I live cement

Going to see electronic things live is boring, because they just press play on a laptop and there are flashing lights and you just kind of dance and act like you’re at a normal club where they’re playing music by a thing you like. That’s exactly what Caribou is like. It’s just Dan Snaith wearing a pair of glasses and kind of bopping in the way that the vaguely uncool guys who make electronic music do.

Or wait, no. By virtue of the fact that Caribou used to be a weird psychedelic thing with a lot of guitars, or maybe for some reason completely separate to that, they are an incredibly good live band, more in line with the live driving rhythms of someone like Holy Fuck than the programmed crew. Though I was not being serious about that either.

This is the third time I’ve seen Caribou in 2010, so there aren’t a lot of new things to think. The first time was on Governor’s Island and it was “hard to think of a more perfect gig”. The second time was at Electric Picnic, late, in the Body and Soul, which was hazy. This was the first time indoors.

It’s a band who don’t seem all that concerned about looking cool, for various reasons. They’re too busy wearing a yellow winter coat in a warm enclosed space, being a member of a Touch and Go band as a fulltime job, playing complex drum patterns as well as a quantized drum sequencer would and probably thinking about calculus, respectively. They go in a few different directions. They can build it up and touch on rocking out territory. They can strip it back into breakdown that’s almost minimal.

Mostly they stay somewhere in the middle, with Snaith triggering those lush synth progressions while he alternates between singing, playing guitar, playing the colour synth and, most excitingly, sitting down at the drums across from Brad Weber, egging each other on with their play. This isn’t Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien picking up mallets to go boom boom click boom boom. Both of these dudes are endorsed drummers. And when one of them is touring the toms while the other one’s accenting out rhythms on a hi-hat, that’s a pretty impressive sight.

Bowls, with its vaguely atonal sample of a Xiu Xiu-esque singing bowl (presumably), was on of the in-set highlights, hypnotic as hell, flipping from speaker to speaker and allowing bass and rhythm to sneak up. It’s a banger. And then, to close the set, Odessa, and the guy pulling off his shirt and waving it around his head. Dan Snaith still thinking about calculus.

Coming back out for the encore, it seemed like one of those moments where you actually believe Dublin is a great place for touring bands to play, Snaith saying “you guys are awesome” to a sold-out Button Factory (the gig originally having been booked for Crawdaddy, in a fit of insanity by someone). It was Sun, obviously. And then, at the end, still thinking about calculus, shaking hands with the front row, he’s pulled out and crowdsurfed around for about thirty seconds, the roof long torn off the place.

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Here in my chest where you burst, I keep the crush and the weight of the world.

Sometimes a place develops a relationship with a band that’s beyond just being ordinary attendees of their gigs and listening to their music. To our eternal national shame, we made careers for Josh Ritter and David Gray by becoming strangely attached to their music when no-one else was. It’s not like Future Islands are that much more popular here than anywhere else, but I think both Dublin and Samuel T. Herring are aware that it’s a little different when they come here.

I don’t know what it is. I wasn’t at any of the previous gigs, so I couldn’t really speculate. When the guy said “we’ve been looking forward to this for a long time” he seemed unusually sincere for someone bloating up the home crowd’s ego. I think he was telling the truth.

Anyway, before talking about Future Islands there’s a few other things to countenance. This was my first visit to the Workman’s Club. Seems a decent place. The wooden floor makes a sound when you stamp on it, which is usually a bad omen, but the sound was fine and the size and shape of the place, with no bar in the actual venue area itself, is good. Tentative thumbs up to the Workman’s Club. Not a workman, but if I was I’d be proud to be associated with it.

The next thing: Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands. There’s minor meme status to the fact that they, along with Squarehead, play all the time, but I haven’t seen them in a long time. And they’re different now. Tighter, and any attempts to keep calling them ‘freak folk’ will fall flat. There’s a confidence to them, and their new, meatier stuff, obviously forking off from the last Ariel Pink album in certain cases, is excellent. Also, what we can probably confidently call the Album 2 iteration of the band, even though it’s the same, can’t help but benefit in some vague sense from the fact that most of them have some profile in their own right now – you’re watching Catscars, School Tour and Hunter-Gatherer formed like Voltron, not just the Cold Dead Hands.

