THE
POP GROUP
Sticky
Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Sat 25th Oct
I
had wondered if, after so recently seeing Hawkwind again, this would be another
guilty pleasure gig – an old post-punk band reforming to perform tracks
from a classic album. After all, last time I saw Mark Stewart he was
glaring down the lens of a BBC4 documentary to firmly state “punk
isn't about asking forty-something old blokes what punk is”.
Moreover, the Pop Group were the walking, talking definition of music
as an unstable element. They were like a Hadron collider - throwing
together their heady cocktail of punk, funk, dub, noise and more,
just to see how it all combusted. Reproducable? I'm surprised it was
ever captured in the first place.
Then
again, as the reformed band put it - “let's face it, things are
probably even more fucked now than they were in the early Eighties,
and we are even more fucked off.” (I offer fulsome apologies, of
course, for their use of that inappropriate word 'probably'.) And
perhaps more to the point this was my first and, for all I know, only
chance to see so legendary a band.
Simon
Reynolds famously pointed out that Public Image were able to take up
the essence of dub without the cliches, so avoiding sounding like the
usual clod-hopping white-boy imitators. And the Pop Group, all
self-styled 'funketeers' before the dawn of punk, are similarly able
to plug into funk. Some of the most laid-back music suddenly sounds
agitated, sharpened into a weapon, but like it had been intended to
be played that way all along.
At
times the rhythm section sound so tight you can hardly conceive they
go back to inhabiting separate bodies afer the show. But then seconds
later they can sound engagingly ungainly; you're never sure if
they're cleverly deconstructing the music they'd only just been
throwing out or just breaking apart. (Back in the day, they could be
provocatively vague about that in interviews.) And those opposites
crash together most in the figure of frontman Mark Stewart,
gargantuan yet ungainly. As he rages and punches the air he's like a
combination of an apocalyptic blood-and-thunder prophet and
care-in-the-communty type suffering an attack in Tescos. (All of
which does also mean that, if you listen back to those classic
albums, they can be maddeningly uneven. The silver lining has a
cloud.)
Of
course the curse that normally befalls bands isn't that they get
worse but that they get better. They become
tighter, more professional, and lose the looseness – the unstable
elements that had made them so idiosyncratic and unpredictable. Had I
seen them back in the day, would I think the same of them? Probably,
but I hadn't so I didn't.
Hilariously, with echoes of when Half Man Half Biscuit played against Culture Shock, anarcho-punk surviors the Mob are playing across
town this very night. It's like those old oppositions will never die.
The anarchos forever portrayed post-punk as the music of posers and
empty aesthetes, playing with gestures and taking polariods of
themselves while Babylon burnt. While they sang about a laboratory
animal they'd just liberated, we sang about a book we'd just read.
Yet,
while I'm in no position to tell you how the Mob sounded, I simply
can't imagine a band more impassioned and committed than the Pop
Group. Almost the last thing Stewart says is that the gig's put on in
association with the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, before
launching into the classic 'We Are All Prostitutes'
for the encore. Yet, lyrically, songs could be defiant calls to arms
or dread warnings, but they both sound similar.
Stewart's shrieks and yelps were always a far cry from bold,
declammatory statements. The band's prevalent theme was not so much
revolt as tribulation, the chaos to come. (“Our children shall
rise up against us.”) At their best they were a band you couldn't
fail to be absorbed by, yet they seemed innoculated against the idea
you could follow them. Like the lyric from
'She's Beyond Good and Evil', there's no antidote
for them...
No
decent footage from Brighton, so here's something from Manchester.
(With a very cool backdrop...)
...and
speaking of 'Where There's A Will', this this is
something of a gem. Back-in-the-day footage from Belgian TV, with the
band showing a somewhat... deconstructive approach to lip-synching...
MOGWAI
Brighton
Dome, Sun 26th Oct
At
times, I confess to having something of a love/hate relationship
with Mogwai. Their epic soundscapes can seem no less than
soaring, as if looking down on straight song structure from a
majestic height. Yet it can also sound expansive yet arid,
portention at the expense of substance, cinemascopic in width yet
screen-thin in depth.
One
way to look at them might be as the counterbalance to Sigur Ros. When catching Sigur Ros live, I became quite insistent their
music shouldn't be portrayed as “merely some kind of template, a
big cavernous space onto which the listener can project what they
want to imagine”. A description which ironically does
seem to stick to Mogwai, so often used in soundtracks. Put their
music on top of almost anything and it would most likely magnify it.
Sigur Ros may be like a Romantic painting, and indeed live they used
quite bucolic nature imagery as a backdrop. While Mogwai come with a
gleaming bright lighting rig that borders on abstract art.
They
pre-load the set with some of their softer material, and to be honest
nearly lost me at that point. They seemed a shadow of their former
combustible selves, and I came to long for some fire in the bellies
of those guitars. Plus, while I'm quite happy for their tracks to
include the human voice, conventional lead vocals don't seem to lend
to their strengths at all.
