Albummm Revuuue: Sweet Apple: Love & Desperation

Oh dear. We’re not sure how we feel about the cover art to Sweet Apple’s Love & Desperation - we get it’s referencing of Roxy Music’s Country Life, but seriously? The whole thing screams of cheapness and that poor brunette looks more than a little malnourished. We might even have to start rubbing a Sayers cheese pasty on her sleeve notes in the hope that we might achieve some voodoo act of getting meat on her bones from afar.

Oh well.

Anyway, the album, which could probably be renamed ‘When I Get Sad, I Get Rad’, see’s John Petkovic working through a multitude of personal tragedies and anguish with fellow Cobra Verde bandmate Tim Parnin, and Dinosaur Jr.’s Jay Mascis.

Conceived from an aimless and dejected cross country drive following the death of Petkovic’s mother, Love & Desperation bears all the classic hallmarks of anthemic motor rock collections. The kind of stuff that spirited middle aged men everywhere blast out of their pride and joy on four wheels on hot summer days. It’s an engine chugger alright, but it’s a little easy listening. A little arena rock. A little half arsed and little else.

It’s strong points lie in it’s emotional density, and it’s ability to take a particularly heavy lyric and offset it against an upbeat and resolute riff of defiance.

For the most part though, it doesn’t stand out in a crowd. It has the potential to be amazing - but instead it sounds somewhat half finished, with a guitar sound that at times resembles something that you might have heard on a copy of Wayne’s World for the Megadrive.

There are a couple of diamonds in the rough. Kind of. Hold Me, I’m Dying is pretty fucking catchy, and contains the instantly relatable lyric, ‘we’re dying/ So let’s fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck till we die’, and Dead Moon has a dreamy cadence to it which is refreshing amongst all the chug-chuggery of the more cock rock elements of the album.

But then songs like Do You Remember and Flying Up A Mountain sound a bit like Jack White has thrown all the songwriting scraps from his own supergroup projects and left Sweet Apple scrabbling about for them, furiously trying to construct something worth high fiving over later. The end result is stagnant and uninspiring, covering well tread - if not distinctly OVER-tread - ground, and is unfortunately forgettable.

In short, Love & Desperation is so sadly disappointing that I might have to do a cry, wipe my tears away with my Dinosaur Jr. tee and scream ‘MASSSCIIIISSS, NO!’ at the top of my lungs in a psychotic bundle of upset in an unmoving car somewhere.

Heartbreaking. Truly.

Love & Desperation is released on April 19th.

Sweet Apple on Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/sweetapplesongs

Live review: Japandroids @ Korova w/ Apple Cannon, Cold Ones, and We Come Out Like Tigers, 27.02.10

Oh, Apple Cannon. Let it be known that the lingering lethargy from Friday night boozing, and the onslaught of groggy head that attacks following the ill-advised late afternoon pints are blasted the fuck out of the evening by your storm of deliciously loud skin peeling thunder rock.

The red and green clad duo (drummer and guitarist, both sharing bombastic throaty vocal duties - what more do bands need these days?) are like a mental hygiene program, providing a sonic boom of Kyuss-esque brain cleansing doom.

From the palatably basic but feverishly fine riff-attacks of ‘Oh YEAH’ to the divinely catchy stoner-metal of ‘Lightning Mask’, it’s suffice to say that we’re well awake. Wide eyed. Buzzing. Jittering. Over-stimulated. This must be how Lindsay Lohan feels at 4am on a Wednesday morning.

Get the bevvs in lad! I’m good to go! I’m all over it!

Cold Ones too, don’t disappoint. The sound quality’s a bit iffy, to say the least with frontman Russell, high-voltage loud and energetic as he might be, not able to contend with the sheer noise of his bandmates performance. In fact it’s doubtful his microphone’s even on at some points. But fuck it, it’s hard to give a shit when a band can grant an after-song applause made up of high-fives all round like CO could.

High energy old-school hardcore punk. We never thought we’d see the like ever play in Korova - used to be that the hardcore scene were shuffled away to play gigs out of wheelie bins and death trap basements on the outskirts of the city centre, like the Oscar The Grouch of the music scene. We’ve come a long way, you guys.

Frontman Russell, donning a kamikaze bandana and laughing out between song banter that is at times delectably cringe-worthy, is an uproarious, blur of refreshing psychosis. The entirety of the stage area, including the totally unstable ceiling, all become his own private play pen. In a brave salute to Ian MacKaye, he threads the microphone through the rafters of the ceiling before hanging off it by his knees and continuing the lyrical howlings’ that command your complete attention at all times.

It’s nerve racking stuff, that. We once saw a fly stumble onto one of those rafters only to bring half the fucking ceiling down. Luckily, the CO frontman dives off unscathed. Whew. CO are everything you could want from hardcore punk. Loud, fast, pummeling, raw. They’re unyielding and fun - that’s right FUN. I can’t remember the last time that adjective was applied to the local music scene, but there you go. True Story, yo.

We Came Out Like Tigers are less so. In fact they’re a bit of a downer. We suddenly feel like Lindsay Lohan at 7am on a Wednesday morning when all the nose sugar has left the blood, and you’re left wondering what the fuck happened to your life, lovers, career and evening. Boo-fucking-hooooo!

