RHIANNON GIDDENS/ CHRIS WOOD (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

RHIANNON GIDDENS (with FRANCESCO TURRISI)
St. George’s Church, Brighton, Sat 23rd Nov

If I’ve not seen Rhiannon Giddens’ rootsy Americana before, five years ago I did catch Dom Flemens, her compatriot from the old-time music outfit the Carolina Chocolate Drops. At the time I found Flemens the Flava Flav of roots music, broad of smile and as good-humoured as he was black-humoured. 

And you could go some way portraying Giddens as its Chuck D, righteous and soulful. Except she’s at the same time its Lisa Simpson, even if she clutches a banjo rather than sports a sax. She’s as transmissive of knowledge as Flemons was infectious of smile. Back-announcing a song about the slave trade, she confesses she’s “that girl at the party” who never lets that sort of thing go. (I don’t know who Flemons would be from the Simpsons. The analogy kind of breaks down there.)

If her staple is roots, a lot of branches turn out to have roots. And the set ranges from acapella folk to Vaudeville show tunes to Gospel. (Yes, Gospel in a Church!) A range extended further by the presence of Francesco Turrisi, who brings in the Mediterranean and South America. The first half closes with a Southern Italian number believed to cure sufferers of spider bites. (No idea if it works, but it’s so exuberant I expect it got the spiders dancing.) They joke about the seeming incongruity of combining the banjo with the Iranian dram, which at least in their hands sounds pretty awesome. Maybe Twenty Twenty will be all about the Banjo/Dram genre.

Giddens programmes all this smartly, closing the set with a poignant acapella vocal about migration, eschewing even a microphone, then following that slug of hard stuff with a rousing Rossetta Thorpe singalong. (For “that girl at the party”, she knows how to party.) And she inhabits each different number, sassing up the show tunes.

But perhaps it fared too far to hold your interest throughout. The highs were no less than sublime, the sparse but precise musical accompaniment, seemingly aware of precisely what was required and what wasn’t, perfectly underlining her vocals. She mentioned the title track of the new album, ’I’m On My Way’, being put up for a Grammy, though it seems way too good to win.

Yet at the other end… An Irish shanty didn’t really come off for me. While I confess folk instrumentals usually lose me, I fared better here than I might. Perhaps because, despite its hokey image, the banjo actually has a spiky sound. Even Turrisi’s tambourine solo worked better than that dread description might suggest, but was still a tambourine solo. (Though I did enjoy the sight of him tuning tambourines, surely the mark of the perfectionist.)

Giddens was originally conservatory trained, but gave it up to reach for music’s roots. And her voice can be an effective instrument indeed, with that unflamboyant inner-strength quality. But it does at time retain the rather mannered diction of the world, which cuts against the sense this music is the history of the socially excluded. Not to suggest you can only sing if you’re straight outta Compton. Just that music is often a dish best served raw.

Speaking of Grammy-nominated numbers…



CHRIS WOOD
The Ropetackle, Shoreham-by-Sea, Sun 24th Nov

The one Chris Wood album I actually own, ’Trespasser, always impresses me with the different styles of songwriting it combines. Unusual for folk, which can at its worst feel a restrictive genre. Whereas this gig seemed to more-or-less stick to one style. Possibly because the set-list skewed to the new album ’So Much To Defend’, skipping ’Trespasser’ altogether. But on the other hand that one style was to prove fertile.

He does one song about that great folk staple Superman, in which the big S is reluctantly forced to give up on all that truth and justice business. It employs, and employs well, the comic trick of contrasting the big against the small. (Imagine Superman leaving a note to stop the milk.)

But he has a more common trick, in both senses of the word. He tells an anecdote about getting chucked out of Art College after his photography displayed only “an eye for trivia”. (Not least because ehe was supposed to be studying Graphic Design at the time.) It’s a line he likes enough to put on the front page of his website. For, as he points out, that’s the eye he’s been using ever since.

Contrast him to Bob Dylan, who would fill his songs with iconoclastic characters such as the Jack Of Hearts and Einstein Disguised as Robin Hood. Whereas Wood’s songs feature common folk such as chip shop owners, long-suffering Ebbsfleet football fans and Maureen who’s just learnt how to Skype her grandkids. The title track of ’So Much To Defend’ would be a good example, a series of snapshots of everyday life not so significant in themselves but whose effect is cumulative. They start to compose a bigger picture, albeit one which only has time for the little people. He then drops in a line such as “To the masters of the universe we are naught but fertiliser/ What kind of beast is man”.

And of course he’s right. Evil is always banal. There’s nothing grand or thrilling or even very interesting going on inside Trump’s orange dome or Johnson’s blonde coiffure. They’re not even particularly good at being bad, they’re just petty and grasping. It’s the everyday where life happens. Orwell’s famous line, “if there is hope it lies in the proles”, hovers behind a lot of Wood’s songs.

