, without the Jon Brion post-production, False Priest stuff sits incredibly well alongside the Sunlandic Twins/Hissing Fauna/Skeletal Lamping stuff. Our Riotous Defects touches Comedy Barnes, unseen for the most part since before Nina, weird sex squeal Barnes, and, on Janelle Monae’s part that he sings himself in her absence, abstract, transcendent Barnes. And Coquet Coquette could’ve sat in after She’s A Rejecter fairly comfortably, three years ago.
There was also plenty of Hissing Fauna, which is great news even to the hardiest of devotees. The live band means they can do an accelerating intro to Gronlandic Edit that drops a bomb when it actually kicks in. Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse, being the ‘hit’ in these parts as far as I can discern, goes down predictably well too. It’s weird, though. Barnes is a different person on stage, or at least a different character, than he was when he was doing this stuff the first time round. It’s post-Georgie Fruit Kevin Barnes that sings everything now, no guitar in hand, pretty much frolicking around the stage with his admittedly improved but also slightly less revelatory singing voice. That’s fine, and lots of fun. But worth noting.
And so David Barnes used the arms and the blood and the silver gorilla masks. Anthropomorphic animals in lycra battled on stage, they begged for Kevin’s blessing, they lifted him up, they faked fighting him, they played hype man for the encore and they exploded streamers and confetti from their wrists like weird abstract Spidermen. It’s a reverie, no doubt.
The encore? There’s almost always a cover. If you weren’t hep to that, check out You Ain’t No Picasso’s archive of oM’s covers. There are lots, and those are only the ones that got catalogued. They’re usually tributes to someone you can hear in their music – David Bowie features heavily, say, and so do the various 60s bands you see on the cover of Mojo, and Prince. Fittingly for Nu-Kevin, the encore in the Academy was…
Thriller! An exclamation mark there – one in every 10,000 words is apparently the guideline, so it’s probably time – to acknowledge how surprised the crowd was when the massive synth chords hit for the first time. And then two more Michael Jackson songs medley’d into it before going back to those Thriller chords to end. It’s not The Past Is A Grotesque Animal, but it was fun as hell.
They’ve been around a while, but all of a sudden any Irish Times employee you talk to (and by talk to I mean read the writing of on the internet) is telling you to check out Cloud Castle Lake. So, having been curious for a while – to the extent that I asked them to do an interview once that fell foul of the 50% attrition rate between being questions being sent and answers being returned – I decided to check them out at Electric Relaxation in the Bernard Shaw.
One of the obvious advantages to gigs in the Bernard Shaw is that they are free. One of the obvious disadvantages is that it is patently not a venue and if there’s more than about fifteen people there you’re probably not going to see anything. There were significantly more than fifteen people there. I couldn’t see anything.
Still, though. The scarlet letter with Cloud Castle Lake is the Radiohead thing – that the voice sounds like Thom Yorke’s, and the experimentalism follows the Kid A-Amnesiac-HTTT-In Rainbows mould. It’s there, definitely, as much as I’m sure they’re tired of hearing it. But for me that’s not the main thing going on. En route to being a little post-rocky, they shave off the unwieldy ‘epic’ edges and end up somewhere weird, proggy and not too far from krautrock at times. They’re hooks without melodies, rhythmic patterns from both the low end and the high end, going after the full-body-experience as well as just the head. The voice – which you could justifiably spidergram to Jonsi if you weren’t happy with Thom – is pitch perfect and so high it really just functions as another instrument, but with a little extra personality. It’d be interesting to see them play alongside someone a bit more aggressively experimental like Children Under Hoof, to see how they fit.
The recordings they have are all qualified with a (live) or a (rehearsal) caveat, which actually makes it all the more impressive that they’ve built up such a buzz. Whenever they do put something new out, consider it on the proverbial ‘hotly anticipated’ list.
Back to the grind in Dublin with no money, but that just means you have to be ready when opportunity knocks. Instores in Tower are to the casual Irish music fan what Marks & Spencers closing time is to freegans, and when there’s a chance to go see a band you’ve been waiting to see for free, there’s no reason not to jump at it.
Squarehead have been around a while, floating peripherally into my field of vision at Hefty Horse gigs in Anseo, in conversation and in MySpace top 8s (in the long, long ago). They were good, too, or seemed like they had the potential to be. But it felt like they blew up (such that you can blow up in a scene that seems at times to consist of about 80 people) over the summer after their inclusion on the Popical Island #1 compilation with the obvious piece of shamble-pop genius that is Fake Blood. That’s their arc, in my head. And I hadn’t seen them since this happened, so I shuffled down to Tower from my perch in House 6.
They’re lots of fun. I’ve said several times before in posts I am not energetic enough to find and link to that I have a soft spot for the power-trio. Mighty Atomics were one. So Cow, in various incarnations, are another. Three-piece Ted Leo is pretty much the be-all. Squarehead are a little like that, but not a lot.