Make no mistake, they’re an alright band - at least technically - but they just don’t seem to work within the context of the gig. Their arrival onstage, particularly having followed Apple Cannon and Cold Ones, is kinda like walking straight from a party at it’s peak to a interview with the Dole, wherein you’re somehow serendipitously stuck sitting between two of your ex-lovers who winge at you for a whole half hour before being berated by pen pushers for being a total fucking sponge.

Nightmare.

The inclusion of a violin adds a nice level of melancholic, insistent drama to their set, and their opening song does have a tidy piece of spoken word in it, which is incredibly interesting, but a great many of their songs also tend to blur into the last one.

But then Japandroids take to the stage. And sweet child of mine, they are exactly the dreamy, scuzzy, riff-sultry heart grabbers that the hype machine warned us they’d be. Maybe even better than that.

‘Hi, I’m Brian, that’s David’ smiles guitarist / vocalist Brian pointing excitedly at his drummer, ‘we’re Japandroids from British Columbia Canada, and this is the last night of our European tour, so let’s get fucking wild’.

And wild they get. Feral, to be accurate. Kicking into The Boys Are Leaving Town - a catchy, upbeat number which builds up from it’s repetitive and gorgeously simplistic verses into it’s intensely epic chorus of ‘Will we find our way back home?’!.

The drums throughout the set are blindingly AMAZING. They punch through the flesh, the mind, the heart - they make the cans of Red Stripe in the hands of audience members foam up with vibrancy. Both of them are translucent in their energy - sparkling. Lithe limbed and discordantly sexy. You can’t take your eyes off them for a second.

Lo-fi anthemic, their minimalist brand of college rock is too infectious for words. Rockers East Vancouver, is performed with a rawness and exuberance that long outdoes it’s original recording, declaring lyrics loud and with a visceral permanence that’ll secure it’s place in the mind for days later. Wet Hair too, with it’s repeated lyrics of ‘She had wet hair/ say what you will/ I don’t care/ couldn’t resist it’, is just so insanely catchy and uproarious, that it’s impossible not to grin wide and beaming along to it. And sweet Christ, that drum roll at the end of the song nearly brings on a coronary. Sublime.

The audience is going ape-shit too. There’s at least more than a dozen people scattered around the place screaming hungrily along with every word - even along with the more obscure songs from the bands’ collection of older material.

The set is sadly blighted by a few technical difficulties. But as proved early on in the evening by Cold Ones, it really doesn’t much matter about tech issues so long as the set is attacked with vigour and exultance.

Except they do stop to fix it up.

They stop and stop and stop.The break seems to last a lifetime. Just when they seem to have it together, something else happens and the tech guy returns nervously tinkering with buttons while Dave sips water cooly on the drums and stares grinning at the audience, totally amused.

‘This is just like those buddy movies, you know, where like the cop is one day away from retirement and he suddenly get’s killed - this is kinda like the musical equivalent.’ he laughs.

Brian tries a thrum of a guitar riff. Something’s still fucking up. Dave continues, ‘We were so close! So close!’

But they get it together in the end, Lethal Weapon style, and storm the fuck on.

I Quit Girls, provides a melancholic change in tone and pace that is blissful, and more than a little spine chilling. All goose-pimpled downbeat, with their trademark lyrical repetition that wrings each word out dry, and cutting, but never drops it’s energy. ‘She was just one of those girls...After her, I quit girls’. Ouch.

The set seems to last an age. At times it becomes a trance like repetition of the tranquil, anti-tranquil, sublime and the rad. And yet it still seems to end too soon. You feel like screaming at the top of your lungs, Can We Keep Em?! Oh, Please! I Promise To Take Good Care Of Em! at the promoters. But instead they leave. Back to British Columbia Canada, and the audience looks so stoked from the experience that they may never sleep again. Lohan style.

Japandroids Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/japandroids

Japandroids official site: http://japandroids.com/

Apple Cannon Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/deathbyappleseed

Cold Ones Official Site: http://www.coldones.co.uk/

We Came Out Like Tigers Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/wecameoutliketigers

Interview with Dirtblonde

The term ‘cool’ has been expressively and adoringly chiseled into the marrow of Dirtblondes’ body of rock’n’bone over the many years of their loud, gnarly, scuzz shattering career.

It’s fixated on every review, winking feverishly at hipsters everywhere with the stamp of approval that Dirtblonde are an official rock’n’roll dream. The real deal. Jagger. Iggy. Leather. Snarling.

So when I ask them about what a typical Dirtblonde day entails, their response is refreshingly uncool by the standards of modern rock’n’roll cliche.

‘A day in the life of Dirtblonde?’ Ivan begins, laughing, ‘would probably be a boring one. For me at least it’d involve listening to jazz and stroking my cat’.

Lula smiles in agreement, she’s wearing a Twilight t-shirt which again is totally anti-cool by the provisos of being in a shit-hot band. To those of us who harbor deeply secret Edward Cullen fantasies, the move is cool-as-fuck. Most of us have to hide our collection of Twilight paraphernalia under the bed next to the porn.

‘There’s nothing worse,’ Ivan elaborates, ‘than people trying too hard to be rock’n’roll all the time. Save rock’n’roll for onstage - you don’t have to be like that all the time. I mean, Iggy Pop plays golf and Mick Jagger’s always been pretty mellow’.

They go on to say how they don’t really listen to the sort of loud music you’d imagine of them at home. Instead they prefer a bit of John Coltrane, Moondog, Dusty Springfield or a spot of Cat Power whilst cooking.

