…and were there ever three more disparate gigs it would be hard for the mind of man to imagine...
SLINT
The
Old Market, Brighton, Tues 12th August
”Like
swimming underwater in the darkness
Like
walking through an empty house
Speaking
to an imaginary audience
And
being watched from outside by
Someone
without a key”
Though
I only belatedly discovered Slint and their 1991 album
'Spiderland', it's still possible to see how
transformative they were to the hardcore scene they emerged from.
It's not much of an exaggeration to compare them to the effect Joy
Division had on British punk a decade earlier. (Though in terms of
contemporary sales versus long-term influence they were more like the
Velvets. If now acclaimed, the world of the time was not waiting for uncategorisable new music to
emerge from Louisville, Kentucky and the line above about an
“imaginary audience” - that was to prove prophetic.)
Except
the influence only partly correlates. If, as Tony Wilson famously
phrased it, Joy Division moved the conversation on from “fuck you”
to “I'm fucked”, Slint shifted things from “I'm mad, as in
really quite cross” to “I'm mad, as in not all here”. They took
a music aimed outward, intent on expressing it's disgust with the
world, and turned its focus around. However expansive their
soundscapes were, they always sounded like they were really
mindscapes.
While
much hardcore music was great, that may be partly a factor of the
fact there was so much hardcore music. With that
much mud, some was always likely to stick to the wall. And at it's
worst it did play up to the idealised self-image of the teenager –
a noble, uncorrupted outsider, a raging visionary refusing any
compromise with the system. Slint found the teenager adrift in a
senseless world, fearful yet fascinated, both tempestuous and
fragile. However much more 'arty' it was, however it seemed more
indirect in expression, it was in it's way a more honest account.
Slint's
role in music history has now become to plug the missing link between
hardcore and what came to be called post-rock. And, formally at
least, this can be borne out. While for example quiet/loud
juxtapositions were a staple of music in that era (with the Pixies'
Black Francis later complaining of “bozo dynamics”), no-one did
it quite like Slint. Their music didn't just the volume so much as
explode, like a pinhole camera view bursting into cinemascope. And
you can hear that effect all over Mogwai.
But,
unlike so much post-rock, Slint were never simply smart or clever. As
Drew Daniel said, “one can still detect the malingering presence of
metal and hardcore”. ('The Wire' 362, Apr '14) Slint
weren't musical polymaths so much as sonic psychopaths. Their music
tended to be made up of simple elements thrown into disorienting
combinations. Hardcore wasn't the flat ground they left behind when
they took off, it stayed part of them and they were happy to leave
their roots showing. Listen, for example, to the chugging bassline of
'Nosferatu Man'. And this hardcore bedrock stopped
things straying into the opposite teenage cliché – the mawkishness
of the lovelorn, the self-pitying life of the trustafarian. The quote
from 'Dom Aman up above continues with the lines
“He laughed at himself/ He felt he knew what that was”. All
identities seemed uncertain.
Two
scenarios always come to mind when listening to 'Spiderland',
both part-inspired by their preference for mumbled narrative over
conventional vocals. Firstly there's the old private eye movies such
as 'The Big Sleep', with their deadpan voice-overs
as if such flat vocal inflections will somehow impose narrative
coherence over a grotesque nightmare, line up the surreal chaos into
an orderly set of clues. Those films were of course influenced by
expressionism, whose crazily askew angles and sharp light/dark
delineations always seem analogous to their music. (Perhaps needless
to say 'Nosferatu Man' is named after Murnau's
1922 film.)
But
they're also somehow reminiscent of a teenage diary, written not so
much as an account of events as an attempt to make a map of the
world. The mumbled narratives, as if made of words that can only
barely be spoken aloud, make the Spiderland it's spidery handwriting.
The sound evokes a still moonlit night, in an open yet private space,
some sort of solitary refuge. (Like the quarry pool of the sleeve,
only in darkness.) All sounds carry, even the most mumbled vocals or
the clattering of the drums. Then, just when your ears are attuned to
the small sounding big, the big stuff crashes
in...
Some
have questioned whether Slint are really a band to see live. Which is
in some ways an illustrative question, throwing into relief the way
their music is simultaneously expansive and intimate. Certainly
there's no live show. The front of the stage is occupied by no-one at
all; Brian McMahon narrates from the side of the stage, as though
trying to describe the music rather than present it. He stands
stiffly at the mike, like he's never got used to the posture. The few
words they say to the audience, I was later told by more veteran
fans, count as effusive.
And
listening to Slint does feel very much like a one-on-one experience,
pretty much like reading a diary would. It's reminiscent of Kurt
Cobain's description of listening to the Raincoats – you feel like
you're eavesdropping, and if they knew you were there it would ruin
everything. But in many ways the fact that, seemingly against the
odds, the music manages to overcome all that and reach across to
everyone makes the gig more of an event. Even today, even after it's
been taken up as an influence by so many, it's not really music which
fits in anywhere. It's just music which works...
'Breadcrumb
Trail', from London...
WOLF
EYES
Sticky
Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Wed 6th August
Last time I managed to catch Wolf Eyes live, four years ago, I
called them “the Stooges of noise music”. (Perhaps partly because
both hail from Michigan.) And if you thought the Stooges were the
Stooges of noise music, then clearly you're yet to experience Wolf
Eyes!
Their website states “there is no denying
the homemade nuclear war Wolf Eyes has left on music”. And the boys
aint' kidding! After rock music long became a corporate brand,
something to stick over car ads, the old fuck-you attitude gloriously
returns. The music's an eviscerating blast, like one of those ray
guns in SF films that reduce you to a skeleton. Intense and
exhilarating.
