Ben Frost - By The Throat

By The Throat is a menacingly suggestive title. It says to me: the music contained within this package; bedecked with pictures of wolves illuminated by lonely headlights, is going to wrestle you to the ground, before it’s slavering jaws lock tightly around your neck until you give it the attention it craves. Flatly, it expects me to refuse to pay attetnion to anything else for it’s duration. Thankfully, it’s a title that is less suggestive than it is threateningly indicative.

For adopted Icelander Ben Frost has created an ambient album which defies the apparent conventions of the genre: a maelstrom of foreboding compositions which grab, grip and bite.  The eagle eyed and bat-eared amongst the music press were quick to lump this sublime record with Sunn O)))’s latest opus ‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ upon it’s release late last year, due to it’s ability to give ambient music the kind of brawn and teeth that it generally seems to lack. Yet By The Throat is a very different prospect to its cowled (and in my opinion, highly overrated) ‘cousin’. Like the wolves that prowl it’s artwork it refuses to rely on brute terror and brawn, instead ceaselessly stalking the listener and wearing it down with persistent guile.

And by that, I mean that until you hear it, it’s hard to imagine anyone creating a record quite like By The Throat. This is a uniquely cinematic and affective set of compositions that single-handedly espouses the unique attributes of what is considered noise, perching somewhere between terror and beauty. Earlier I used the word sublime to describe this record, and for once, I’m not succumbing to hyperbole, if you’ll permit me a brief detour into aesthetic philosophy. The sublime is a concept of (traditionally natural) beauty which dates as far back as Plato, yet in reference to By The Throat, the theory of the sublime developed by English philosopher Edmund Burke is my touching point. Burke stated that the ‘sublime’ was a separate entity from traditional beauty, whereby what is “”dark, uncertain, and confused” could instil feelings of awe and appreciation in a way similar to that which is beautiful.

It’s this contrast between serenity and fear upon which the album thrives: the achingly dischordant strings of ‘Peter Venkman Pt 1′ coming up against the chanted refrains of a choir can be likened to the album’s most terrifying moment, which comes during ‘The Carpathians’ as peaceful strings die away to be replaced by a snarling that increases in volume until you’re sure the record is about to tear your throat open, and drag your bloodied corpse into the arctic night to share with it’s howling brethren.

There is certainly a strong sense that it’s Frost’s adopted homeland which has figured most heavily in his creative process: the glacial streams of white noise which dominate opening track ‘Killshot’ could hardly be said to come from his birthplace of Australia. Yet it’s the sparing, calculating quality with which he uses extreme frequencies and volumes which marks this album out from its peers. Frost is not a maximalist in the vein of fellow white noise weaver Tim Hecker (or indeed Sunn o))), yet another reason why I feel that particular comparison falls rather flat), yet nor does he succumb to the kind of analogue simplicity that’s so in vogue of late. Frost is in fact, an icy industrialist.

Yet his minimalism is a more classical variant, relying on strings carefully mingled with blasts of glitch laden noise, which lends his music a far more fearful and lonely aspect than his compatriots, and a far more emotive warmth than his competitors. The dull intensive care ward throb of ‘O God Protect Me’ is interrupted only by a dull drone of strings, whilst ‘Studies For Michael Gira’ is a death march of teutonic electronics, punctuated by a harrowed violin that would certainly meet the approval of the Swans frontman, if not classical composer Samuel Barber (he who penned the famous Adagio For Strings which bears his name and features notably in ‘Platoon’). Like the much vaunted Christian Fennesz, he is not above finding melody in his apparently chaotic murk of buzz and hum, and once the listener has delved a little deeper, it’s clear that labelmate Nico Muhly‘s modern piano work is often the perfect foil to Frost’s cascadingly chaotic samples: the lonesome piano of album highlight ‘Híbakúsja’ meshing seamlessly with the gulped samples, evoking the feeling that Frost’s instrumentation is literally struggling for air.  But more often it’s those strings which are foremost in the listener’s mind. Frequently beautiful, but simultaneously eerie and foreboding, it’s not for nothing that comparisons have been made to that most infamous piece of cinematic dualism: David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ theme tune.