One particular high point was the song where Robyn (Catscars) left the stage, watched from the floor, then came back up to do a falling piano version of some dubstep high-end over a huge climax. Paddy and Ger’s duelling vocals, too, brought a new energy. Going exciting places, this Patrick Kelleher.

So then Future Islands. Like I said, I haven’t seen them before. I came to Future Islands on their last album, In Evening Air, with the vague knowledge that they had this live reputation. At first I was confused. I’m pretty sure a lot of people are confused. Here’s this post-new wave synth stuff, vaguely fragile sounding and maybe even saleable if the right whining fringe sang over it. But then there’s Samuel Herring.

Uncanny, is a good word for his voice. It’s one of the knots to untie with Future Islands, the fact that he doesn’t speak like a semi-aristocratic mid-Atlantic school tie old boy. He does sing like one. But it’s so far gone it doesn’t feel like an affectation. It feels like a character, something to transform into to let out all these ultra personal emotions that come through their songs – unrequited love, fucking up, being far away and a lot of other sad things.

I’ve been doing a little thinking about characters as indie band singers lately, apropos Kevin Barnes’ attempt to explain that he’s not roleplaying as Georgie Fruit any more, but it’s still a character. Authenticity is one of the idols of this whole constellation of music, but punk’s not what it was in terms of influence, and the hyper-irony of self-consuming online hipster criticism is seeping into how bands approach what they do. I’m not suggesting that Sam Herring’s being ironic, because he’s probably not. He’s about as sincere a guy as you could find, down to the berserker chest-beating and the preparatory sad face he pulls during instrumental intros while he’s waiting to sing.

But it is still worth noting that, as far as my reading goes, he’s playing a character rather than just adopting a stage persona which everyone does to some degree (except Ted Leo, obviously). It adds a layer of distance between the audience and the performer to a certain extent, but it also makes it much easier on a personal level to engage with. Jamie Stewart rubs salt in his own wounds without the redemptive power of a totem character to project through. He’s hard to watch. There’s none of those moments of sunken stomach empathy and despair with Future Islands, sad as they are. In a sense, Herring and the audience experience the same character, and it’s cathartic for everyone.

This could all be bullshit, but it’s fun to think about. Without any of that stuff, this was a gig par excellence, paced a little poorly but made of great songs, enthusiastic performance and a crowd as open as you will find in Dublin short of the youth crew at their favourite band in Marlay Park. When beats dropped, people bounced. Bounced. Not shuffled awkwardly, but actually dipped in height and returned to their original height in time with the music. That was fun.

Worth not fixing my phone for three extra days. Also at this point a shout out to my cousin whose antics at the last Future Islands gig are apparently ‘infamous’ according to the singer, from the stage, while introducing the song her infamy was cemented during, last time.

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Say I have some stilletos… take ‘em off and test your mettle.

Popical Island is without a doubt A Good Thing, in a quite important, structural way. There are a few reasons. Firstly, they are, to some degree, a label. The Popical Island #1 compilation (which is still around on Bandcamp) put a whole bunch of excellent Irish ‘bockety pop’ bands and bedroom projects in the same place and gave it to people in a form that made them take it seriously. It’s amazingly endearing, catchy and great as a collection. Stream it at least if you haven’t heard it. It opens with So Cow literally naming places on the road to Dublin on Exclusive Express Bus Service License Blues, makes Fake Blood by Squarehead available for a thousand potential future girlfriend mixtapes, and introduces a lot of cool music on the way. But it did more than that.

It created a scene. That sounds dramatic, but stuff always sounds dramatic, so let me explain what I mean. These bands existed beforehand, it’s not like they formed just so Popical Island could exist. But they were ‘Thumped bands’ or part of different vague alignments (in my mind at least) – Hefty Horse or whoever. What Popical Island did was to draw a Venn Diagram around indie pop in Dublin and the places that contribute to its scene. Where before, Dublin had indie pop bands, now it has a scene. And that has a home now, too.