Liverpool’s a weird city. Maybe the epidemic is nationwide, but the trend for creating impenetrable cliques and scenes within the local gig market is one Liverpool finds itself foul to year in, year out. Dirtblonde, it seems, are very much the outsiders in this arrangement. It almost seems that they’re more appreciated outside of their home city, than they are in it.

‘It’s not contrived. I mean, we’re not trying to be outsiders, we just don’t belong to any scene.’ Lula shrugs, ‘I think every city must be like this - it’s pretty competitive’.

‘It’s frustrating’ Ivan continues, ‘I don’t know what it is, maybe because we’re influenced by more American music like Sonic Youth or The Stooges. We’re not really influenced, I don’t think, by the same stuff as the rest of the bands in the city’.

So what do they think of the Liverpool music scene at the moment then?

‘There’s a lot of different scenes around - I mean you’ve got the retro Zanzibar lot, and then you’ve Class A audio, and Pete Bentham’s free rock’n’roll stuff...and then you’ve got a lot of the-’ Ivan winces trying to think of a polite way to proceed, ‘-shitty local bands. Uninspiring.’

Lula adds ‘But there’s a lot of great music in the city. We’re both loving the Anti-pop label - The Dead Class, The Temps, The Fraktures. The Long Finger Bandits are great too, and Pete Bentham And The Dinner Ladies’.

They love, they say, bands with a lot of energy - it’s something they always come back to, a quality which is incredibly evident in their own guttural, brazen-kinesis of a live show. They cite performances by The Dead Weather and My Bloody Valentine as the most notable gigs they’ve been to over the years.

Lula explains, ‘It’s easy to be cynical about The Dead Weather because they’re a supergroup and Alison Mosshart is a bit of a poser or whatever. But they were just so raw and had such a good time - they weren’t trying to prove anything. Alison Mosshart was just so unbridled and getting in everyone’s face. It was so exciting’

Whilst Ivan - a man with possibly the loudest guitar sound Purple Revolver has heard in recent years - thinks back dreamily to the My Bloody Valentine gig

‘It was just how loud it was. You could feel it in your body - the physical nature of the sound! Such energy, again’.

Dirtblonde are a band also notable for their experimentations with mixing spoken word pieces with rock’n’roll. Lula herself had a book of poetry published last year - At 3 o’clock I Think Of Sex And Death - and also co-ran Heartbeats, a rock’n’roll poetry night which has sadly escaped Liverpool’s clutches and moved down to London.

‘It’s always on the cards that I might bring it back on here’, Lula grins, ‘but I never set out to be a poetry promoter. I don’t want to be in charge of starting a poetry group or anything like that. Heartbeats was just fun - we wanted people to develop their performance, and get confidence about their work and move it out of their bedrooms and share it with people. We heard a lot of amazing work at those nights’.

We end with the token Smash Hits hypothetical question. Dirtblonde are at a party. It’s lame as fuck. They’re falling asleep. They open one last beer when Lo And Behold! A bloody genie pops out! He says he’ll grant them the presence of any 5 people of their choosing to arrive at the party and save the night, who do they pick?

Their eyes light up.

‘We have this discussion all the time!’ Ivan beams, laughing.

‘God, we do seriously discuss this all the time, and now that you’ve asked us I can’t think of anyone’, Lula adds grinning and spooling her mind through past ‘dream dinner party’ discussions.

‘Kevin Spacey!’ Ivan shouts out, ‘Oh! And Stephen Fry. And Jeff Goldblum! And Paul Rudd too. We have to have Paul Rudd’.

‘So I guess there’ll be no women, then?’ Lula interjects, laughing.

‘No, no - what about that comedian? Janeane Garofalo? She’d definately be coming to the party’,

‘And the Cheerleading coach from Glee - Jane Lynch. Her too. Definately’.

So what have Dirtblonde got in store for the future?

‘We’re gonna re-record and do a music video for our song Brooklyn. We’re gonna film it in the Laundromat on Aigburth Road’ They smile at each other in excitement. ‘It should be cool. Laundry rock’n’roll...’

Sounds awesome. We’re sure it’s going to be anti-cool, cool as Dirt.

Dirtblonde words: http://dirtblonde.wordpress.com/

Dirtblonde music: http://www.last.fm/music/Dirtblonde

Dirtblonde photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8861519@N03/

At 3 o’clock I Think Of Sex And Death by Lisa Jones (AKA Lula) is available to buy online here:

http://spikepublishing.wordpress.com/buy/ and is also available from Probe Records and News From Nowhere.

live review: Dirtblonde @ Hurdy Gurdy, Badformat, 19.02.10

Oh Hurdy Gurdy, file this one in the ‘Lesson Learnt’ drawer and move on. Essentially - if a gig night has taken less than a fortnight to put together, you can pretty much expect it to be a bit of a tits-up, lackluster FAIL.

Hurdy Gurdy at Badformat is tonight reminiscent of those early teenage gig nights that used to go down in Heaven’N’Hell (remember that joint?!) and The Zanzibar absolute beards ago in which the audience was only made up of the bands and their mates. You know, where there’s about five people going ape-shit-with-restraint before some Ramones-rip-off band onstage, and about forty people ambling round the bar high-fiving the bloke they sit next to in sixth-form history for his totally slick guitar skills.

It’s Friday night. Badformat has no phone signal and is as far away from the part of town where all your mates are as is humanly possible in the city centre. This is the gig equivalent of the arctic circle, or a Twilight Zone episode in which apathetic, mean spirited music journo’s are locked in the same gig for eternity until they can learn to just be NICE.