And his stage persona comes in here, which is… well, it’s not to have a stage persona at all. He professes to dislike “shows”, where everything is rehearsed to the point of rote. That doesn’t turn out to be a problem here.

When he walked out solo, I did feel my expectations shrink. The last time he’d fronted a trio, which seemed one too many. A duo would seem just right. You only need a little colour with Wood, as a little colour goes a long way with him. However, the one-man-band set-up did throw the focus onto the lyrics, and this is odds on to be the most words-foremost gigs I’ve heard this whole year. (Blanck Mass, still to come, seems unlikely to beat it.)

In fact, so much did I enjoy this, that when he suggests it was Spider-Man’s father who came out with the “with great power” line, I didn’t loudly object. Which is really the first time ever.

YouTube seems sparse for live Wood. This is something on the tour before this…

THE COSMIC DEAD/ PREOCCUPATIONS/ STEVE EARLE/ FORT PROCESS DISPERSION/ RADIO 3 EXPOSURE (SUMMERTIME GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

THE COSMIC DEAD
Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Thurs 12th July

On my second sighting of the Cosmic Dead, I remain as convinced as ever of the virtue of their collision of space rock with noise. (And before anyone starts, I know officially space has no sound to make noise in.)

Among the many reasons to despise New Age music is it’s fondness for star field backdrops, like they see the universe as some giant chill-out room complete with twinkly little lights. The cosmos… the actual cosmos is vast, unknowable, full of convulsive forces which would tear us apart in an instant. The drummer’s T-shirt promises “the light will devour us all”, which seems to sum the whole thing up quite nicely.

In fact since last time the band have had their own upheavals, and now sport both a new drummer and keyboard player. They start, perhaps unexpectedly, by singing and playing along to the pre-show Abba track over the PA. They then launch into a full-on noise number, with just a repeatedly chanted mantra vocal at the centre of the primordial chaos. This proved a baptism of fire for some, and numbers had thinned out before that track was done. Each to their own, I suppose.

Things coalesce a little more after that initial big bang. The penultimate track even has something of a groove, with the singer spinning seemingly spontaneous words about seagulls. (After someone in the audience kept shouting about them.)

Then the final number is lumbering, monstrous and very definitely riff-led. As if the sonic assault wasn’t enough on it’s own the band, while playing, dismantle the crowd barriers and venture out into the audience. As they handed out mikes to budding primal screamers, I assumed things would only degenerate, plunging into ear-shredding chaos until the plug was pulled. But they somehow managed to regroup back on stage and hammer that riff back into shape.

Which seemed to sum up the whole thing. They’re illustrating very much the opposite of the steady stake theory of the universe. Creation and destruction not as opposing poles but ebbing and flowing tides of energy. You’re probably wondering if I’m going to go on and say it was both lucid and frenzied. The answer is yes. Yes I am.

Lo-fi but from yer actual gig! Watch out for your lugholes…



PREOCCUPATIONS
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 14th July

Preoccupations channel the music of the post-punk era, to the point be they could be a Factory signing who somehow fell through a time vortex and found themselves in contemporary Canada. There’s the freak disco of A Certain Ratio (as sighted only recently and in this very venue), to the point that when they spot a mirror ball aloft they ask for it to be lit up. But there’s also the haunted spaces of Joy Division and the “raining shards of glass” guitar sound of Keith Levene.

The guitarists often swap over to keyboards, though you’d often not know which was chosen sight unseen. Band member Scott Munro has commented “my ultimate goal would be to make a record where nobody knows what instrument is playing ever.”

They use cross-rhythms, the drummer in particularly could often be playing in the opposite direction to the rest of the band. (In, you know, a good way.) But the rhythms are themselves often pretty off-kilter, which makes for music weird down to it’s very marrow. The result sounds spectral and visceral at the same time, like a hand passing through a wall that still punches you in the chest.

Most people will know about the controversy over the band’s original name. Now they are no longer trading at Viet Cong, there doesn’t seem much reason to still bring the thing up. But in a way it shows how dodginess differs through the generations. Sixties anti-war activists would often uncritically champion the Viet Cong, in order to neatly divide the world into Yankee Imperialists and freedom fighters. Whereas now the term’s just become a sign, detached from any context and interchangeable with other signs - the way the coins in your pocket are interchangeable. And the only thing worse than bad politics is no politics.

Different venue but same tour…



STEVE EARLE + THE DUKES
The Dome, Brighton, Tues 17th July

Despite his high reputation and multiple years of service, I wasn’t previously very up on American country artist Steve Earle. In fact the catch-up nature of the experience reminded me of seeing Richard Thompson in this venue seven years ago.