I missed Popicalia 1, the first Popical Island club night in Shebeen Chic, but Popicalia 2′s line-up – Hipster Youth, Squarehead and the mighty Grand Pocket Orchestra – was too good to miss. So I shuffled down and got a pint of Harp, as you do. The place is the perfect size – a basement with enough space, but without being cavernous. There’s a distro table with CDs and (naturally) tapes from various affiliated bands, even if they’re not playing, like a hardcore distro or, I suppose, a twee pop one from a place with a slightly stronger tradition. Thumbs up to that, and to the money box concealed within a hardback dictionary. Twee as fuck yo.

Hipster Youth opened in two-piece live format, all crunchy, no-fi beats from a laptop and lapgaze keyboard playing. Despite sinning cardinally and breaking kayfabe by admitting (through a heavily distorted microphone) that they hadn’t practiced in a million years, they carried the lo-fi electronics thing well. Super Fun Hipster Suicide Party’s Twin Peaksy descending melody on the Casio keyboard every suburban house grows organically when the children hit five was an obvious highlight, as was Thursday night which, despite some rust, had enough complexity and belt to work. And then, announced as a Large Mound cover, Gardenhead by Neutral Milk Hotel. Teenage Elders is sold out as a physical release, but you can download it for free if you like, and the guitar lo-fi facet of Aidan Wall’s personality Porn On Vinyl is about to put out a cassette album on his label Long Lost too.

Squarehead came next, marking the third time in less than three weeks that I’ve been to a gig Squarehead played at. Would possibly be retreading to talk about them, but Fake Blood’s still the shit. So good.

But now to the crux of the matter. Grand Pocket Orchestra. Sometimes when you leave a gig, especially with an Irish band you’ve seen before, you get this weird idea that they’ve ‘arrived’ in some un-solid sense. It’s not like they haven’t been good forever – their EPs were brilliant and their album, which eventually came out (on the same day as Fight Like Apes’ second album according to Mary-Kate in UCD’s newspaper) is full of ‘riot pop’ excellence. They were great as a three piece the first time I saw them at HWCH 2007 (seeing as it’s blog birthday week), but now, with Maggie ‘The Social Hand Grenade’ Fagan on drums and Bobby ‘Brain Heat Wave by No Monster Club is finally about to be released this month‘ Aherne on miscellaneous, it seems like they’ve hit the peak of their powers.

How many crowd-surfers do you see at your average indie pop collective club night? Honestly? Well there were upwards of five at this, plus two band members. Mr. Pop-I Ruan’s tweet summarises it well:

@Popical_Island

Trouble deciding the best moment of tonight…the dweeb mosh-pit or barry lennon keeping them in line.

Barry Lennon’s from Richter Collective, by the way. Footnote there.

Anyway, GPO. It was incredible. Frantic as hell, with album songs sitting confidently as equals alongside the early EP songs. There can’t be highlights when it was so intense for the whole thing – Radio, Get Go, Odd Socks, Ballet Shoes, Basketballs, Worms, all genius. Plaintive requests for water from the band were met mostly with blankness from equally thirsty spectators. The floor got wet, people fell over. At the end of the set, evidently with no more songs to play, they got back up and played Get Go again at about 1.4 times the regular speed.

Anyone I talked to afterwards said it was the best Grand Pocket Orchestra gig they’d ever seen. It was definitely the best I’ve ever seen. Out the back afterwards, in the company of a gypsy euphonium player who can’t actually play any further than the third bar of Happy Birthday but tries anyway, people were comparing wounds. I was wringing sweat from my hair (sorry anyone I dog-splashed), others had grapefruitesque swellings on their shins, bruises in various places, desperate thirsts for water, ill-advised internal urges to take their shirts off.

Goes in the top tier of the memory bank, for sure.

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All I know is that you’re perfect right now.

Coney Island’s great for a lot of reasons. It hosts the world famous Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, for example, the site of Takeru Kobayashi’s doubling of the original event record in 2001 and his ignominious fall to Joey Chestnutt is 2007 which ultimately led to his non-participation and bizarre Free Kobi campaign on this year’s July 4th event.

There’s other stuff, too. Candy apples. The “subway crowd”, according to a New Yorker who recommended keeping away. And once a year, for free, the Siren festival, put on by the Village Voice. To give a general idea of how great Siren is historically, here’s some examples of bands who’ve played since 2001.