In keeping with this spirit allow us to politely skip through the evenings events, briefly mentioning the total lack of atmosphere and the fact that most people are either huddled round the bar or sitting off on couches around the permitter away from the stage area (unless of course their mates band’s playing), and jump straight to the point where the awesomeness that is Dirtblonde takes to the stage.

Sadly for the cool as fuck, rock’n’noise duo, the performance feels like one of those mid-90’s music videos in which a cool as fuck, rock’n’noise band tear up the stage to a frankly unreponsive, oddly assembled audience (watch Zero by The Smashing Pumpkins or anything from The Dandy Warhols).

Dirtblonde don’t let this stop them though. Having draped the unused drum kit with red LED lights and their mic stands with bright, twinkling scores of bulbs they burst into a sublime racket of gorgeously low register, apathetic vocals and roaring, throaty, louder than apocalypse guitar. Backed only by their trusty drum machine (never underestimate the power of a Boss Dr-670), they’re downright dirt-o-matic, scuzz lusty perfection.

‘This one’s about being an obsessive fan of someone’ Lula announces before they break into Superfan - a riot act of want that sees Ivan dropping to his knees for it’s finale, screeching his fingers across fret boards causing an ungodly, visceral disturbance. He’s bowed upon the floor for the act, as though in begging before a shrine.

There’s a cheeky nod to Patti Smith too, with His Name - a Gloria-esque spoken word, locomotive dreamscape of tersely built up raw pleading rhythm which is sumptuous for Lula’s honeyed delivery and Ivan’s chug-chugging accompaniment.

‘Here’s a slow one for those of you who don’t like too much noise...’ Ivan grumbles into the mic, probably at the scores of lifeless people by the bar shouting over his pneumatic guitar sound, no doubt wishing they were sat in the quiet of The Everyman Bistro eating quiche and discussing the misanthropic merits of silent discos.

They kick into Brooklyn, a plummeting, lost-soul of a song that pines and longs and hammers on with an underscore of melancholy juxtaposed by a determined, swinging fist of a riff that never quite makes the punch, but is opulent in it’s doomsy ongoing threat.

Their finale is as blissfully destructive as they’re notorious for. A Rock’n’fuck-it kick of the bucket that descends from sexy, heavenly moans to a riff-babel infestation of discordant destruction. Lula hangs her head like an unused puppet and bashes bass with an amorous determination for decorum whilst Ivan swings his guitar about the place like Leatherface with his chainsaw, before attacking the LED lights draped around the drum kit. He pulls them off and around him, becoming entangled like Mowgli fighting a neon snake before falling to the floor and writhing about in a onslaught of pure, precious din.

The set is over.
A smattering of half-arsed applause spills out, and a couple of yelps that sound more like the faulty mechanisms of a flare gun than a verbal accolade. It feels like Dirtblonde may as well have been playing in Sayers for all the good it did them, but then that’s Liverpool for you.

But sod it. Dirtblonde - Purple Revolver salutes you. Come round and fuck our office up anytime you want - you’ll probably get more of a crowd, too.


Dirtblonde words: http://dirtblonde.wordpress.com/
Dirtblonde music: http://www.last.fm/music/Dirtblonde
Dirtblonde photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8861519@N03/

Live review: Los Campesinos @ O2 Academy 12.02.10

Last time we saw Los Campesinos live, there was a great deal of buzz surrounding their now anthemic boogie-tasm tune You! Me! Dancing! and the audience was made up of Skins-lite teenagers hepped up on Lambrini and White Lightening determined to make us feel older than we needed to and too intimidated to dance.

Within the space of a couple of years, Los Campesinos - and their audience too, it would seem - have matured into quite the collective of intelligent smile pushing indie-pop masters. Gone is the Lambrini and the White Lightening. In it’s place is a band rider full of organic food and herbal tea.

Except there’s been a terrible mix-up - Tinchy Strider is playing the main room at the O2 Academy tonight just downstairs, and him and his ‘crew’ have somehow wound up with the Campesinos rider.

Los Campesinos vocalist Gareth bemoans in a barely decipherable low mumbling drone the fact that a member of Tinchy Striders crew have pissed in his pack of special herbal tea. ‘I like to drink it before I go onstage...you know, cause I’m trying to be like a good vocalist these days and so, yeah, no herbal tea for me’, he winces mockingly like the kid in school who’s had his Kit-Kat chunky had out of his lunch box and is trying hard not to cry about it.

Aaw. And so begins the loveliness that is a Los Campesinos live show - abound with raw teenage angst, some fantastically well written self-deprecating lyrics and walls of irresistible pop-noise that the crowd bops and bounds about to throughout.

The audience is fanatical, singing / screaming along with every song, their fists passionately pounding the air. Their fans believe in Los Campesinos, obsessively, irrevocably, and it’s easy to see why.

When ‘Straight In At 101’ is played, the lyrics are vastly anthemic (‘We need more post-coitus and less post rock’), and it’s impossible not to smile along, particularly when it’s sublimely Philip Larkin-esque ending finally hits, seeing Gareth prosaically pronouncing how his heartache wasn’t featured on the 100 most heart-wrenching break ups of all time over the top of some simple, thrumming guitar. (‘Imagine the great sense of waste/ the indignity/ the embarrassment/ when not a single one of them was mine’). Amazing.