So much so, in fact, I’d be tempted to call Earle the Richard Thompson of country. Both have been making music since the late Sixties (’68 and ’67 respectively). Both gigs focused on recent material but kept up a high hit rate, despite Earle playing the best part of two hours. Both gigs focused on roots music, but weren’t so exclusive as not to pull on several roots. Earle took in rock’n’roll and blues, including a cover of ‘Hey Joe’.

Earle is regarded as a more political songwriter than Thompson, something that comes up in his choice of emblem (a skull combined with a hammer and sickle) and his ’tween-song chat. (He is, it transpires, not the greatest fan of his current President. Can’t imagine why.) But rather than polemics he mostly writes character songs, which is often the best way into politics anyway, so even there the difference isn’t so great.

There was a strangely familiar deja vu effect where I’d keep imagining I’d heard songs before. Even if I have heard more Earle than I remember, it couldn’t have been in those numbers. I suspect it’s more a mark of their rootsiness, they work in so well they feel like they’re already in your blood on first hearing.

I may be remiss not just on Earle but Country in general. After the Thompson gig, I did manage to catch up on him at least a little. Whereas, several years back, after seeing Emmylou Harris (again in this venue) I vowed to start digging into her catalogue. But alas life intervened. There’s neither enough hours in the day, nor days in the week. Hopefully, I’ll have more luck in Earle’s case. If anyone has a favourite album to recommend…

From the gig! Yes, really, from the gig…



FORT PROCESS DISPERSION
De-la-Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sun 15th July

This “dispersion” was described by organisers Lost Property as “an all day building takeover at the historic and magnificent De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill”, as a warm-up for the full-on Fort Process in September.

Among all the noise assaults and musical experimentalism, The Legend of St. Winiborde was something of a surprise - though a welcome one. It was effectively a throwback to 1972, when folk music, left field strangeness and children’s TV didn’t seem like exclusive categories. It was a part sung part narrated fable, somewhat in the tradition of Oliver Postgate. The music went from charming naive melodies, illustrated by both the calm measured-voiced narration and the slideshow of simple lino cut drawings, to stranger instrumental sections.

Ostensibly it was quite a conservative story, how the natural harmony of a society is disrupted by someone who dares question things. Yet the evil apprentice figure became semi-sympathetic, perhaps even the protagonist. In other words, even his disruption became part of the natural order.

Whereas Plurals most definitely were leaving behind standard instrumentation. Two of the trio had guitars, but used them sparingly and as input devices, rather than as primary instruments. They also utilised radio voices, though I’m not sure whether they were recorded or plundered live from the airwaves.

The most common complaint about this sort of music is that it doesn’t go anywhere. But that’s just imposing rules on it from other genres, which don’t apply. First, it did develop, in the sense of shifting gears, building sounds up until they mulched into a drone, they graffiti-ing noise guitar on that wall of sound, before returning to the more ambient beginning.

But more importantly, it’s not intending to go anywhere so much as open up a space for you to get lost in. The band’s name surely comes from adding things together, not taking them forward. But there’s more to it than that…

Recently deceased Steve Ditko, genius comics creator (hurrah!) and Objectivist tub-thumper (boo!) took as his credo the phrase “a thing is what it is”. And if that sounds confining then fortunately its not even true on it’s own terms. Metamorphosis happens in nature all the time, and failure to notice it is Cro Magnon thinking calling itself common sense.

And a great appeal of this type of music is that a thing doesn’t have to be what it is, that it can’t be broken back down into notes like a sentence into syllables. Particularly with the addition of the radio voices, it had a liminal ‘between stations’ feel. Even what you hear you only semi-discern, like spying the shapes of objects in the fog.

Pursuing the radio metaphors, Johanna Bramli was less on my wavelength. Her set had its moments but was marred for me by some saccharine la-la vocals, which I just found New Agey.

The visuals, on the other hand… There’s no absolute need for a visual element to this type of music. The only thing I’d say is when there isn’t, arranging things in a traditional audience/ performer face-off becomes a bit redundant. But when there is, it should be done like this. Anything suggesting the tropes of rock videos or even any kind of narrative is clearly out.

This focused on “the brink of nature”, as the indicia said to an otherwise unremarkable exhibition elsewhere in the De La Warr. It’s the point where the natural tips into the abstract - roving close-ups of the pattern of tree bark, rock surfaces or the tide lapping on the shore. It’s not about introducing the foreign but reframing what you already see, finding the strange in the familiar.

The one thing you could say about this warm-up, without fear of contradiction, was that it was quite definitely warm. The De La Warr was essentially built for days like this, when the Channel becomes a turquoise colour field you could almost mistake for the Med, and ‘the English Riviera’ almost becomes a viable concept. (I took a few snaps, which I’ll post at some point.)