From
there, thankfully, guitars started to spark up and more sonic
variation appear. One track, unusually foregrounding keyboards, had
the prog-meets-arcade-game ring of Goblin. For another the band lined
up at the front of the stage for a wall of fuzz guitar. But one with
the sweetest of tunes held within it, like a butterfly in a bottle.
And
yet once the noise arrives it came to be the quietest parts which
spoke the loudest. There's something to those stately tempos, like
they're the antidote to the modern world of just-in-time economics. (Slow being the new fast, and all.) There are those who dismiss
the band as ponies with one trick – dynamic contrast, setting up
the noodly kindling of a track to toss a guitar explosion in midway.
Yet, for example, '2 Rights Make 1 Wrong' is
almost a spiritual for us unreligious types, combining the genuinely
hymnal with a kind of Christmas-lights twinkliness. (Maybe they're
one of those bands you really should see on a Sunday.) But it took
set-closer 'Mogwai Fears Satan' to sum it all up.
Yet there is a guitar outburst mid-way, but the loudness is there to
enhance the quiet parts rather than the other way around. It's the
sonic equivalent of looking at a colour field painting, music to
bathe in. The guitar notes sounded so delicate they were almost
dissolving as they reached your ears.
If
I didn't like everything they did... well, I don't like everything
that Mogwai do. But when these guys get good, they can get very good
indeed.
Talking
of 'Mogwai Fear Satan'... (Alas it cuts before the
end. And at times the camera can't capture the full range of sound.
But surf YouTube and that would seem to be the general rule.)
ANTEMASQUE
Concorde
2, Brighton, Monday 13th Oct
Antemasque
are a successor band to legendary American hardcore outfit At the
Drive-In, featuring vocalist Cedric Bixier-Zavala and former bassist
Omar Rodrigues-Lopez, now on guitar. ATDI were like the
featherweights of hardcore, balancing out the piledriver heavyweights
like Black Flag or Nomeansno. (Maybe Fugazi were the welterweights. I
am probably reaching now...) Their tracks were writhe, wiry and
dynamic, capable of taking unexpected moves. Had you been foolish
enough to try and wrestle one, you'd have been held to the floor
before you knew it.
Music Emissions called them a “chaotic balance of adrenaline
and intellect”, which seems about as close to pinning them as
anyone's likely to get. Though commonly dubbed 'post-hardcore' they were more like a hardcore and an art rock band somehow happening
at once – Sonic Youth and the Ramones as conjoined twins.
Yet,
though a keen ATDI fan who never managed to see one of their frenetic
live shows I couldn't muster the enthusiasm to see either of the
earlier successor bands, the Mars Volta or Bosnian Rainbows, when
they came to town. Which, judging by the relative size of venues, was
a common choice. They seemed to have all the intellect yet a
deficiency of the adrenaline, taking things in a jazzier, proggier
direction which left me less than keen to follow.
Not
so this time.
Yet
if I'm here because Antemasque are back to the patented ATDI sound,
in a way that could bring its own set of problems. Not having been in
the room at the time I can't offer any special insight, but its
notable the band split soon after hitting their creative peak with
the acclaimed 2000 album 'Relationship of Command'.
Perhaps they simply figured their work here was done. As Omar himself
has commented “if you're not moving forward, you're stagnant. And
that's no way to be”. Which left me initially apprehensive of
Antemasque sounding a bit apres.
Notably,
however, they play no ATDI tracks and seem keen to strike out on
their own. Truth to tell their trajectory may well be the opposite
direction to the Mars Volta, straying more into conventional rock
territory. Guitar solos start to creep in, and at times you hear the
echoes of Led Zeppelin. Watching Cedric's unmissable wild mane in
mid-toss, whereas once it resembled the MC5's Rob Tyner now its
starting to look like Robert Plant. Now as the record shows I love Led Zeppelin as much as the next
music fan, and besides its more a raw Sixties sound than stadium rock
they're channelling. But my feelings are mixed as to whether its a
sound Omar and Cedric should be straying back to. It can at times
feel like avoiding stagnation via reverse gear. Perhaps significantly
they've reverted to the world of singles, releasing no less than four
in the month of April.
Yet
overall, if they don't match previous heights they're still coming up
with damn fine tracks put across with no small amount of conviction.
And their lack of adherence to the old sound is made most unmissable
by a lengthy trance-out soul track, the sort of thing Van Morrison
went in for in the Seventies. Turning up late in the set like beamed
in from elsewhere and featuring Cedric uncharacteristically cooing,
it was about as enthralling as it was unexpected and swept the whole
of us away. It suggests perhaps than rather than old-timers living in
the shadows of past glories, Antemasque are a new band still forming
their sound. I would tell you the name of it if I knew myself.
This
isn't it...
Coming soon! Probably more music stuff...
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