2001: Guided By Voices, Quasi, Superchunk
2002: Sleater-Kinney, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars
2003: !!!, Modest Mouse, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
2004: The Fiery Furnaces, Blonde Redhead, Mission of Burma
2005: Q and Not U, Spoon, Saul Williams
2006: Tapes ‘n’ Tapes, Scissor Sisters, Art Brut
2007: MIA, Dr. Dog, Black Lips
2008: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Islands, Times New Viking, Broken Social Scene, Beach House, Jaguar Love, Annuals (FOR FREE! Fuck sake.)
2009: Built To Spill, Micachu and the Shapes, Future of the Left.

This year was the tenth anniversary and it was pretty great too.

The first band I got to, having had to rouse a household full of hungover delinquents with nothing but bare willpower and a promise that they’d probably like some of the bands, was Surfer Blood.

Surfer Blood are a band I like an awful lot, but live sound got the better of them, and with unwieldily booming subwoofers hiding the guitar melodies and killing the groove, they were only okay, and probably would have been worse than okay for someone without the melodies burnt into their head already.

Ponytail, or the second half of Ponytail’s set, was next. Ponytail are a preposterous and excellent band, and having never seen them live despite being in Dublin at the time of their visit, I was excited to see what they were going to be like.

They were sparser than I expected, and more punk. Whilst on record it comes off as slightly more composed, in a live setting the irrepressible Molly Siegel seems to be pretty much exclusively a really excitable cheerleader for the band’s naive, complex music. It works pretty well, and a moshpit forms. Molly says things like “golly”. Cos she’s Molly.

Show of the day came from the Pains of Being Pure At Heart, up next. I know they’re divisive, but as the all-knowing life judge and stone-tablet opinion hander-downer, that’s ridiculous. They’re great. Their debut album could not be more full of great indie pop songs, and all it takes is not screwing it up to transform that into a live show.

They didn’t screw it up. They played the hits, and plenty of new songs, and seemed genuinely delighted to be playing Siren. Their enthusiasm was contagious, really, and even if a Pains crowd is never going to do more than dance lightly, it was an enjoyable light dance. Highlight, for me, was Come Saturday, but then that’s always been my favourite song of theirs.

The God of Musicians More Respected Than Good will have to forgive me for this one: instead of going to Ted Leo, I brown-bagged it for a while in the carnival, watching an Italian ice-maker make Italian ices grumpily and generally surveying the point at which the hipster Siren crowd meshed with the “subway crowd” (I’m presuming they don’t have subways in Williamsburg. Right? Am I completely right on that point?)

So this sets up Holy Fuck, with the sun going down and the risk of living a week the colour of a cherry slushie just for the sake of seeing a few indie rock bands waning. Safe hands.

If you’ve never seen or encountered Holy Fuck before, you’re missing out. Listening to them on record is something, but not enough. Much like HEALTH but a bit more amenable to normal people (rather than ridiculous people) dancing, they fashion their conceivably programmable beats from real instruments, some conventional, some silly. The drummer is the driving force, taking whole songs up and down with him as he sees fit. Then there’s a bassist and two sets of keyboard/sample self-facilitating media nodes, one of which features a 20 euro Casio keyboard I still have a home, the default beat from which actually forms the basis for a Holy Fuck song.

On Coney Island at dusk beside the beach and boardwalk surrounded by people looking happy, a rollercoaster and a carnival in the summer, pretty much everything was great, but Lovely Allen, with its swells and forget-your-troubles-esque euphoric moments, was always going to be the high point of the day.

As they finished, I got another beer (in another brown bag) and headed towards the beach, passing a man in a Fermanagh GAA jersey who turned out to be from Queens and was found immediately out of his depth after he walked foolishly into the trap of asking my GAA fundamentalist (and Nordy) companion if he’d watched the World Cup.

He hadn’t. We continued on our path to night beach drinking.

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If you market yourself for blood, how do you come back?

It’s not CBGBs or anything, but there’s no denying I was a small bit excited to see what the Music Hall of Williamsburg actually looked like. Crucible of Alt, sort of thing. It’s not that impressive. Just a Tripod-esque place on a slightly smaller scale. Kind of like seeing the Mona Lisa in real life or something. Not that I’ve seen that. But I have spent some of my life having lots of fun at HEALTH gigs, so, even though the only-doing-free-stuff rule was temporarily broken, I saw them play there.