And Bolide were to conclude the afternoon playing from the outside bandstand. It would have been splendid to soak up their sounds and the sun from deckchairs, in such salubrious surroundings. Alas they were beset by sound problems, meaning half the band couldn’t hear the other half. (Something of an impediment for improvised music.) 

It concluded with someone audibly exclaiming “Thank God that’s over!”, who turned out to be a band member. Still, a grand day out overall - with the full Fort Process yet to come. It was a highlight of last year’s season, so hopes are high.

St. Winiborde and Plurals, though neither from the Dispersion…





Us true obsessives then hung around, littering up the normally neat De La Warr past sundown, awaiting...

RADIO 3 EXPOSURE
De-la-Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sun 15th July

Exposure is a series where Radio 3 tour new music venues to broadcast… well, new music. I think I have previously seen precisely two events which might be described as new music at the De La Warr, one of which was earlier that day. Café Oto it ain’t. But no matter, it’s a decent venue.

I only really took to one track from Jobina Tinnemans’ set, ’Silt’, where strummed strings were combined with some almost Goblin-like otherworldly vocals. In general, her work seems to stem from specific places and aiming to convey the weirdness of the local landscape. But that track, written about and first performed in Iceland, seemed the only one to genuinely stir up something.

Conrad Sheldrake’s shtick was to turn samples into songs - combining sound files as though they were instruments, one as the bass line, another the rhythm track and so on. He’d often run through those samples before launching into the song, foregrounding the elements which made up the collage.

His first song was dedicated to Carroll and Lear, and generally things had a comedic, absurdist edge to them. Which is something inherent in pop music anyway, waiting to be drawn out, the thin line between “Awop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom” and “Goo goo g’job.”

I kept feeling I should have liked his set more than I did. He was doing the sort of stuff I’d normally go for and was executing it effectively. The only formal drawback was his less than characterful voice. But, at least to me, he somehow failed to achieve lift-off. There was perhaps too much of an emphasis on cleverness, which can mar the bright clear pictures of pop songwriting.

It may well be that neither were natural live performers, so we were not hearing them at their best. (Rather summed up by the description of “sound artist Jobina Tinnemans performing a piano-based set”.) There’s something almost animist to electroacoustic music, as if sounds are held to embody a spirit, and so work like spells upon the listener. Whereas once the sound is detached from its source it becomes like a butterfly on a pin, something merely aesthetic.

In Sheldrake’s case, the set may have worked better had the sound files had been linked to film clips. By seeing those sounds produced (even if not live) may have linked them more with their source in our minds. But you have to take what you get.

My heart did not leap at the news Trevor Watts and Verion Weston played free jazz, a genre to which my general reaction is “respectfully disagree”. But parts of their set ventures into blues and soul, at times played surprisingly straight, at others put through some kind of organic distortion filter. True, at others, they veered back over to the other side of the highway. But I fared better than my expectation.

In the end, none of the three acts really grabbed me. Each seemed in it’s turn like the other act, the bit I was willing to sit through before my thing came on. So the night was neither a resounding success nor a crashing failure. Based on this exposure, I’d say the state of new music is fair to middling.

You can hear the whole thing on Radio 3 from Thursday.

Coming soon! After that surprise burst of music stuff in a normally relaxed July, the gig-going will now abate for more than a month. At which point the September spate will most likely arrive in earnest. Until then…

THE MEKONS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES}

St. John’s Church, Bethnal Green, London, Sat 15th July

“That had ‘em rocking in the pews”, Jon Langford jokes after one number. The rare acoustic gig turns out not to be enforced by the Church venue, or even due to their having recently made an acoustic album (‘Jura’) but by the drummer having to attend his Mother’s birthday. While the support act were the children of one of the band. Reaching forty year anniversaries while almost entirely bypassing the mainstream, they can go like that.

The Mekons may best be defined by their label, Bloodshot, boasting of “the finest folks out there playing the waters between roots and punk and rock ‘n’ roll”. Or by their own imprint, Sin, a play on the classic Sun records. Which might seem something of a left turn, given their beginnings as a post-punk band based in Leeds. (They describe themselves as “folk-punk lifers.”)

For post-punk was based around the twin imperatives of not making music which had ever been made before, and of learning as little as possible about the instrument you were ostensibly playing. It was not normally a recipe for longevity.

Whereas a move to America and an embracing of country mainstayed the Mekons. Though their appearances these days arrive Brigadoon-like amid a welter of other projects, including Lu Edwards doubling as the guitarist in the current line-up of Public Image.