They play a number of songs off latest album Romance Is Boring, and their sound is veering deliciously close to Hefner territory these days, particularly on tracks Who Fell Asleep In and new single Romance Is Boring, in which lyrics are performed with the vocal equivalent of an eye rolling at unachievable love affairs and doomed, lackluster coupledom.

The septet do struggle somewhat with sound quality though (what’s going on with sound engineers lately?) - which sees some of the best lyrics totally drowned out by an inconceivably loud bass. The audience is so plentiful and crammed into the auditorium that you can barely see the stage, and so it isn’t until about 5 songs into the set that you realise Oh Yeah, There’s A Violinist Playing With Them Too, which is a real shame since when the violin can actually be heard it adds a resonating sad face and spiraling intensity to songs.

You! Me! Dancing! of course makes a bat-shit excited appearance towards the end of the set, announcing itself with a teasing foreplay of rattling, scuzzy, noise - the crowd baiting hungrily for it’s blood by clapping uproariously along before breaking out into a mass jive of intensely joyous arse-shaking and limb convulsing when the opening riff finally kicks in.

They end with an endearing amount of humility, thanking the crowd again and again for coming to see them - ‘This is the second best thing we could be doing, and we’re so happy to be able to do it. None of us are any good at football to be doing the first best’, Gareth beams appreciatively before the band slam into Sweet Dreams, Sweet Dreams, seeing the Campesinos frontman jumping straight into the front of the crowd to hive five and love.

An everlasting queue forms at the merch table following the show, with Gareth stood at the side thanking and hugging each individual person for attending, and signing vinyls and cd’s happily. It’s a rare and lovely thing to witness, especially since the fans are so truly grateful to meet him and thank him for a show they’re ear to ear grinning over.

Somewhere downstairs, Tinchy Strider and his mates are probably flinging out piss soaked ginseng and blackcurrent tea bags as souvenirs to the red eyed masses gathering by the stage door to meet him.

Gutted. Luckily for Los Campesinos, the bereft aid of a couple of herbal tea bags did nothing to sully what was a perfect Friday night performance. Piss in all the boxes of tea you want, Strider, but you wont stop Los Campesinos from pissing all over your live show. And that is fucking science FACT.

Los Campesinos Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/loscampesinos

Los Campesinos Lastfm: http://www.last.fm/music/Los%2520Campesinos!?ac=los%20campe

Buy Romance Is Boring: http://tinyurl.com/ygekguo

The Ex & Brass Unbound, Stig Noise MMX and Zun Zun Egui live @ The Kazimier, Liverpool

Stig Noise MMX frontman Jacob is pacing about excitedly before yelping out at the already buzzing crowd ‘I can’t remember the last time The Ex played England, nevermind Liverpool’, he grins a wide coat-hanger grin which is mirrored back by the hollering, fervent crowd who’ve hungrily gathered in The Kazimier for the monumental occasion.

The set erupts into the finely tuned discordance for which Stig are consistently celebrated for. A melodic anarchy of brass, throaty lyricism, and killer onslaughts of bass, drum and guitar that never once veer far from perfection.

Each song is decadence - an irresistible array of limb twitching, unpredictable and mediated psychosis punctuated by the occasional spoken word vocal, dual drum finale and sumptuous tentative build ups of pace and noise that explode into a fever of hot tempered noise.

If this is the foreplay, you think to yourself, then fuck-help me when the main flesh scabblers finally arrive to headline later.

Second act, Zun Zun Egui are a little less exciting. Initially, they’re fucking outstanding - an audacious blend of the tropical, the tribal, experimental and downright doomsy. They begin songs down one path and without warning divert, screeching and attentively, down another totally subverting their own sound and the crowds expectations of it. But the formula wears a little thin and samey three songs into the set, and what was fresh and exciting to begin with becomes commonplace and predictable.

The frontman is charming and enthusiastic enough, shimmying, grinding and thrashing himself about the stage and the audience with enough energy to bring on an early Springtime, but his fellow bassist looks more than a little pissed off throughout the entire set, huffing and puffing after each song with the brattish expression of a young boy who missed his afternoon nap and didn’t get a biscuit with his glass of milk that evening.

But still, their sound is exactly what the audience is craving - the beats are heavy and the bustling bodies are busting out spazz-o-matic moves sponsered by Give A Shit How Stupid This Looks, I Gotsta Dance!

And then ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod - an entire ETERNITY passes before The Ex & Brass Unbound take to the stage, tune up, plug in and begin what is without a doubt one of the best live shows The Kazimier, and even possibly Liverpool, has ever witnessed.

That’s no exaggeration either. It’s so good that the vocabulary hasn’t been invented yet with which to do a review of them justice.

Featuring a line up of eight members (including 5 on brass), the post-punk no-wave legends are remarkable from the get-go. A flawless and dissonantly brooding performance off-set with shimmers of the jaunty and the relentlessly jazzy. Sweet Christ is it good. The vibe in the entire theatre is electric - the room awash with uncontrollable sweeping movement and spacious unbelieving smiles that will leave faces aching for hours afterwards.

Songs span intricately and incessantly, managing to explore songs within songs - the whole band looks ecstatic, and when you consider that this is a band that’s been around for about 30 years now, is a comforting and heart-warming thing to witness.

Their set develops an extensive range of genres, all played with a forcefulness that makes you bite your lip with such rapture that you might require stitches afterwards. Songs begin on triumphant, opulent levels and descend into a cacophony of debauched, poetic spewed noise.