Previously
they seemed perfectly pitched between out-there rock and noise music.
This time it was like the venn diagrams flipped the other way –
they'd lessened the experimental/impro leanings to become a rock
band, but still with the sheer abandon of noise. While much noise
music just sounds like rock without the tunes, Wolf Eyes throw in
just enough structure to gain some traction. The combination becomes
virtuous, like a cocktail drug. Brighton Noise exulted “they’ve
started playing actual 'songs' and they’re really good at it!”
(Though newbies may want to note those inverted commas. Wembley Arena
is still some way away.)
As
if by way of contrast, after three support acts all solo turns, they
stride on almost as a parody of a band-as-gang – sporting cut-off
denim and indoor shades. For the most part the drummer played what
I'm reliably informed is called a “box of tricks”, some
dial-sprouting gizmo slung at his hip, meaning they effectively line
up and face the audience off. I think we probably blinked first.
A while ago I quoted Mark E Smith's classic line “R+R as
primal scream”. It's not so much you can't hear the words in all
the cacophony, as you imagine they must have somehow gone
beyond words – broken through into primitive
shards of sound. It was like a jigsaw in reverse - a picture getting
chopped into bits then, instead of being boxed, getting slung in your
face. As said over the very different Sigur Ros, the less you're
able to make out the words the more significance they take on in your
mind.
For
all their recent discoveries of the rudiments of song structure,
they're still savvy enough to keep it to a relatively short set. It
becomes a sudden jolt to the senses, a short sharp shock. Certainly,
after buying a CD from their last show I found I didn't really play
it much. It's a visceral experience best undergone live. And they
still punctuated proceedings with a longer, more lumbering piece. If
you want to keep with the Stooges analogies, it would have been their
'We Will Fall'.
Through
all this sonic assault, some guy still managed to take notes as they
were playing. Mate, that's even nerdier than me!
Doing
their stuff in Rome...
MARTIN
SIMPSON + DOM FLEMONS
Ropetackle
Centre, Shoreham, Fri 25th July
Martin
Simpson's guitar-playing and songwriting has given him one of those
impeccable English folk pedigrees, a CV spattered with names like
June Tabor and the Albion Band. A reliable source of gossip claims he's been nominated for
the Radio Two Folk Awards a record-breaking twenty-three times.
But
as if all that wasn't enough, he also led a kind of double life. For
the folk-tuned Englishman is part dude, having spent many years in
America soaking up the traditional music that lies State-side. Indeed his own website emphasises how his career has “combined
the diverse elements of British, Afro-American and old-timey music”.
Which
of course is what you might expect. After all, what's in that term
'pedigree'? People talk about folk styles as if they're putting dogs
in for Crufts, proud of how they've preserved their uncontaminated
breed. And that's nothing but nonsense. Folk has always lived in the
cross-breeds, in the inter-changes. Folk purists can almost end up
spouting the old right-wing saw about migration destroying culture.
While what migration actually does is vitalise culture. Popular
culture works like water. It always tries to reach the lowest level,
and cover the widest area it possibly can. it doesn't take to being
siloed up. Try to pen it and it will respond by trying to burst those
banks. Seriously, how many folk songs are there about itinerants and
restless wanderers? Compared to the number about those who stood in
one place and refused to move? And the mass migration from Europe to
America is a classic case in point. Think of the way English folk
tunes resurfaced reworked in Bob Dylan tracks.
And
as if to prove this point, Simpson is this night performing with Dom
Flemons of American string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Sporting braces and a boater hat like he's just stepped from some
sheet music illo, broad of shoulder and still broader of smile,
Flemons plays off American influences against Simpson's English like
the great tradition of call-and-response. He casually yet
significantly calls the Atlantic “the pond”. The opening number,
a cheery crowd-warmer on the popular subject of death by syphillis,
segues from Simpson' English version to Flemon's American.
What
follows is a whistlestop tour of cross-Atlantic folk history
including - but not limited to - black performers performing in
blackface, the effects of the American Civil War on the Manchester
garment industry and vowel habits among southern Americans. While
Simpson largely sticks to guitar and banjo, Flemons plays everything
including - but not limited to - the electric kettle. (At which point
Simpson instigates the crowd to cry “Judas!” at him. But it
wasn't plugged in, so technically it's still okay.) For all this
instrumental eclecticism, however, I may well have enjoyed most the
point where they both played banjo. The banjo has a surprisingly
spiky sound, given its hokey reputation.
At
times you feel like they have stored in their heads not so much a
great old songbook as a whole era where music was protean, before the
rulebook had been written and you could pull a song together out of
anything you chose. Which leads to a night of great highlights.
However...
I take the point, of course I do, that authenticity in this music is
naught but fool's gold, and that humour was a perpetual element. The
harder that people's lives were in those times, the less they wanted
songs that simply rubbed those hardships in. And Flemon's adoption of
the role of Simpson's comic foil was often effective, like they were
the Chuck D and Flavour Flav of folk. But for my taste there was
perhaps just a little too much leaning towards music hall and show
tunes. It became like a meal more composed of entrees and desserts
than the actual meal part.
Yet
even if that caveat preventing me from finding this a great gig, it
was still well worth attending.
Given
the double-act nature, we really need both a Simpson and a Flemons
clip. And before you ask whether the Ropetackle has been enlarged
recently, these are from Womad...
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