The nearest comparison from recent sightings would be Blyth Power, even if they took their chess move from anarcho-punk. Yet while they’re crafted, literary and allusive, the Mekons (particularly live) are rawer, more rambunctous and perpetually edging on ramshackle. I’m not sure one number had a single singer, with many performed chorally. At one point they reassemble around the grand piano in the corner of the Church, and sing the words off a sheet.

The songs are political (they jest cheerily about jumping on the post-Corbyn socialist bandwagon) without being pedagogical. They often feel simultaneously spirited and reflective, like that vital but unsustainable jolt of punk energy was transformed into something more durable.

One of my favourite images is the narrator’s irrefutable tattoos from ’Sometimes I Feel Like Fletcher Christian’. Within the song, they represent life experience manifested as a set of illustrated scars. But I like to imagine it also stands for their songs; the way individual lines tend to be direct and straightforward, as distinct and iconic as tattoo images, while suggesting bigger connections they never quite spell out.

This clip’s neither acoustic nor in a church. Good, though…

THE LONG RYDERS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Concorde 2, Brighton, Wed 4^th May

The Long Ryders weren't necessarily the best band from the Paisley Underground scene.

(I'd probably plump for Green on Red if we were giving gold medals.) But that probably bigs up the scene rather than diminishes the band, it was hard to stand tall when surrounded by giants. Because they were a darn good band, and perhaps even the most archetypal of that scene in that they played the concept the most straight. It's recipe proved a potent one; Sixties psychedelia mixed with Sixties country rock – Creedence Clearwater Revival revived – with a dose of punk energy. Their songs served up tales of outlaws, unemployed drifters and guys just out of jail with thumping hooks and aching melodies.

Perhaps by that point American music had come to seem novel all over again. Perhaps to us Brits it felt rootsy and exotic at the same time. And perhaps it seemed a fitting antidote to replace post-punk. Whichever, by the mid-Eighties long macs and serious expressions had fairly rapidly been replaced by pudding basin haircuts, tasselled jackets and cowboy boots. Rocking out replaced studied cool. (Despite studied cool having been devised to replace rocking out in the first place. We were a fickle bunch.)

Besides post-punk was almost auto-innoculated against becoming genuinely popular; the Desperate Bicycles, Josef K and Throbbing Gristle were never going to become household names. People were supposed to not get it, that was part of the point. Whereas these guys felt like they could step from tearing up your local venue to rocking out 'Top of the Pops'. The Paisley Underground could manage a Paisley takeover.

Alas that was never to be. Only the Bangles became a hit band, and they did it by transfusing into a pop outfit. And with mission unaccomplished the scene soon fell apart. The Long Ryders didn't ride for long, a mere five years separating their first release from their last.

And things seem to have languished in obscurity since then. Despite the notion that now nothing gets forgotten, a flick through the internet suggests that many of the scene's best albums aren't widely available any more. Notably most of the audience seemed to be my age or (gasp) older, like they'd not attracted any new fans since their day. (And male. It was one of those gigs with a long queue for the Gents and none for the Ladies.)

And yet they're one of those bands who can stop for years, then pick up just where they left off. They might not be as energetic as times past, frontman Sid Griffin now has a cup-of-tea roadie and trouble reading the setlist without his glasses. But the music still packs the same punch.

Seeing them live, it becomes clear that what makes them is the combination of Sid Griffin and Stephen McCarthy. While Griffin's roughhandedly rambunctious, unabashed in leading the audience into call-and-response singalongs, McCarthy is more reserved, more melodic, more lyrical. One twangs, one jangles. It's even there in the way they're dressed, Griffin in braces and jeans while McCarthy is jacketed. It's like the difference between Micky Dolenz and Davey Jones. (Well, everything gets compared to the Beatles and Stones. Why not the Monkees?) Of the two, I prefer McCarthy. But the point is that the combination is virtuous.

The band now have a box set collection of their releases, 'Final Wild Songs'. (Though not available at the gig for some reason.) Hopefully somewhere between that and this tour they'll start to be remembered the way they should.

Let's try and prove by point by posting both a McCarthy and a Griffin clip. Mcarthy's 'Ivory Tower' from Valencia...

...and Grifin's foot-stompin' 'Looking for Lewis and Clarke' from Madrid... (I don't know why they're both from Spain.)

MUTATIONS FESTIVAL (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

All over Brighton, Sat28th/Sun 29th Nov

Mutations is the self-styled sequel to Wire's Drill festival from this time last year, put on by co-curators One Inch Badge and promising “a creative mass of genre hybrids and expression, delivering some of the most inspiring, creative and interesting music the world has to offer”.