It’s near impossible to describe the record that Frost has created without resorting to hyperbole. It really is sublime in both senses of the word, and there’s very little more that needs to be said, however much I’d like to drone on. By The Throat might be the perfect record, or it might be a simply brilliant one. Either way, the way that Frost has captured beauty, terror, fear, serenity, loneliness and warmth all in a single set of eleven compositions points to this particular LP being one that doesn’t so much as deserve your time, but physically demand it.

Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

Progression is at once the enemy and the friend of new bands the world over. Don’t progress, and you’re condemned as formulaic and linear, a relative dinosaur compared to others expanding their horizons and aiming for that bright blue yonder. But equally, stray too far from the confines you set yourself on your first LP/demo/EP and you might be accused of betraying your musical ideals and values, or trying to run before you’ve managed to crawl.

It’s with a little trepidation that I approach Tarot Sport therefore: having heard from band and critic alike that this is a new direction for Fuck Buttons, I’m unsure as to whether it’ll be a Great Leap Forward or a disastrous attempt at revolution.  I should relax, really, because I know that Fuck Buttons are one of my favourite acts of the past few years, and that they’d have to deviate pretty far from their norm to disappoint me.

What is certain is that a combination of more expensive equipment and working with Andrew Weatherall has smoothed out some of the duo’s rougher edges: opener ‘Surf Solar’ might open with electronic trills and squiggles, but it’s not the buzzsaw power electronics of ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either; as what I’m informed is a looped, distorted sample of a cheerleader rally chatters over pounding blockbeats, before a slightly blunted buzz of white noise cuts in. Fuck Buttons have gone happy hardcore, without even knowing it – ‘Surf Solar’ is ten minutes of extremely euphoric dance music, which sets the tone fro the remainder of the record.

Which leads nicely onto my next point: those on the lookout for a ‘noise’ record should shy away from Tarot Sport. The ‘noise’ bracket is a sloppy one, and I reject those who decry Fuck Buttons as ‘Whitehouse for pussies’ or ‘Ramleh for bedwetters’ as misinformed. The duo may lack some structural diversity; each track sees them stack their lego blockbeats into a joyously multicoloured pyramid before taking a running swat at the construction, but Fuck Buttons were never about audio masochism or eardrum puncturing: Sweet Love For Planet Earth didn’t confine itself to ‘noise’ paradigms of raw volume or free-jazz wanderings, preferring a more structured and accessible approach, akin to dance music.

Tarot Sport definitely takes this a step further, logically. As a sometime noise listener, it’s clear that the pair have a wide knowledge of noise music, but perhaps also a newfound or rediscovered love of straighter forms of electronic music. As such ‘The Lisbon Maru’ bends sheets of buzzing electronics around bubbling samples and another thumping drumbeat. It’s easy to see why ‘Olympians’ was so named, as its clean sound brings to mind Sally Gunnell charging down the home straight in excruciating slow motion, a beautifully hopeful synth line leaping out from the cacophony around halfway through.

There is a feeling that Tarot Sport could potentially disappoint as many as it fills with joy, and whilst it is certainly a less immediate record (to these ears) than it’s gnarlier sounding predecessor, it still has a ferocious bite hidden within those leaping melody lines. If this is what dance music is, then consider me interested once more.

Beastie Boys – Ill Communication

“Timeless”

Funny word, timeless. The implications are that whatever you’re describing exists outside of time as an eternal fixture. Which if thought through, is pretty much what every book or painting or indeed album or band does as part of it’s existence. I don’t really believe that an album ever ‘ages’; a  musical document of a moment or series of moments can’t age. But the listener does. Shed Seven were always crap, it just took certain people a long time to realise it.  Anyway, I should stop opening reviews with cod-philosophy. Point taken.

That said, when Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch was diagnosed with cancer last month, it finally dawned on me that Beastie Boys were old. Previously, I’d seen them in the same way that many see AC/DC or Iron Maiden – timeless fixtures of hip-hop and 20th century culture. Maybe it was the live shows; energetic, exciting and probably up there with the very best I’ve ever seen, but I’d never thought that MCA, Ad Rock and Mike D would ever seem ‘old’ or in any way mortal.