The first support was a guy called Gold Panda, a sampler squelcher and accelerando enthusiast from (or with a very convincing impression of a person from) England. Some of his songs were fairly uninspired lo-fi electronics, but once he got going, he brought little Wham City leaps of joy into his tracks. His closer exploded with unexpected drum ‘n’ bass rhythms, too, which was a pleasant surprise. Lightly bearded and with his hood up for the whole set even though it was a ridiculous temperature for night time.

Second support were Indian Jewelry, who were more on the nightmare rock end of things. With strobe lights framing their affected four-across-the-stage moves (particularly the stand-up drummer), they seemed to be going for a Happening-type musical event, and it worked sometimes, but seemed a little too pretentious at other times.

But here’s the rub. HEALTH came on, and instantly a space started to clear in front of the stage. First, it was one or two semi-crusties elbowing the people in their immediate vicinity. But then hard beats dropped, and a mosh pit of about twenty to thirty developed. The crowd divided, as they tend to when there’s a mosh pit at a gig by a band made of less than 75% beard, into those who wanted to be on the fringe watching or drinking beer, and those who wanted to slam dance to Death+. I decided I wanted to slam dance.

The politics of the mosh pit are kind of interesting. There’s the guy who is just running into everyone and pushing people. There’s the guy who looks like he’d be moshing the exact same way if he was by himself. There’s the short girl who thinks she’ll be fine, then gets elbowed in the head and knocked over and has to be rescued and escorted back a bit, where she stands proudly and maybe says “whooooooooo”.

The highlight’s a foregone conclusion at a HEALTH gig, really. So Die Slow came, the music pulsated, the crowd bobbed en masse, the strobes made it seem even more like a heart attack, and then it ended and left a mess of breathlessness and riverine sweat trails down t-shirt backs. But an honourable mention to set-closer and newest HEALTH release USA Boys, the non-remix from the Get Color remix album. Slower, more hazey-gazey, but just as intense in its own way.

The encore was about 60 seconds of pointless jamming, but who cares. This is one of the best live bands in the world at the moment.

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This Is The Sound Of No One Giving A Shit

So there I am at 7pm, sitting in front of Double Dagger, from Baltimore, Maryland, asking them who their favourite Wire character is. I have a very limited number of interview moves. More on that soon

Sometimes you build gigs up months in advance, looking at setlists and live videos, listening to early EPs and B-sides, trying to make sure you have your own enjoyment covered from every possible angle. But other times you don’t. Other times you only discover a band exists about 24 hours before they’re due to play, but they sound good, so you go see them play upstairs in Whelans.

When this happened with the Mae Shi, it started a long, fruitful relationship with the band and even wove a new strand in the spider-web of vague ‘types’ of music I spend time finding out about. It happens at things like HWCH and other festivals a lot too. But it’s still great, in the same way that meeting someone new and interesting is great: you can’t anticipate it happening, but when it happens, it just makes sense.

So there was Double Dagger. There’s only three of them, a drummer, a bassist and a singer. It’s actually visually jarring to see a band without a guitarist or at least a keyboardist, like you’re looking at the skeleton of a band, missing the bits that normally make melody or texture. But they don’t need that.

They go with the loud-quiet-loud formula. Nolen Strals, a man who chooses to perform without his very thick prescription glasses most of the time, talks the verses while the bass and drums hang back a little. He literally grabs members of the crowd to tell them things, whilst singing. “The stage is a lie”, he says at one point, in the kind of weary way you’d say it if you’d been saying it for a decade and no-one had believed you yet. Then a pedal is stepped on and the bass becomes what three guitars are for Built To Spill. Or maybe not.

They make lots of noise, but there is never a note wasted, because there can’t be. One guy (Bruce Willen) is responsible for all of the music except drums at any given time, and because Strals might not even be singing a melody at any given time, this means everything follows him. It’s the power-trio thing taken to the next level. It could fuck up badly, but it doesn’t.

The songs are imperatives to do stuff, all about wasted time, boredom, death and repetition. They work. Not many people saw Double Dagger in Dublin, but if everyone who did kicked everyone except the bassist, drummer and singer out of their band, we might have the start of something a bit weird, at least.

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Guess who was filming it.

(honorary mention to Guilty Optics, who were pretty good too)

Last While Omnibus: Ex-magician, still knows the tricks.