Of all the acts, the festival was chiefly sold to me by Om - a band I've long been keen to see live. If their name alone isn't enough to suggest their trance-out sound, imagine Pink Floyd's 'Set The Controls For the Heart of the Sun' - there's the same relentlessly steady pace, the same sense of measured expansiveness. Or, as they sprang from the rhythm section of doom band Sleep, imagine doom without... well, without the doominess. Ever wondered what doom would sound like with just the transcendence, with none of the oblivion? Wonder no more.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Om is the way they can actually play so little yet conjure up such a vast sense of space – like each instrument is a flickering flame in a huge cavern. If the bass is the bedrock of their sound, its chief accompaniment is not the drums but the recited vocals. (Assisted no doubt by bassist and founder member Al Cisneros also being the vocalist.) Amil Amos' drums, liberated from their usual back-up role, throw almost dub-like rolls around the Cisneros that open up the sound.

The third member, Robert Lowe, has the commendable restraint to contribute either tambourine or nothing at all for long periods. At times he takes to a keyboard, a teeny-tiny thing still capable of providing a rich organ sound. At others he contributes vocals which could only be compared to choirs of angels. (Quite possibly from some choir-of-angels effect. But whatever the effect is, its effective.) Sometimes I'd watch him waiting, waiting. Then sing a couple of phrases and sit back again. The calm restraint was enticing in and of itself.

And rather than building the set up to a finale they have the quiet confidence to instead slow it down. Tracks extend in length and get simpler, for one extended section only bass and vocals. Though they're more hypnotically regular than drone, they perfectly epitomise something I said of drone music some time ago:

“While drone is sometimes dismissed as bliss-out and escapist, it doesn’t have to refer out to anything else in the universe because it already encompasses the universe. It doesn’t merely encompass the sound of the big and the small, it denies the distinction between those sounds. 'As above, so below' is an important concept in drone. Blake’s conception of 'infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour' is just up drone’s street.”

Before the set, we were talking about how much of a Marmite band they were – how liable to induce a polarised reaction. For me, its not too strong a word to describe them as magnificent. Then at the end I looked round after an hour of being mesmerised, to find half the room had decamped to venues elsewhere. Each to their own...

Next up on my must-see list was Josh T Pearson. His career to date consists of shrinking from a trio to a solo player, then recently expanding back up to a duo. And in the process sounding the least expansive yet. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

His first band, Lift to Experience, a trio of Texans who played Texan-sized music - psychedelia multiplied by post-rock turned up to eleven. Released in 2001, their one album almost fits with Godspeed's ambiguous apocalypse. Except in their case it was never clear whether the Biblical imagery was the only thing which captured their mighty, expansive sound or vice versa. Whichever, they were best summed up by the lyric “And I can hardly wait to hear that great trumpet sound/ Pouring down out across the land”.

His next record didn't appear until a decade later, a solo album of what Wikipedia calls “epic acoustic ballads”. Songs seemed sung with the weary reflection of someone much older, surrounded by regret and discarded beer cans. This time the defining lyric was 'Woman, When I've Raised Hell'. The brooding quality of wisdom reached too late. As if Lennon had jumped from 'Sgt. Pepper' to 'Plastic Ono Band' with nothing in-between.

The Church venue makes for the perfect setting for such songs. Pearson has a five-finger strum technique which sounds as much classical as country, combined with an ability to make his own voice sound like a choir.This can create a huge range, both sonically and dynamically, with things rising to a crescendo then falling to a mumble. It hardly seems possible to be coming from one man and his guitar.

Then midway through he introduces his new performing partner Calvin LeBaron and the tongue-in-cheek name the Two Witnesses. They sing actual old-time Pentecostal hymns, or new songs in the style of them. (Plus a cover of the Velvets' 'Jesus', never a bad thing.) Reflecting this cleaner, new direct new music he has a cleaner appearance – now shorn of beard and with a white-hat cowboy look. In their unadorned simplicity, those hymns must be about about the hardest of styles to emulate. There's nothing really to them apart from their effectiveness, they just remind you what a great songbook the hymn book really is. But, against the odds, Pearson comes through. Only the final number, playing up the gay element of singing about “his love”, was pastichy.

From the sublime to the ridiculous... only you know, the good kind of ridiculous...

Anecdotally, I got the impression most people's must-see was Lightning Bolt. And they may well have been higher up my list had I not seen them before. They comprise noise-guitar and still-more-noisy drums. If there was such a music genre as 'dayglo cartoony noise', that would be Lightning Bolt. Himself a cartoonist, drummer Brian Chippendale almost takes on the persona of a cartoon character onstage – masked and using a distortion mike throughout, even when speaking to the audience. Much like the great Melt-Banana, amid the sonic onslaught is not just melodies but catchy bubblegum pop tunes.