But that’s a bit of a down note to start a review on the re-issue of one of my all time favourite albums. In a funny way, it seems to sum up the Beasties’ career up until that point: Ill Communication might not be acknowledged by all fans as the definitive article, but it took elements from all previous releases (Licensed to Ill, Check Your Head and Paul’s Boutique). This was a group on the crossroads, not worlds away from the avant jazz hop they’d mix together with Hello Nasty, with it’s mix of sharp beats, sharp humour and yet still flat out stupid and entertaining in places. And whilst all that might the ‘Boys had moved away slightly from the rock rap hybrid they had championed with their first two releases, Ill Communication provided maybe the definitive track of that genre with ‘Sabotage’, a track which still sounds as peerlessly rocking as it ever did, perhaps thanks to the immortally hilarious video made to accompany it.

And maybe I’ve cheapened this somewhat by mentioning a funny music video, but humour was always a key component of the Beasties’ madcap adventures with the microphone and the sampler. How else could they ever have got away with a line like “It’s the taking of Pelham, one, two, three, if you wanna a doodoo rhyme then come see me” amongst others? Well, maybe it’s cause the sample of ESG’s ‘UFO’ on ‘Sureshot’ is so tightly executed that we can forgive their style over substance take of wordsmithery. Or maybe it’s because they never pretended that they were riffing on anything deeper than MC battles, chicks and parties; instead focussing on bending the rules of language and playing with the rhyme?

Actually, that’s a half truth, due in part to‘The Update’, when three B-boys showed us that serious wasn’t beyond their ken either. Opening with a muezzin call and then rolling out rhymes taut with genuine skill and guile yet on a subject that wasn’t about sticking dicks in mashed potato, well, that took a bit of balls. And when you come to the frenetic hardcore of ‘Tough Guy’ it might dawn on you that never have the Beasties sounded so disparate in their influences and diverse in their outputs, yet maintained such a high level of quality control.

But most of you will know this already. You’ll remember the hypnotic swirls of ‘Bodhisvatta Vow’ as keenly as the taut chickenscratch guitars of ‘Sabrosa’ – the instrumental that launched a dozen more on later albums – and maybe even be able to rap along to Q-Tip’s lazy call and response in ’Get It Together’. You’ll know that the wardrum tribal beat of ‘Shambala’ might not strut like dumbass funk of ‘Do It’, but equally recognise that they both share an absolutely killer beat, even if only one of them has your favourite brash B-Boy lyric (“I’m a six-point-seven on the richter scaaa-ayle!”).

Fact is I’m not gonna sell this re-issue on the strength of the second disc of material. I mean, it’s the usual mixed bag: there’s a few remixes, live versions and out-takes alongside the basketball court freestyle skittering of b-side ‘Dope Little Song’ (sitting nicely alongside some actual recorded basketball court squeaking) and a few more live instrumented tracks (‘Resolution Time’ and the gnarly sounding hardcore snarl ‘Mullet Head’). Thing is that if you don’t own this already and you’ve read this far, you probably already should. And if you already own it, chances are you’re just about now casting your eyes about your room and looking for your copy. So, treat this re-issue as a reason to pick up an album which is everything great hip hop should be: polished, innovative, witty and above all great fun. And you ain’t doing that, then for god’s sake, listen to Q-Tip and Get It Together.

Jackie O Motherfucker

July 10, 2009

I don’t make a habit of drinking at live shows – it’s not a tenet I subscribe to, but I just tend to get irritated when I’m swaying more than the drunk or stoned frontman leaning off the edge of the stage. Plus of course, live venues are notorious for being able to empty your wallet and your savings account with one fell trip barwards for a round. And that’s not mentioning the numerous bladder emptying breaks required, interrupting the flow of the music, or meaning you miss watching the guitarist punch the singer and then stuff him through the bass drum before storming off.

That said, tonight’s a Friday, and my plus one is resolutely emasculating me and plying me with liquor in the confines of the homely and increasingly warm and fuzzy Café Oto. Don’t worry though, the buck stops right there. When she offers me her jacket as I shiver a little; outside staring into Dalston on a summer evening that’s not as warm as might be hoped, I refuse.