Another thing I went to in The Last While was Pavement, predictably enough. I would have been to see LCD Soundsystem too, but Iceland’s greatest PR disaster since the slave trade back in Viking rumspringa days managed to passive smoke that out of existence. I’m kind of glad I left it a while to write about it too, because the general consensus in my vicinity was something between “OMFG” and “that was, without a doubt, the greatest gig I have ever seen”. It wasn’t the greatest gig I have ever seen.

It was obviously brilliant though. It’s Pavement. 99% of bands in existence could play the most flowing, energetic, perfect gig possible and still not come close to Pavement because they’re not painting with a palette that has Grounded and Trigger Cut on it.

They walked out. Everyone looks pretty much delighted except for Malkmus, who is dressed as a teenager and looks about as excited as the kid who has discovered Nirvana but still managed to get hoodwinked into playing guitar for the school choir. But that’s fine. That’s what he’s always looked like. It’s not like he wrote literally 100% of the band’s good songs or anything. Not like it should be his victory lap.

Things ranged from fun to coronary-inducingly brilliant, with my particular favourites being Summer Babe and Grounded. Sometimes they weren’t that tight, but if they were tight, they wouldn’t be Pavement. Sometimes they played songs that were just Bob Nastanovich shouting, but if they didn’t do that, they wouldn’t Pavement.

They picked the right amount of time to stay away, they came back, and by the looks of Malkmus (who does a good impression of a sloppy guitar player even after ten years in which he was publicly doing proper musicianliness with the Jicks) they probably won’t be doing more music. The Pixies method. If I could see them again before they slumped to the Grey Havens, I’d be delighted.

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I will become outrageous.

Some degree of suspension of disbelief is pretty much compulsory when you go to see Xiu Xiu. You will stand there as Jamie Stewart and band, which in this iteration is just Angela Seo, set up equipment, look confused, tweak knobs and ask the soundman in polite California English whether the monitors are turned on. After a few minutes, there’ll be a thumbs up to the soundman.

And then the curtains raise. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Stewart goes from 0 to something approaching Noh theatre in about 3 seconds flat. With the self-confidence of someone who’s been declaiming self-loathing over alternating pop, noise and silence for about a decade, he opens with the quietest song imaginable, plucking sparse chords and whispering with a violently pained expression on his brow.

Whelans drops to silence. You can hear Kasabian or Primal Scream or whatever, drifting in ambiently from the front bar. Stewart is impervious. Audience obedience and rapt attention established ab initio, it just means that when the noise does come (and the noise will always come), it’s going to wreak that much more damage.

This happens with Gray Death, the opener and first single off Dear God I Hate Myself. It’s hard to describe the absolute presence of Xiu Xiu live – I can say they’re intense, they’re heavy on a gravity’s pull type level, they’re absolutely earnest, but it doesn’t conjure up what it’s actually like.

Listening to my new favourite lines in the Xiu Xiu canon, “If you’re expecting consolation, I will become outrageous/If you expect me to be outrageous, I will be extra-outrageous”, I thought of two things. One, this is a different type of outrage to Ashley Cole’s pants and Iris Robinson’s Calvinist satan incarnate. It’s an obsolete concept, but a lot of Xiu Xiu’s appeal is in what is DOES, beyond thought, in the hackles it raises once you’ve submitted to the desolate self-pity. Two, I tried to think of what various friends would think if they were there. Would they be as bowled over by the sheer weight of the thing, or would they just think he was being ridiculous?

Right after Gray Death came the title track of the album. If those friends weren’t able to take Gray Death, they definitely wouldn’t manage Dear God I Hate Myself, the lines of the chorus elongated to differentiate them from the recorded version as if to say “I am not just singing this, I am saying it”. It actually approaches being hard to watch at times, but if it’s not cathartic for Stewart, it’s cathartic to watch.

Without Caralee McElroy (who left to play in Cold Cave), Ches Smith and Devin Hoff (who are possibly just not on this tour), a set of only new material wouldn’t have been that surprising, but lo, there was Boy Soprano. And there, absolutely rampant in its noisy new incarnation, was the closest thing Xiu Xiu have to a hit, I Luv The Valley OH!

Complete with its scream “OH!”