The surrealist George Bataille once claimed...honest, this is going somewhere... once claimed that the drive to make art was rooted into the infantile instinct to despoil pristine surfaces. That's why the child doesn't stop colouring when they get to the edge of the piece of paper. Similarly, Lightning Bolt seem to stem from the child's love of making noise. Rather than the nihilism so associated with the genre there's something joyous and uplifting about the whole thing, even as its rough and abrasive. Certainly, you can rely on a Lightning Bolt set to put a great grin on your face.

Metz had the unenviable task of following Lightning Bolt and pulled it off, but having blogged about them before I wouldn't have much to add.

The Ice Maiden vocals of Chelsea Wolfe may be as much a cliché as her too-much-mascara all-black Goth look... in fact they may well be the same cliché. But her music is as inventive as her image isn't. I was even reminded at times of Swans, the same punch-packing sonic savagery and willingness to go into sections of atonal noise. While at others I was reminded of the wall-of-sound of Phil Spector. Perhaps the problem with the studied dressing-up of Goth is, contrary to Lightning Bolt, its cartoony without knowing it. While Chelsea Wolfe's set truly did take shamanic flight for shores unknown. Hopefully she'll be back in Brighton soon...

Blanck Mass is the solo project of Benjamin John Power, one half of the inimitable Fuck Buttons. And the solo set ranked alongside the double act. Perhaps sounding similar to the parent project, but then sounding like Fuck Buttons is hardly a downside. There's the sudden drops you'd expect from dance music. But as often Power would overlay one section above another, sometimes then pulling it away to re-expose the beat beneath, like dance music's answer to 'Sister Ray'. Ultimately, I can only repeat what I said after seeing Fuck Buttons: “For a band who can go some way out there and fear no abrasion of the ears, it's intriguing how they can also set a crowd a-dancing.”

Dan Friel mixed throbbing discordant electronica with rinky-dink Casio tunes. Not alternating between them or juxtaposing them, but melding them together. It was a musical chimera, like the body of a tiger given the head of a purring house-cat. All provided by what looked like the most boffinish piece of home-made kit, leads and wires bedecked with fairy lights. The sheer impossibility of it dazzled your ears.

Despite the dodgy name, Montreal's Ought are a force to be reckoned with – propulsive post-punk with perhaps a dash of the Strokes. In a similar trick to the Fall of Flipper, the ever-insistent music is overlain by a singer sneering with arch disdain. It's like wanting to diss the whole world at once, with a band was the best way of blagging a public address system. It's the type of punk which isn't angry at its audience – just disappointed.

To combine dream pop with shoegaze guitar might seem an obvious idea. But perhaps doing it requires quite different skill sets – the melodic sense and self-discipline of songwriting versus the tight band dynamics that allow a bunch of people to take off together without getting lost. My Bloody Valentine, for example, might have often sounded like their tracks had pop songs inside them. But they stayed inside, like the gooey centre of a chocolate.

Widowspeak, however, seem capable of combining both. Singer Molly Hamilton would stand front of stage, intoning breathless sugary vocals, a little Stina Nordenstam only less little-girl and affected. Only for the band to then huddle together to create intricately interlaced guitar lines. It was like being read a bedtime story, then having your dreams take flight. Genuinely ethereal.

Arcimago started out with an intriguing question – what if Goblin had been an electronica act? )And ironically the performer was Italian, Ugo Negroni.) After all, doesn't electronica sound non-human yet possessive? Alas, as it went along it swapped strange electronica for more regular beats. Nice while it lasted...

Nature Channel served up some spiky garage rock fit to put hairs on your chest, then announced they'd not be gigging for the next six months. As soon as you come across a band... Wild Cat Strike (that's them above) provided Americana so languid steel guitar came in. Which they'd then splice with outbreaks of wall-of-sound guitar. While Saintsenaca popped over from Ohio for some of your actual from-America Americana. Some other stuff too. And of course I couldn't see everything.

Generally the festival seemed well-planned, acts starting on time and venue sizes working coping with the punters without leaving latecomers stuck outside. (If any of that did happen, I didn't see it.) And it was great to be rushing between venues when the rest of town was going mad for the Black Friday consumerfest, despite the fact it wasn't even Friday. There was, however, a strange swapping over between what would be the most intuitive Saturday and Sunday nights. While Saturday night finished up with everyone in a church in Hove listening to acoustic music, Sunday culminated with the double bombardment of Metz and Lightning Bolt. Followed by a club night going on till one. (Which by that point I was feeling too middle-aged to attend.)

Which was compounded by Christopher Owens' Saturday set not being headliner material at all. It's not so much that I didn't take to it, though I threw in the towel after two numbers. It's that most people didn't even stay as long as me, upping and leaving as soon as Josh T Pearson finished. All this most likely stemmed from the festival being planned slightly too late, when all the regular venues already had their Saturday nights booked out. But it would be worth considering should One Inch Badge decide on a follow-up...