And with Jackie O Motherfucker, I’d actually advise a drop of something to lubricate your senses beforehand and sink yourself deeper into their hazy world. For over a decade now, Jackie O (named after JFK’s widow) have been plying their slowburning trade of freeform noise, psych jazz, folk and blues, revolving around reputedly tempestuous core member Tom Greenwood. Of late they’ve experienced something of a resurgence; the droney freakfolk of Flags of the Sacred Harp, a far cry from their earlier noisier works, arrived in sync with a new movement of bearded free spirits. This mini tour is in support of their 15th proper longplayer, which melds the bluesy country of their later work with the more spacey wanderings of their early experiments.

Muso’s is gripping his final beer when they take to the stage, with barely a murmur from either bandmate. Starting out with a wonderfully atonal take on American blues, the band lurch and shudder through the early motions. The dense hum of a lapsteel, buzzing like flies over a corpse, coupled with slow motion drums, and Greenwood’s reverberating guitar moan all come together and bring to mind Dylan Carlson’s latest work with Earth, but taken to somewhere darker and more unpleasant. If Carlson was soundtracking Sergio Leone films, Jackie O would be soundtracking a Charles Manson biopic, such is the uneasy nature of tonight’s sound.

Greenwood’s voice is unconventional in the extreme – he’s nearly completely atonal and tuneless, yet when coupled with the warped blues his band plays, his inaudible lyrics become a powerful, deep reaching instrument. It’s easy to drift along with the music almost into the atmosphere, band cutting over the murmuring audience on a bright Friday evening.

And indeed it would be all too easy to criticise the one dimensional nature of Jackie O’s junkyard blues, if that was all they did tonight. Slowly and imperceptibly, the band ease into overdrive, shifting gears until they finish the night with a sheet of acid swathed spacerock, sparse duelling guitars reverberating around the candlelit tables as the clank of the drums and the hum of the bass intensifies and intensifies to the point of near lift off. When Greenwood dopily intones that “Uh, we could play some more if you like?” it’s barely even a question, so well are the band gelled at this point. Every minor diversion and slight deviation feels somehow perfect and precise, and the natural evolution of their sound from haunting to epic is a wondrous thing to watch unfold. Perhaps it was the alcohol listening, but on the overground home, electricity humming around me, I can’t help but feel that I’ve caught Jackie O on a good night, and myself on an even better one.

Pagan Wanderer Lu - Fight My Battles For Me

A cursory glance at Pagan Wanderer Lu’s Last.fm page is most revealing, it seems. The comments box is dotted with wayward metal fans who have evidently been waylaid by the presence of ‘Pagan’ in the name. When an Eastern European black metal fan leaves you a comment saying simply “weird”, you’re probably doing something which qualifies as right, under the correct circumstances.

That said, I don’t know if ‘weird’ is the right terminology for Fight My Battles For Me, a ramshackle collection of bedroom lo-fi in the truest sense of the word. It’s not something I’d listen to readily, but something ‘weird’ wouldn’t feature songs you could happily whistle along to whilst you go about your daily doings. Would it?

I think the point we’ve reached is that where it becomes clear that weird, like it’s estranged cousin beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. So maybe we’re best settling with odd as a word to describe Andy Regan’s latest stitched together album. ‘The Gentleman’s Game’ juxtaposes angry shouted swear word choruses and the wonderful opening line “Matthew’s bleeding from his mouth”, whilst ‘Good Christian/Bad Christian’ takes a Public Enemy/Dalek style sample of a raging preacher and overlays it with a bent keyboard riff and wry observations about religion.

And whilst the oddpop mix might not be to my tastes, there’s something admirable about Pagan Wander Lu’s take on the one man band. It’s DIY and lo-fi in a pleasant way; not full of jarring angry feedback or tape hiss, and instead sounds like a man recording in his bedroom and trying to make the record sound as good as possible. And if that approach occasionally leaves the recordings feeling a little rough around the edges and overly laden with cheap sounding casios, then so be it.

But the problem is that there’s only so much cheap Casio I can take at once, and in truth, it all does wash over me. More’s the shame, given some of the delightful lyrical twists and turns Regan pulls off. A line like “I am friends with everyone you’re friends with on the internet…I can’t believe we never met” is the kind of thing that on paper sounds terrible, but when gently lilted it raises a wry smile. Similarly ‘The Memorial Hall’ is wrought tight with clever lyrical asides but unfortunately, the circus nature of the music somewhat spoils the effect.

