Sleigh Bells, London Lexington

Sleigh Bells

August 9, 2010

Seeing a gig at The Lexington is always a treat; it’s one of the few bars in London that offers a genuinely strong line-up of American beers and bourbons, combined with a large selection of guns and dead stuff on the walls.

Sighing as we finally enter the upstairs area of The Lexington, full of burger and Brooklyn Lager, Becoming Real are winding up a set primarily involving poking laptops, banging drums and generally making noise. Pleasingly hypnotic is the only description I can accurately use to describe them, sounding a little like Tom Tom Club without any of the groove or hip/lame (depending on your frame of reference) vocals. … Continue Reading

Cold Cave, London Cargo

Cold Cave

May 12, 2010

Maybe it’s the slight drunkenness, maybe it’s the moving horse head in the pub before the gig, maybe it’s the hour I spend trying to talk to a Dutch girl in rudimentary German when all I know are requests for snack food and lewd come-ons, maybe it’s the way Cargo seems like a cross between a Mediaeval dungeon and a BBC set for a dystopian science fiction drama, with huge exposed pipes and thick black curtains. Whatever the reason, opening band Factory Floor come close to being the cheapest hallucinogenic experience I’ve ever had bar sleep deprivation and that time I didn’t eat for 5 days. … Continue Reading

Frightened Rabbit – The Winter Of Mixed Drinks

Frightened Rabbit - The Winter Of Mixed Drinks

There is every reason for Frightened Rabbit to be triumphant. After two critically well received albums they teeter on the edge of the mainstream, while Glasvegas, the band they are likely to be erroneously compared to have proven themselves exactly as good as you would expect of a group hyped by today’s Alan McGee and today’s NME; right up there with date-rape and bowel cancer.

Adding members at such a rate they should be approaching Los Campesinos! in terms of stage-filling ability this time next year, Frightened Rabbit’s sound has been expanding appropriately. Their new LP, The Winter of Mixed Drinks kicks off with ‘Things,’ a thudding behemoth of a song which swells and reaches upward ad infinitum like an ancient stone fist. … Continue Reading

A Hawk and a Hacksaw – Délivrance

A Hawk and a Hacksaw - Délivrance

With their last two records, A Hawk and a Hacksaw provided two different approaches. There was the more-or-less pop approach with added gypsy instruments and melismatic howling of The Way the Wind Blows‘ opener ‘In the River’ and then the full blown Hungarian folk rattlings of the admittedly descriptive but rather awkwardly titled A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the Hun Hangár Ensemble. So what did the best band from Athens, Georgia who are actually from New Mexico do? They did the right and proper thing and combined them.

Délivrance manages to blend the two sides rather effectively, especially on tracks like the dulcimer-led ‘Kertész’, which, from certain chord progressions and the vocal line manages to sound clearly Western yet with a musical accompaniment written to chase pigs around a Romanian hillside to. There is also a variety of material which was possibly lacking from … and the Hun Hangár Ensemble, with the frequent pig-chasing songs broken up by excellent atmospheric pieces like ‘Vasalisa Carries a Flaming Skull Through the Forest’ which manages to live up to, and indeed actually sound like, its brilliant title. Indeed, the restrained nature of ‘Vasalisa‘ is all the more refreshing after a great number of tracks with a “let’s just throw all the gypsy instruments we can at it” approach, and it manages to be the most memorable track on the entire collection. … Continue Reading

Frightened Rabbit, London Scala

Frightened Rabbit

April 15th 2009

It can be heartbreaking to go to a live gig and see songs that mean the world to you disinterestedly rushed through by the band that originally wrote them. Songwriters get tired of their own songs, they resent people preferring their lovely little three-minute pop ditty to their four hour long song-cycle about the Eastern European public transport system. To see something so dear to you be treated as lightweight, something to be rushed through before playing some tracks from the new album, as an inconvenience, especially by its own creator seems to invalidate our own opinions and leave us distrusting our judgement.

As one of the many people around the world with something of a large emotional investment in Frightened Rabbit, especially their album The Midnight Organ Fight (large is perhaps an understatement – if my emotions were money, I could probably contribute a large part of the G20’s bailout with that investment), I was thinking about this on the way to their live gig at the Scala. I quite liked their recent live album, but it somehow didn’t seem to pull quite the same strings, and it’s now a year since TMOF came out; what if they’re sick of it? What if they spend the whole gig plugging a new record? WHAT IF NOBODY LIKES ME? … Continue Reading

Art Brut – Art Brut Vs. Satan

Art Brut - Art Brut vs. Satan

I have long held a fondness for Art Brut – back to when I saw them supporting the man who made being cruelly overlooked an art form, Luke Haines with The Auteurs in November 2004. I’d got to University and London for the first time about two weeks previously, and had no idea where Islington was. I had been unable to drum up any enthusiasm amongst my new peers to go and see the gig; they hadn’t heard of the Auteurs (suffice to say I’m not in contact with them anymore), so I went exclusively with people from my hometown and, knowing me, was probably trying to pretend I knew London like the back of my masturbation implement of choice. We got lost.

By the time we got in, the support act had started and everyone was exchanging slightly bemused looks. The drummer was standing up instead of sitting down like the usual moistly glistening mound of skinslammer most bands relegate to the darkness at the rear of the stage. The guitarists were falling over and pissing themselves (not literally). And the singer- well, the singer wasn’t a singer. He was shouting and pacing up and down, looking like what he was saying were the most important utterances since God warned Adam away from his orgasm-apple tree. It just worked. … Continue Reading

Peter Doherty – Grace/Wastelands

Grace/Wastelands

The first sound that opens Grace/Wastelands, Peter Doherty’s first solo effort proper, is the click of plectrum on muted guitar strings and a hushed count-in. So far, so much like the various discs of demos self-released over the years since The Libertines imploded in a blaze of guardsmen’s jackets, fistfights and visions of England both crystal-sharp and pink-gin tinted. But something has changed: ‘Arcady’ is a song Peterphiles have heard countless times before, though it’s previously seemed aimless and unfocused, like it was being written and re-thought during its performance. Here, though, with producer Stephen Street and collaborator Graham Coxon, the songs have been finished, polished and rethought before recording.

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Data Select Party – Hanging Out With Humans

Data Select Party

The opening of Data Select Party’s EP/mini-album Hanging Out With Humans puts one in mind of the fantastic Dirty Projectors.

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My Sad Captains – Here and Elsewhere

My Sad Captains - Here And Elsewhere

Back in autumn last year, I went to see the War on Drugs, a fantastic combination of squalling feedback, Springsteen-propulsion and sun-baked Americana. They had presumably arrived on these shores feeling like conquerors, with a few of their own dates scattered their big gig supporting the now all-conquering Hold Steady. Well, Tad Kubler’s pancreas put paid to that (you could say it Almost Killed him. Hah!), forcing the fist-pumping Berryman-fanciers to postpone their Britannic excursion, and therefore stranding the War on Drugs on these grey shores without their promised big break and with just a handful of disparate headlining gigs. … Continue Reading

Dance Area – AA/24/7

Erol Alkan's Dance Area

‘AA 24/7′ is the fourth release from implausibly named danceparty hero Erol Alkan’s Phantasy Sound label.

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