A version of Hungarian folksong Hidegen Fujnak A Szelek is a perfect example of all this - seeing drummer Katherina Bornefeld take to the vocals, cow bell in hand, and create a sublime din of re-worked, idiosyncratic genius. A song which is by equal turns jubilant and disquiet at once.

Onstage camaraderie is big, the band beam at each other and are playful with the performance, hitting drum machine sampler buttons with guitar heads in sync, taking the piss out of the member of the brass band who dares climb up onto the above stage stage of the Kazimier to belt out a plunger muffled power bleat and at the some of the dancing going on in the crowd before them.

The band thankfully return for two encores - the highly desperate ear splitting screaming that follows their absenting of the stage leaves them with little choice - of unpredictable dance heavy joy. They end with a brass off which sees two of the brass band trying to tunefully outdo each other before crumbling into a myriad of onstage giggles.

Awesome - awesome - awesome. There just aren’t the words or the online space available to fully credit the gig with the praise it needs.

Put it this way, if you missed this gig you’re an absolute bloody fool. Simple as.

Once A Month

Like super sized

like club

sandwich

double layered

self

four eyes split brained

fork devil tongue

scooping

nasty

out at people

like waking up

half hanging

out of your own mouth

and swollen, gory

being too big to fit

back in

a panic of being seen

like zoo limbs

like cages

every flesh beneath transparent

matters

cavities

it seems to the eye

but like rock like elephants

balancing for circus

on every motion

even words

which are featherweight

with liqueur

laurels on other peoples shoulders

and bouldering

unshifting

days later

apologies don’t have the brawn

to shift that

like the World

to be anti-gravity

and weightless

like everyone else

to be moving over and around

you

a litter

a turd

in the street

in the bed

in the inbox

like you

the physicality of brain dead

like sleep memory

like waking

remembering

a man paying you

for bursting his flesh

squeezing him like a pimple

a horror chorus

of slimy dove

a dream a dream thank fuck a dream

you realise upon pillow

exhausted

before the day

is even clothed

like strangled time

like mime

a sign-language synopsis

spat out by the brain

in ill-humored

epithets

that promises to rest

once the body

has spat out the blood

and booed

at you enough

to be finally

done

Ex-Easter Island Head, Wolstenholme Creative Space, 22.01.10

The bizarro brilliant brain-child of that bloke who plays guitar with Balloons - Mr. Ben Duvall - and also featuring the talents of George Maund from Indica Ritual, Ex-Easter Island Head is a totally fucking awesome example of stepping outside the fucking box, pissing all over it, filling it with dogshit, setting fire to it and then leaving the stinking thing on the front porch of Jo-Whiley’s indie boy-band twat factory.

Set up as three de-tuned guitars, all featuring a limited amount of strings, and balanced incongruously atop of three optimistic looking keyboard stands, Ben and George perform an ambient, percussive victory of grumbling, exquisite, exorcised noise accomplished with only a tense amount of extreme concentration and drum mallets hammering against strings and guitar faces.

Simplistic in it’s lack of vocals, the momentum is carried by slow build up’s of rhythm and repetition which chime discordantly like bells announcing a lost hour to a an already lost World. The whole piece is incredibly percussive of time and of hidden dimensions between time - like a momento-mori in which the skull beats against it’s own life-span.

The performance is terse and breathless, it has a delicate, tribal, dystopia to it - at their first gig supporting The Portico Orchestra in The Kazimier, there was an intensity which no-one dared breathe against. One slip of timing or misjudgment of rhythm and the whole piece is fucked. Thankfully, the piece never reaches this point - and instead pummels itself on flawless and mesmeric.

Ex-Easter Island Head are, in fact, the soundtrack of Alice In Wonderland’s clock watching rabbit. Thumping, paw-pound Earth and watch tapping, the chimes of time, purpose and urgency shaking the fur from the brain outwards. None of it makes sense, per se, but follow it like Alice and you’ll be granted a half hours sweet, distracting release from your own tempered existence.

Promise.

Albummm Revuuue: Charlotte Gainsbourg: IRM

Charlotte Gainsbourg is one of those impossibly perfect women. The kind of woman whom, if you were to be exposed to their presence for more than an hour would no doubt break any merit of self-esteem you once held for yourself.

Stunningly beautiful as well as being an insanely talented actress (did you see her in Anti-Christ? I’m Not There? Fucking hell...) and musician, it’s enough to make you want to stay in the bed for the next week and take stock of your under-achieving, slacker life thus far.

IRM then is another trophy for the Charlotte Gainsbourg shelf of awesomeness. Named, interestingly, after the french designation of the MRI machine which bounced soundwaves off her cerebral tissue following a brain haemorrhage three years ago, the album is stunningly low-key and somehow also dreamily epic by the same turns. It’s a truly gorgeous achievement that manages to be eerie, cheery and heartfelt and uncompromising in it’s desire heavy, breathy production.

The imprint of album producer and co-writer, Beck is undeniable on the album with many songs, in particular ‘Heaven Can Wait’ and ‘Time Of The Assassins’ on which he shares vocal duties, as well as the electro-drone of ‘Trick Pony’. But it’s still irrefutably Gainsbourg’s album - if just in terms in terms of substance and lyricism, despite the immediately identifiable Beck arrangements.

Having said all that though, the album is still something of an awkward fugue between the delicate, haunting folk and dream pop of it’s first half and the onslaught of genre confused songs which litter the later tracks, skipping between Kills-esque electro, country and dark experimentalism.