When Pagan Wanderer Lu’s bubbling lyricism and dense instrumentation does work, it works wonderfully it must be said. Whilst the intro to ‘Ten Cities Is Not A European Tour’ might for some reason make me think of Bran Van 3000’s ‘Drinking In LA’ (I really have no idea why), it has a mournful melancholy to it, and it builds into a glitch maelstrom most admirably. Equally, ‘The Tree of Knowledge”s initial rondo a cappella layering might irritate, but the end product is satisfying in its simplicity (especially the delightful chorus line, which I won’t spoil here).

My personal problem with the album is that it seems to attempt to be odd for the sake of oddness slightly too often. Granted it’s not the kind of thing I’d find myself listening to very often, but there’s a feeling that sometimes, Pagan Wanderer Lu might be better received by my ears if he wandered a little less and kept things somewhat simpler, allowing his delightful lyrics to win me over.

!!! (chk chk chk)

July 7, 2009

There’s a sad inevitability to it, but the fact is that any fairly normal white man dancing around a stage is going to end up looking a little bit like Bez. It’s not about the maracas, or the slight paunch, or even the dopey grin and the thousand-yard stare. It’s an association with what a white man dancing looks like which has been irrevocably etched onto my retinas. Bez haunts my waking dreams.

So sorry to the frontman of !!!, but when you preen and pout on stage in your wifebeater and waterproof jacket, I’m thinking not of your deliciously funky moves, but instead of a Mancunian gurning with a pair of maracas.

And that image isn’t the only odd thing about the band known verbally as Chk Chk Chk’s live show tonight: there’s a certain weirdness in choosing to play 50 minutes of uninterrupted brand new material and then making the crowd go wild by ending on three hits and then abruptly leaving the stage and the crowd baying for more.

It would be all too easy to blame some of this eccentricity on personnel changes withing the band: the NYC multi instrumentalists are slimmed down since I first saw them tear a festival stage a brand new arsehole back in 2005. I’m pretty certain the headcount reached double figures then, but my memory is dullened by more than just the passage of time, if you catch my drift. Now, there seems to be just six, and there’s definitely not enough use of the rather sad and lonely looking second drum kit at the back of the stage. The new tracks are strong – it’s the same disco funk pulse, but there’s a subtler, more electronic edge – two of the band stand at the back doing what can only technically called ‘knob-twiddling’ while our Bez-a-like humps speakers, dances and gives the crowd his best come-and-get-some Marc Bolan impression. The problem is that aside from him, there’s little movement in the band. Maybe they’re still getting to grips with the new material, but there seems to be precious little improvement in terms of stage presence from their shockingly flat performance at May ATP. It is better than that, however, as our main man gets in amongst the punters during the extended pysch burn outro of a new track which brings to mind the pulse of ‘Dear Can’ and forces a dance pit of sorts, shaking his thing up against anything that dares get near. But still, that electricity I remember isn’t sparking like it used to: when your frontman is having to gesture to his bandmates to give it some more, the omens aren’t great.

Maybe that’s my ill fortune in catching them at the height of it all: I remember them as a living, breathing party incarnation, with several vocalists clambering over the stage and exhorting the crowd to ever greater feats of terrible last night of the festival dancing.  So in some ways, I think I expect a little too much of them: in my opinion, a great festival set is nigh on unbeatable. I’d rather see a band tear holes in my eardrums and retinas for less than an hour than watch them labour through a longer set of uncertain quality.

But just as I’m about to write it all off as a self-indulgent band practice, !!! throw me a dime. Well, three of them, in the shape of some old tracks. It’s incredible – the crowd come to life and this in turn seems to wake up the band who suddenly remember they’re performing: the bassist leans back and starts to swagger through the galaxy sized bass lick of ‘Must Be The Moon’ and a knob twiddler abandons his post in favour of beefing up the percussion sound. Now we’re rolling, as the saying goes. And then they indulge us with a superb rendition of a track from their debut (I think it was ‘Intensify’ but don’t quote me on that) before finally ending on an absolutely killer ‘Heart of Hearts’. And then, like that, they’re gone, as the £17-a-ticket crowd cheer and whoop before booing when it becomes clear that having wired us all up, they’re going to leave it at that. And I guess that’s !!! for you, when it comes down to it – for better or for worse, you’re left wanting something more from them.