The chord patterns are simple, falling somewhere between the memory-surf-wave thing (from Girls to Wavves via No Monster Club, say) and the 1990s-Weezer-revival thing (e.g. Surfer Blood), expedited on a guitar that must be the most college indie pop thing that’s ever existed: a Danelectro that looks like a Mustang. Sometimes Roy (who was formerly Squarehead by himself) will pull off on a lead guitar break, with the crunchy chords disappearing and the focus falling on the melody. Harmonies are paramount, and they’re flawed, not like the ubiquitous Brian Wilson-Noah Lennox comparison, but more in the 60s-teen-garage-band-who-have-heard-Beach Boys-singles kind of way.
Some songs are better than others. This is the consummate indie pop trio, and as with any band who go for The Best Indie Pop Song every time they write, it’s going to be more about melody and immediacy than variety. Many are excellent, a few seem lacking spark. But the highlight (and closer) is clear, and Paddy Power stopped taking bets on it some time in July: Fake Blood.
With drummer (and Mr Popical himself) Ruan Van Vliet placing a tambourine on the hi-hat – literally just putting it there, not screwing it on, he’s not Larry Mullen, are you mad? – they tear into it, and it’s as sad and uplifting as a song can be. It’s the 7″ they were promoting too, and if there’s ever been a song to own on 7″ this is it, so if you don’t have it, go get it. They’re numbered, so go quickly and get a low one. Although admittedly I took a higher one than I could have just to avoid those COVER ART RUINING GIANT TOWER STICKERS.
I went to see Nobunny in the Knitting Factory in Williamsburg. He is a bunny. And a nutcase. It was full. Somewhere over 50% of the crowd seemed to stagedive. One man over six feet in height stagedove onto a woman under 5’3″ at one point. Someone bought me a can of PBR because they said I looked super-friendly.
None of it made sense. I’m writing it off as opposite day. And drawing a line under New York. POSTS ABOUT IRELAND FROM TOMORROW
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, something’s awry here. You’ve been scrolling and scrolling, all the way back to the Long Long Ago, and you can’t find anything. Where are all the musicals?
Well I’m going to shock you. I don’t go to see a lot of musicals. Excluding Christmas pantos, I had been to one, ever, before this summer. But circumstances conspired, and I ended up in the Eugene O’Neill Theatre watching Antibalas warm the crowd up for FELA!
Here’s some background. Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra are an afrobeat band based in Brooklyn. They’re ‘contemporary’, in the sense that they were actually around in Nigeria in the 70s, but their sound is so respectful and rooted in that era that calling them a ‘modern take’ is a bit foolish. Their leader, tenor saxophonist Stuart D. Bogie, is Dave Sitek from TV On The Radio’s session musician of choice. The collaborators list is ridiculous. Seun and Femi Kuti and Tony Allen have sat in with Antibalas, but it’s possibly best to just block quote the people Bogie has played with:
He has shared stage and/or studio with the Wu Tang Clan, Medeski Martin and Wood, Public Enemy, Celebration, The Roots, Paul Simon, Harlem Shakes, Burning Spear, Zach De La Rocha, Massive Attack, Scarlett Johansen, Mark Ronson, Saul Williams, Passion Pit, Tony Allen, Sinead O’Connor, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, The El Michaels Affair, Baaba Maal, Bat for Lashes, DJ Logic, Brian Jackson, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rana, Dub is a Weapon, Congo Ashanti Roy, Kologbo, Tunde WIlliams, Ticklah, Paul Cox, Renata, Colin Stetson, Foals, Matt Bauder, Matthew Lux, Toby Summerfield, Crush, Kill, Destroy, Fire of Space, The Eternal Buzz Brass Band, Geoff Mann, Recloose, Evan Hause, Reverend Vince Anderson, Chin Chin, The Sharp Things, The Fu Arkist-Ra, Dick Griffin (of Sun Ra’s Arkestra), Vincent Chancey, Steve Swell, Joe McGinty, Tom Abs, Shoko Nagai, Jeremy Wilms, Larry MacDonald, Butch Morris, Bill Brovold and Larval, Caural, Victor Rice, Dragons of Zynth, The Loser’s Lounge, State Radio, Gomez, Brightblack Morning Light, Holly Miranda, Noba, Miles Anthony Benjamin Robinson, Centralia, Wild Yaks, Oren Blowedow, Michael Leonhart and The Get Hustle.
He has also arranged strings for Spencer Day, James Harries and Ben Jonas.
This musical though, you’d have to presume, is a highlight in itself for Mr. Bogie. While Kevin Mambo and Sahr Ngaujah split time as Fela Kuti in the musical, telling the story and singing the songs, it’s Bogie at the back of the stage tearing ribbons out of people’s faces as The Saxophone Of Fela Kuti. Not the kind of thing you’d plan for, but it’s hard to think of a higher honour for an afrobeat player than that.
