The Green Door Store,
Brighton, Fri 19th August
Featuring both the guitarist and
drummer from Bo Ningen, pyschedelic noise purveyors and Lucid Frenzy fave, Xaviers might seem their side project. But they're dominated by the
keyboards of Kenichi Iwasa, the guitar lines often as metronoic as
the drums. In fact for the one section the guitar takes to the fore
he immediately switches to secondary drums.
To this day, there are those who
associate space rock with prog. Yet his child's-play stabs couldn't
have been further from their sophisticated swooshes, a buzzing
biplane against a Red Arrows display. His cheap, insistent and
off-kilter lines lead the band through one long improvised number.
They're strongly Krautrock influenced,
never a bad thing in my book. And Krautrock of course can mean either
the propulsive rhythms of Neu!, so much a forerunner of the
repetitive beats of dance music, or the deranged freak-outery of
Faust. Except Xaviers somehow manage to cover both of those styles at
the same time. It's a set which lurches forward like a drunken robot.
Imagine the clanking castle on chicken legs of 'Howl's
Moving Castle' combined with the humanising imperfection of
Wall-E. (This analogy is handily pictured.) You were never quite sure
whether it would be able to keep going, while it actually assaulted
your senses for a full set length with none of the longeurs impro can
lead into.
From listening you'd have no idea how
proficient the musicians were or even if they had any idea themselves
how it was working. It might have been propelled by sheer forward
motion for all we knew. And it's refreshing to see such a safety last
approach to taking to the stage. The band name comes, I would assume,
from the psi powered head of the X-Men. And they certainly seem
possessed of advanced telepathic powers.
An earlier, and less keyboard-led, set
from London...
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