Andrew WK - I Get Wet

Sometimes, I forget what music is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be about fun. It’s supposed to be about making you feel good, about making damn sure that you feel like the king of your very own hill, even if it’s just a hill of beans.

So let’s be clear from the start that my appreciation of I Get Wet isn’t ironic. Submitting it as a classic album review isn’t my way of sticking it to the man, the floppy haired scenesters or the slack-jawed musicophiles, though if it does so, that’ll be a bonus. My appreciation for the white clad madman Andrew WK is based on one solid, unquestionably objective truth: I Get Wet rocks hard, and it rocks fast.

Put yourself in Andrew WK‘s position: you’re a musical genius by all accounts, a virtuoso on piano, and a multi talented instrumentalist who has lent his hand to Current 93 and Boredoms, amongst others. You’re the son of a well-respected lawyer and author of several acclaimed legal textbooks. And when you sit down to write a solo record, you throw that all away and make something bigger, better, harder and more aggro than any of your biography should permit. Big drums and great slabs of dumb, unrefined guitar are the meat and potatoes of this album, finished off with a those roaring vocals and frenetic synth work.

In some ways, it’s no surprise that Andrew’s current gig is as a motivational speaker. That there’s a bludgeoning nature to his ‘message’ should be obvious, hearing what he does to a pair of speakers with ‘She Is Beautiful’. If the title suggests a whimsical love song about sunset beaches and that special girl, you obviously don’t know your WK. Take a love song, cut it into pieces with a meat cleaver and then smear the bloody remnants all over your face, screaming out “SHE. IS. BEAUTIFUL.” at the very top of your voice. This is love, WK style. Direct, to the point and taking no prisoners.

‘Party Hard’ is an opening salvo which doesn’t need much introduction. To call it a shot of adrenalin to the face would be a disservice. It can literally destroy dancefloors, if used correctly. Give me six wiry young men, six bottles of tequila and a PA playing ‘Party Hard’ and stand well back to watch devolution in action. ‘Girls Own Love’ falls somewhere between the swagger of ZZ Top and being better than every power ballad you’ve ever heard. ‘Take It Off’ is the theme tune to a thousand men pumping their fists in a still functioning steelworks, while ‘Party Till You Puke’ forgoes any pretences at musicality and degenerates into a two note juggernaut and a chorus that would never be anything but anthemic. ‘I Get Wet’ is a petulant finger raised to anyone still not dancing, and ‘Don’t Stop Living In The Red’ is a final warning to anyone thinking of defying the one man party manifesto.

So with bloodshot eyes, trembling limbs and a grin that could only be described as ‘shit eating’ smeared all over my face, I’d like to submit I Get Wet as a classic album on the following criterion: it’s really stupendously enjoyable to listen to.

Wolf Eyes

“Out of chaos comes order”.

Oft quoted, oft misquoted and a statement of some pretty, hefty philosophical weight. If we didn’t have chaos, we couldn’t have order. If we didn’t have noise, we probably couldn’t have music.

Chaos is evidently a speciality of Nate Young’s Wolf Eyes project. Judging by their latest release Always Wrong on Hospital Productions, sometime home to fellow eardrum perforators Prurient and Kevin Drumm, the loss of Aaron Dilloway hasn’t particularly dullened the trios love of earsplitting grind and sheet metal fx. No, Always Wrong is not a pleasant listen, and anyone who might have forseen it as such is probably best advised to quit reading now. I wouldn’t want to be wasting your time after all.

The thing with ‘noise’ records is that all too often they are a rather boring reproduction of frighteningly intense live performance. I’d place Merzbow’s tour last year with Carlos Giffoni and Flower-Corsano Duo right up there with the best live experiences I’ve ever had, but besides the latter artist, I don’t routinely make a habit of playing their records in my home. And there’s a reason for that – I lack the equipment to make the experience worthwhile, and partially because of that I can’t (or don’t desire to) recreate the desired atmosphere: oppressive, confusing and completely otherworldly. Pure noise is, for me at least, a live phenomenon.