The story’s done with obvious added glitz, but it’s respectful. Fela was a big personality (and a bit of a lunatic) in reality too, so it’s not too jarring. We are introduced to The Shrine, Fela’s club opposite his house in a run-down area of Lagos. We are told by the programme that The Shrine features, on any given night, anti-government lectures, Yoruba rituals, strange dancing and, obviously, Fela music. But many people are here not because they want to see the story of Fela played out (or because their friend likes Antibalas and didn’t want to go by himself) – they’re here because it says ‘Presented by Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’ on the marquee. So they need to know. What’s Fela music?
This is done beautifully well. Fela tells all. First there’s Yoruba music. African ritual drumming, chanting. But that’s the time before. ‘Highlife’ is the Nigerian popular music of his youth. It’s all celebratory horns and uptown jazz party etiquette. So when he goes to London to study medicine like his brothers… he learns how to play jazz instead. He comes back. A guy from Sierra Leone is dressing up as James Brown and playing a close iteration of his funk. He’s a dope, Fela feels, but there’s something to it. Then there’s Tito Puente. “Ethnic” rhythms gaining attention in the popular sphere.
‘Let me break it down for you’, he says, and then ‘now I will put it back together’. The rhythms start. ‘Not Afro-Cuban drums. My drums.’ Two guitars, one chopping and one crawling a riff. ‘Those guitars. That’s not James Brown. That’s AFROBEAT’. The backing vocals emerge. ‘African singing’. Something’s missing. ‘What’s missing? Take a guess’. Real, deep bass. No tone, not like funk bass. Then Fela picks up his red saxophone (and Stuart D. Bogie does too), and there’s no-one in the room left confused about what Fela music is.
If you don’t know the story of Fela’s life, here’s the key points: his mother’s a Marxist who was murdered by the government, his music is great, the government hate him, he starts to get political, he gets beaten up a lot, he goes mental, he thinks about leaving Nigeria, he doesn’t leave Nigeria.
For the rest, go see Fela. I’m sure you can get those Christmas flights or something. Or maybe just read the Wikipedia.
But I was there for the music more than the show, and that was sensational. Water No Get Enemy, Fela’s single, watertight, perfect contribution to the world of music, soundtracks the whole second half of the show, through torture, indecision and soul-searching. And the solo on his hit, Zombie, is the aural equivalent of closing your eyes, walking towards a group of people and slashing the air with a knife.
But like I said with Budos, I don’t know how to talk about this sort of music. It was great. This is Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Listen to him.
- He was playing at South Street Seaport, as good bands tend to.
- He looks about 16 (he is 19 according to research)
- His band have the exact same cast as a secondary school band. Serious guitar-holding demeanour, unhip clothes, knotted hair. Probably a weed pipe hidden in a sock drawer somewhere and a Led Zeppelin poster on a wall too.
- He is nevertheless an excellent guitar player in the old mould, not afraid to play solos, to bring in melodies other than the main one with his guitar while he sings.
- His songs are psychedelic and rangey, but more in a secondhand record store Deleted 60s Vinyl section way than a Built To Spill or Yo La Tengo kind of way.
- He has a couple of choruses too.
That’s all for this one, I’m trying to get closer to Real Life Now before I go see four more shows.
What it would have looked like from the back, if I had been inside the perimeter. via BKvegan
The last time I saw Beach House, I was sitting on mulch in the Body and Soul arena at Electric Picnic, not really keeping it together and unable to understand why it was taking them so long to set up. Detective work later revealed that answer. My memories of that, if I can keep them, will stay with me forever though. It looks kind of like a cross between Super 8 footage and an actual dream, and it sounds like Beach House right before Devotion came out. I’ve never seen them in ordinary circumstances.
And maybe I never will. Rather than spending money I need to spend on 99c pizza slices and cans of Mac and Cheese on actually gaining entry to the Prospect Park Bandshell, it made sense to just find a good piece of grass outside and watch from afar. So that was it. Late as usual, I caught about five songs of Beach House’s support set, possibly all from Teen Dream if memory serves. Take Care billowing out through Prospect Park dusk. Not bad, but honestly, actually seeing Beach House play might have to go a bit higher on the life priority list than it is currently. They are as tight as a politically incorrect joke, and there’s every reason to believe genuine visual contact with Victoria Legrande would help in the communication of her general sultry buzz.
Fun as that was, I had to sit through the National after that. Barring Bruce Springsteen and maybe Tom Waits, there is no music on the planet more people have tried to talk me into saying I like. I think they’re dull, the emotion is forced and often pretty trite, and they’re saved from being out and out AOR by having a badass drummer. Fake Empire, made as usual by the counterintuitive and admittedly pretty deadly drumming, was a reasonably poignant encore, I’ll admit. That far but no further.
I'm Karl. I write this blog and write for Totally Dublin. In a past life I got way too personal with my criticism of Sean McTiernan's predilection for Kendrick Lamar and dulcimer music made by psychotic men in forests on the legendary Them's The Vagaries podcast. Available to sell out in almost any way for money.
m c d o n a k j @ t c d . i e is my e-mail address. I don't really attempt to break new music here or anything, but every few months when I'm bored I pick random shit out of my inbox and free associate with it, so send me your Bjork remix or whatever.