The album works best when it’s at it’s most simplistic - confessional and explorative of darkness - allowing itself to delight with a brooding and thoughtful set of arrangements punctuated with soft vocals, strings, percussion and piano. The song’s ‘La Collectionneuse’ and ‘In The End’ are especially exquisite, and daringly bare.

It’s a shame that IRM is somewhat blighted by the songs of it’s latter half - song’s which actually, when stood alone, are enjoyable enough - they just don’t work within the context of the album, which is fantastic for it’s strength of storytelling. The story is spilt open and totally interrupted by the intrusion of electro, which feels abrasive and ill-timed. But in the power of storytelling, perhaps this is exactly what Gainsbourg wants - after all, this is a woman unafraid to shock and push boundaries as fucking far as she needs to in order to get the story told.

Inconsistant or not - the album is utterly sumptious anyway despite it's odd failings, and could become a definite nightcap favourite in no time at all.

Official Website: http://www.charlottegainsbourg.com/

IRM is released 25.01.10 and can be bought here: http://tinyurl.com/yl6srrj

Henry Rollins live @ Liverpool O2 Academy, 20.01.10

Henry Rollins is a man who easily divides opinion. For every legion of die-hard Rollins disciple, there’s also a legion of die-hard haters, banging their heads against tables in sheer revulsion to a man they see as nothing but a self-indulgent, wide necked pillock.

Nonetheless, whichever side of the Rollins border you stand, there’s no denying that he’s an incredibly engaging and passionate bloke with a helluva tale to tell. I mean, come on, the man fronted Black Flag for a good five years, counts Ian ‘Fugazi / Minor Threat’ Mackaye AND William fucking Shatner as close friends and has probably done a great deal more advocacy for a number of human rights issues in the past ten years than braindead Bush even attempted to think about in his entire 8 years in clown office.

In short - there’s very few men who can hold the undivided attention of an entire venue of people for two and half hours by talking non-stop. No interval. Rollins doesn’t even take a sip of water, or a breath for the whole of that time. Most people zone out just hearing their other halves saying hello to them - nevermind a whole sermon.

The set is as you’d expect it to be. Full of cutting witticisms observing the constant fuckeries, idiocy and inadequacies of global politcs and personal anecdotes, all expressed with a candor of passion and warmth that is incredibly engaging.

He begins with a piece about freedom of speech, leading him into an anecdote about once having a book censored for writing something derogatory about Sting, concerning the droll self-important singers attempts to save Willie Mandela’s cat from a tree with fellow meat head, Bono.

He peppers the set with wonderfully personal anecdotes about spending Thanksgiving (i.e. ‘the fake holiday’) with The Shatners’, replete with a now customary Shatner impression, having a hall full of rowdy pepped-up graduates bust open their gowns to reveal Black Flag t-shirts following what sounded like the most motivational graduate speech in the World as well as the time him and Ian Mackaye forged fake ID’s to go see an early Bad Brains performance.

When Rollins isn’t going on about his personal life, odd turns of career and confusedly lusting after ‘beautiful, long legged drag queens’ during his cameo as guest host for Ru-Paul’s Drag Race, he’s delivering verbal pummeling’s towards some of politics most easily targeted villains. Most notable is his biting onslaught against Sarah Palin, describing the joyless, pump-pump-squirt boning between her and her husband in order to procreate ‘more white people’ - ‘why the fuck else would anyone think they NEED to have 5 children?’ he muses, wryly, pointing out that Palin is ‘constant, comedy gold’ for her constant idiocies.

Where Rollins properly shines though, is when he really gets into his politics, touching topics usually made quite inaccessible to the masses for their sheer harrowing nature, and the heavy handed way with which they’re reported. Insightful and invigorating, his experiences lead into strikingly impassioned tales and rants ranging from the union carbide disaster of Bhopal in 1984 - the toxins of which still pollute the groundwater in the area, to this day - to the extreme inequalities of Sharia Law.

Engrossing, educational, often hilariously self-deprecating and deadpan, Rollins’ performance is one of rare substance, structure and intrigue. Catch him if you can - just make sure you take a good cushion along - two and half hours sat rapt on the edge of a very unforgivingly plastic chair is no holiday on the heiney. True story.

Official Website: http://21361.com/

Vivian Girls @ Korova 18.01.10

Seeing The Vivian Girls live is reminiscent of times past and possibly present/future, involving putting Dreamboat Annie by Heart on repeat, building a fort out of duvets and crawling inside to dreamily pine and suffer oneself for another lost loser love with a stupid haircut.

Sigh.

What a dreamboat.

They’re the sort of band that Daria - remember that show? The dry, deadpan, apathetic MTV generation’s answer to Bart fucking Simpson - would have creamed over.

Yes, the lyrics are for the most part like diary entries bemoaning the activities of mean, emotionally vapid young men and the shit dealt hand of being bloody female, but they’re delivered with a dreamscape cadence that makes it sound more like an echoing reminiscence than an actual present, immediate suffering.

And so it is that The Vivian Girls performance tonight comes with a veneer of teenage nostalgia -of having friends rally around you with a bottle of MD 20/20 and a Breeders mix tape to make the unbearable bearable.

It’s certainly a sentiment that seems contagious and apparent in the faces of the audience who beam with comforted adulation throughout the set.

TVG have a sweet, intimate presence on stage which is refreshingly bullshit free. Their onstage affectionate chemistry is beautiful and there’s a total deviation from the current trend of female performance which seems to require burying oneself beneath 15 layers of fancy dress apparel and 30 further layers of make up and just being vacantly weird for the bloody sake of it.