That said, Always Wrong isn’t an awful record. It’s not a great one either, but it is, for want of a better word, interesting. Undoubtedly, it’s probably not as interesting as their live performances (just how does one play an ‘electrified plank’?), but after a while, it has a certain pull to it. Despite clocking in at just under 30 minutes, the record has an almost pyschedelic feel to it, grimy squalls and casbah drones clambering their way out of the murky industrial dub the collective kick up. It’s listening to some arcane machine shudder and lurch into life, flashes of raw blue electricity igniting as it recovers from some 50 year hangover. This driving clank and clatter, matched with some ear splittingly bizarre tones (I’m pretty certain I picked out what sounded like a didgeridoo in the mix) lends the record the odd sensation of being completely chaotic, yet still heading towards something. When Wolf Eyes get it right – witness the muezzin like clarion calls of ‘Pretend Alive’ or ‘Droll Cut the Dog’ – it is strangely thrilling, hearing something come out of, well, everything.

But, moments like this are too few and far between to make it worthwhile. You get the feeling that Wolf Eyes are a particularly remorseless bunch of misogynists, who long to inflict their own brand of sonic warfare on mankind (witness the track entitled “We All Hate You”), and after repeated listens, it does start to sound like noise for noise’s sake. We’ve seen acts like Skullflower find beauty and ecstasy from chaos, whereas all there is to be found in Wolf Eyes is pain and confusion, two emotions that don’t really have the longevity necessary to really grab the listener. Which is a real shame, because underneath those buzzsaw electronics and clattering percussion of Always Wrong, there does lurk the beating heart of something a bit deeper and cleverer than that.

Sublime Frequencies

May 29th 2009

An interesting fact about the word sublime: in the philosophical school of aesthetics, it refers to something, which is so great, vast and beautiful that it strikes terror as well appreciation into the onlooker. The implication is that feelings of awe are based not just in wonder, but also in confusion and fear.

So if you’ll excuse that attempt at a pyramid lead: Group Doueh are awesome. Tonight, Tufnell Park has acquired a dustblown, scented vibe, as the Sublime Frequencies tour hits town. 

Sublime Frequencies was started by Alan Bishop, best known as the head honcho of Arizona pyschedelic weirdoes Sun City Girls, along with Hisham Mayet. Its stated aim is to “acquire and expose obscure sights and sounds…not documented sufficiently through all channels.” In essence, Sublime Frequencies heads to the outer reaches and drags the best portions of audiovisual experience kicking and screaming back to the Western cultural sphere, where it dumps them on an unknowing and ungrateful audience.

…Or does it? The Dome tonight is heaving and sweating from every pore – every date on this tour has been either a sellout or near to it, a distrusting mix of Viceland hipsters, space cowboys and middle class revolutionaries jostling for place around the stage. If ever there was cause to have faith in the music industry and the discerning tastes of the consumer, then tonight should provide it. That something so fantastically alien of the ‘normal’ London scene should be able to attract this many punters based on reputation along (I suspect that, like me, many here are relative initiates to the SF scene) is a timely reminder that just sometimes, the world can throw you a completely unexpected and wonderful curveball.

Of course, said ball would not be so wonderful were it not for the quality of tonight’s show. Attendence alone does not a great gig make, as a wise man surely once said after seeing Keane sell out The O2. Group Doueh, from the troubled Western Sahara region of Morocco, represent the ‘desert guitar’ scene which has garnered much acclaim through groups such as Tiniwaren, open proceedings tonight, and I’ll struggle to remember a set as engaging as theirs from this year so far. Essentially a four piece tonight, consisting of a male vocalist, a synth player in charge of percussion, Salmou ‘Doueh’ Bamaar himself on lead guitar and his wife providing additional percussion and vocals, they play a storming set of dustblown exotica which sounds like Hendrix losing himself somewhere along the wayside of the Silk Road. The vocals are entrancing, muezzin style hollers blending beautifully with Bamaar’s lightning fast guitar licks other the steady, hollow pound of percussion and organ. 