Couldn’t really ask for more, except for maybe an encore. Jamie doesn’t seem to do encores though. His wave goodbye seemed enthusiastic, grateful and extremely spazzy, but when he and Angela did eventually re-emerge, it was to plug shit out.

Still, this is something properly unique, still in its prime. So no complaints here.

Here is Angela Seo making herself sick to the strains of Dear God I Hate Myself. It was taken off YouTube (scroll down, February 6th).

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Give me a visual on the Loch Ness

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you feel like you have to qualify the fact that you like a band, but not THAT much? I hate having to do it, because liking music should be a positive, expressive thing rather than a quantitative, subtracting thing. But it does happen. It happened to my friends when I started getting stupidly into Wolf Parade, or Of Montreal, or whoever.

And it happens to me with the Unicorns. Because I have two friends who still post on a Unicorns forum. The Unicorns split up in 2004 and they only had one album, but whether it’s because of sample bias or something else, they seem to inspire some fervent love. I never felt that. I liked them, and I liked their demo album too in the same way that I would come to like the lo-fi pop that dominates the last year of posts here. But I wouldn’t charge through No Man’s Land to defend their honour. And I don’t like Islands very much at all, or at least not their second album.

That’s all left me feeling weird, because I got quite into the Clues album, and after this gig, I think I’m actually starting to develop that fervent attachment. I think I like Clues more than I ever liked the Unicorns. It’s not love, but it’s more than like. It’s like like (cf “rape rape” in Goldberg, 2009). Am I nuts? Am I the only one?

I showed up too late to see the Ambience Affair, in what is an ongoing, sitcom-style series of failures to watch them in a bar venue despite the fact that they play all the time and even support bands I’m going to anyway. Don’t give the dinner to the dog, guys, I will get there eventually.

Caught sight of Alden Penner, former Unicorn and lead Clue. It’s always weird to see the mythologised people in the flesh, but this was a particularly weird one. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that the former indie/baroque/toy pop tag team champion of the world would look both very young and very nerdy. But he was. In glasses, he was a Saved By The Bell geek. He took them off to perform though.

As with most bands on their first album, Clues pretty much just stuck to the script of the freshman effort. But how did it get so good? What’s there, that’s not on the already great record? I don’t know. Two drummers, maybe? Charisma? Volume?

Invocatory chords. “OUTWARD REACHING… EXPECTING HANDS!” and then a gap of about thirty seconds. Repeat a few times with different clarion calls, then drop into the languid riff. Toss around some chords for a minute. Then step into it. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

I’m talking shit. That’s Haarp, by the way, if you want to follow along at home. What else? Whole album, basically, like I said. If Haarp was first, what was last? Former Arcade Fire drummer Brendan Reed, standing up behind his drum kit and plaintively singing You Have My Eyes now with an outstretched open hand.

If You Have My Eyes now was last, what was best? Cave Mouth. 2009 is probably my favourite year of music in the history of art for art’s sake, but even if I have to dump out something by BATS or Lovvers or Grizzly Bear, I’m confident enough to say that Cave Mouth’s one of the ten best songs of the year. Made of indie pop not industrial steel, but fashioned out of the same massiveness as Die Slow, it’s a force.

I bought an album as well, and got it signed by Alden, who responded to my general awkwardness (still here after a couple of year, probably not going to go away) by just being the nicest and most conversational dude going. And I heard by the grapevine that Alden and Nick Thorburn (ex-Unicorns and guy who moans about bands in the blogosphere, now Islands) had been discussing sometime Those Geese public abuser Bobby’s interview and the micro-controversy about the video that it stirred up. That’s kind of cool, isn’t it? Like those scenes in the Odyssey or the Aeneid where it cuts to the gods having a debate.

Hard to find fault with this. Have to give two plusses.

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If the words are incidental, then why’s what you write so mental?

Photo by Loreana Rushe @ myleftventricle.wordpress.com

There are only so many times you can beat a drum before it just turns into background noise. Nonetheless, this is as good a time as any to say (for the millionth time, possibly) that So Cow is potentially better than sliced bread, that he would be number one in my version of Jim Carroll/Nialler9/Hardcore For Nerds‘ list of best Irish bands right now, and that going to see a So Cow gig is always a great thing to do.