Songs Never See Me Again and Can’t Get Over You are supreme examples of their lo-fi, cutting confessional style, delivered with totally straight, near-deadpan vocals and blissfully disenchanted vocal harmonies.

Out For The Sun however showcases their prowess for furious near-prog ecstasy, with guitarist Cassie Ramone supplying jagged solo’s to drummer Ali Koehler’s simplistic but aggressively raw percussive style.

Bassist Kickball Katy really shines for this song though - providing a bass line so sumptuous that it could probably be packaged up and sold in sex shops as an arousal aid. She struts into the audience proudly, backing herself straight into people and grinning wide with total delight.

An Acapella rendition of The Chantels’ He’s Gone is another piece of absolute pure joy, made all the more endearing for their fuck ups - having to re-start the song for having gone out of tune and then having to finish the song early for the same reason - all garnished with a delicious fit of giggles which, frankly, you don’t see enough of at gigs. Especially on a sodding Monday when you well and truly need to witness people publicly fucking up in any way and just laughing it off.
It. Makes. Life. Better.

They’re quite amazing, actually, in their talent to swing between total effectual minimalism and raw, distorted noise. They have a great control live which never sees their vocals get overtly emotional or vulnerable, despite the confessional aspect of their music. Any emotion that was there is fed into distortion, the pound of a drum skin, a harmony, a repeated lyric, an echoed line.

Before I Start To Cry and Tension are perfect examples of TVG’s ability to denote their lyricism through dynamics - terse, low key verses spill into built up choruses and finales, with Before I Start To Cry seeing Katy donning a tambourine for the first part of the song, which is probably the most open we ever see the girls during the performance.

However, TVG do work to a formula which, though perfect for listening to in your bedroom with, say, a pack of smokes and a feuding ex-lover, doesn’t quite hold the attention for the entirety of a live show. Instead the set deteriorates a little while before the final song with similar sentiments and styles blending many songs into an attention deficit strangle that lacks desperately needed energy.

But then again, if TVG are the musical equivalent of Daria Morgendorffer, then a lack of energy is exactly to be expected. And applauded!

Hail apathy!

Maybe this reviewers just a little peeved cos they didn’t play I Believe In Nothing. And the final bus came and went in the time it took to wait for it.

Sigh.

Ah well, time to crawl under the duvet fort and pine and bemoan the exemption of this song from the evening.

What a dreamboat.

Official Site: http://www.freewebs.com/viviangirls/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/viviangirlsnyc

Buy Everything Goes Wrong by the Vivian Girls: http://tinyurl.com/y9a8nte

Har Mar Superstar interview

...with yours truly.

Horror? Quite.

The Moral Of The Story

fucking

of it

is more fun

yourself

face

for the sake

than just punching

in the fucking

face

yourself

is more fun

of it fucking

in the fucking

than just punching

for the sake

Fucking

for the sake

of it

is more fun

than just punching

yourself

in the fucking

face.

A Man I Met In The Art Gallery Where I Supposedly Work

If I don’t take a break every now and then and talk to someone

I’ll die

that’s what he said

short stumpy nervously scraping

the scalp under his baseball cap at regular

intervals

tabloid rag rolled up into the breast

of his jacket like a spare limb a crutch a weapon

a page 3 tit

peeking

out at me like a winking blind

man with an infection

me fuckin social worker Rob - I call him nob-head like -

tried to teach me how to use a fucking

diary fucking gobshite fucking silver spoon

21 year old shitbag

he said

21 fresh out of daddys wallet he can fuck off the cunt

I nod. he probably is a cunt.

and then doctor nob-head - he’s even fucking worse

you wanna talk about cunts - he was doctor cunt

that one right gobshite gave me a fucking notebook

to write down all me fucking fears and fanny-feelings in fuck off

doctor cunt - posh as anything he was - and a right nob-head

I tells him

IM NOT PUTTING NONE OF THAT FUCKING SHIT IN A BOOK FOR YOU TO HAVE A GOOD CHUCKLE

AT WHILST YOU'RE TAKIN A SHIT

I nod. Doctor cunt sounds like the type of person to do that.

He pulls his cap off.

A long deep canyon of a scar runs from his eyebrow to his scalp.

See this part of the ‘ead ‘ere love? He points at it. cold cold cold.

That’s where me brain popped there, love.

Oh, I say.

He’s whispering. The conversation feels illicit.

How did you pop your brain?

Don’t know. Doctor said it just happens. But see ‘ere, girl? He points

at it again. cold cold cold.

That’s the part of the brain that handles identity. Fucked, aint I?

I nod. I suppose he is.

Y’see girl, I’d like to write down me whole life story. I can tell yer what happened

when I was 4 and me mam left me in a trolley outside the supermarket, or when I was 8 and the nuns caned me hand so ‘ard that I bled all over me biro, but I couldn’t tell yer about me wedding day or where I went yesterdee mornin’, you understand.

I nod. I guess. I once got so drunk that I forgot an entire year.

Plus, I haven’t got the patience to write more than a page. Doctor cunt says thats a good thing. He says if I had more patience I’d probably want to do more and doing more might kill me huuhuuherrrr.

Fuck. Why don’t you write it as a haiku?

A haiku? Bloody hell love, I had a brain hemorrhage, not a cold.

He leaves.

I get back to work. Whatever that entails.