The Hendrix comparison is not one I make idly, either: besides putting his guitar behind his head to play it, Bamaar is a sensational musician, veering from providing subtle backgrounds, to semi chickenscratch licks, to wailing Arabian solos that resonate with his wife’s poetic chants and the incredible tones of the charismatic male vocalist. The performers are a delight to watch, and rarely has something so layered and complex been such a joy to watch. By the final song, complete with a facemelting extended solo, shuffling feet have taken the place of scratched bearded chins, as the whole casbah is well and truly rocked to its foundations.

Thankfully, Muso’s has time to catch its breath before Syrian pop sensation Omar Souleyman takes to the stage, and it’s just as well, as he commences as he intends to finish, with a delicate poem leading into a thumping four on the floor arab pop anthem. Accompanied by just two musicians, along with a poet (think something like a mute hype man at a hip hop show, who utters suggestions to the main act), Souleyman turns the place upside down, a jangling three string satzh guitar played at the speed of light over the top of thumping drum machines and street market keyboards, both of the latter provided incredibly by just one man. It’s awe inspiring, as Souleyman himself whips the crowd into a frenzy, repeating evocative Persian poetry over a barrage of instrumentation. 

Yet, when compared to the majesty and diversity of Doueh, it seems, to Muso’s at least, a little flat. His trick might be incredible, but it is just a single trick, repeated over and over. Try telling that to the two dancing men on stage, or to a ferociously hyped crowd jumping, hooting and hollering for the entire set. Yet by the last two songs, we’ve swallowed our pride and despite our weary feet and heavy heads, join the central fray. And as Souleyman, via translator, wishes us happiness throughout our paths, it’s hard not to contain the joy that seems to fill the entire room. Sublime? Almost certainly.

Times New Viking

May 18th 2009

Times New Viking are feral. They’re wild, wild kids, as they showed back in October when they shredded collective face supporting Los Campesinos! So, tonight, having spluttered and stretched out all the ATP ache, we’re looking forward to having some fun, as the kids from Ohio play the tiny Cable Studios and rip the primitive PA to sgreds with their even more primitive fuzzbuster punk.

And, as far as entrances go, crawling away from the bar and shuffling onstage before yelling “Hi we’re Times New Viking! From Ohio! Our President smokes!” isn’t a bad one. And as the rather beguiling keyboardist Beth Murphy beckons the audience closer – after all, this is a floor show – it all seems to get off to a good start. 

But disarmingly, for a buzz band that has never been more deserving of the buzz, the 120 capacity venue isn’t half as rammed as it should be, and the kids seem to be more in the mood for shuffling instead of slamdancing. As ATP is still hanging, albatross-like, around our sorry necks, we take up position at the side of the stage expecting to watch the action unfold, but it never really does. Yeah, all drinks might be £3, but it’s a Thursday night, and no amount of exhortation will make everyone in the room dance.

That aside, Times New Viking are still Times New Viking, and their ability to lash the harshiest fuzz and the dirtiest skronk to the sunniest hooks remains unparalleled. You can keep your No Ages, your Women, your Vivian Girls and your Crystal Stilts – this is the real deal- fast, raw, joyful and grin inducing. The set is mostly new material, but peppered with older material- the raucous ‘Hate Hate Hate’ from Stay Awake is given an early outing as is the smothered shuffle of ‘The Wait’, which sits beautifully alongside the brattish ‘Teenage Lust!’ with it’s bittersweet refrain of “I don’t want to die in this city alone”. There’s an audible hush as a bass makes it’s way onto the stage, and Beth straps on a guitar – is this like Dylan going electric?, the crowd seem to ask (silently), but all fears are averted as the track turns out to a soon to be classic slab of summer trash punk. The new material does show a little variation from the classic theme: slightly slower and a little grungier sounding, veering away from The Germs and heading closer to Superchunk.

But as they end a fiery 40 minute set (inevitiably with ‘The End of All Things from Rip It Off), it hardly feels like a second has gone by, it’s hard not to feel a little frustrated watching them standing on drum stools and cranking out the riff to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in front a dazed and bemused-looking crowd. It took us until halfway through the second song to start dancing like a loon, and we can’t help but feel that a band like this deserves more. The sad fact is that, in cases like this, the audience leech some of energy from such a vivid performance. That said, energy is not something Times New Viking seem likely to be lacking in for several years. All hail somewhere in Ohio, where the party’s at.