The inevitable vidclips, a few from the festival itself but mostly from thenabouts. You'll figure it out...

Coming soon! More gig-going adventures...

THE WATERBOYS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, Mon 16th Nov

“Bexhill!” bellows main man Mike Scott at the climax of their first number. Mischievously aware that this is not the most rock'n'roll word to shout. But the gag turns out to be double-edged.

Last time they played these halls it was to revisit the classic album 'Fisherman's Blues'. Their best-known era consisted of Celtic folk with a side-order of Americana. This set starts, closes and is dominated by new numbers. (Not just taking up over a third of the set, but front-loaded in the running order.)

Last time, I made a gag about a Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman getting together. This time every member of the band, bar Scott and the fiddle of stalwart Steve Wickham, is a Yank. While the latest album, 'Modern Blues', was recorded in Nashville. An album which may well be best described by the band's own website, as “an electric, soulful, bold, freewheeling rock'n'roll record with a skinful of killer new songs”. The jacketed bass player looks remarkably like a solicitor from small-town Surrey, and makes John Entwistle look a master of stage moves. Yet he turns out to be David Hood, from the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section the Swampers.

In short, Scott truly is bringing rock'n'roll to Bexhill. A band who should have long since been stuck on cruise control come up with the most kick-ass, rootsy rock'n'roll you've heard in a long time. “I'm still a freak,” Scott sings. “I never went straight.” Wheezy, swirly organ suffuses each track, sounding like a log fire feels – like being bathed in warmth. Almost every number goes into a wig-out instrumental section, which gets unhinged even by Waterboys standards.

Even when they turn to old numbers, they get swept up in this new fervour. 'Medicine Bow, stirring and expansive in the original, is now fiery and propulsive. Then, in a fiddle-dominated coda, turns into something from the Cale-era Velvets. They even do the double from their last appearance, and provide the second time I've actually liked the hit 'Glastonbury Song'. In fact its the more traditional version of 'Whole of the Moon' which doesn't quite spark up.

Perhaps the most crucial thing is that, even as it proudly wears the influence of the great music of the past to the point of name-checking influences, its never referential. Scott is simply taking the music he likes and making more of it. Reviewing the album in the equally rock'n'roll Telegraph, Neil McCormick suggests “Scott is perhaps the closest thing we have to a Neil Young figure in British music, ranging across folk, blues and country.” And he probably is.

Its one thing to see a longstanding band and be cheered they're still coming up with decent material. Its another to walk out thinking “these guys should really be planning a live album right now. This stuff needs getting down.”

Scott's mission to take rock'n'roll to unlikely places continues with this version of 'Still A Freak' from Brussels...

...plus, from Bexhill itself, Fisherman's Blues' for the encore. With added “whoo-ho-hoos” from the audience...

'SHINE BACK AT THE SUN' (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Another Spotify playlist for those who care to listen. A grab-bag of stuff I've been listening to lately, and ocassionally even writing about on this blog. 

Including, but not limited to, Slint sounding fragile yet expansive, one of the most minimal Can tracks ever (which by Can standards is saying something),  Goblin getting infernal, Alternative TV having an existential crisis, a track by Swans and a track about swans. We don't just throw this show together, you know..

Bob Dylan: No More Auction Block

Slint: Washer

Arab Strap: Phone Me Tonight

Can: Desert

Goblin: Opening to the Sighs (Originale)/ Sighs

Tricky: Bad Dreams

The Fall: Who Makes The Nazis? (Peel session)

Big Bill Broonzy: Letter to My Baby

Dock Boggs: Pretty Polly

Pentangle: Rain And Snow

Fucked Up: Royal Swan

Tom Waits: Bad As Me

Gomez: Shitbag/ Steve McCroski (Radio One session)

Swans: A Little God In My Hands

Alternative TV: Lost In Room

”Facing the sky as the ultimate sum

Of the lives that it chose to survive

And shine back at the sun

To take the world between your bill

To leave enough and have your fill


To leave the water but drink the milk

To be a royal swan

To spin the wool with silk

To be a royal swan”

'COLOURS I'D NEVER SEEN' (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Ladies and gentlemen, the latest Lucid Frenzy playlist is now available for your delicatation and pleasure. Mostly consisting of folk, blues and country but with some of that post-punk shennaigans thrown in for good measure. Just click the header...

"Colours I'd Never Seen"

The Waterboys: 'Malediction'
Jeffrey Lewis: 'The Gasman Cometh'
Arcade Fire: 'Windowsill'
Califone: 'Salt'
The Rolling Stones: 'I Got The Blues'
Hank Williams: 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry'
Odetta: 'Make Me a Pallet on the Floor'
Pentangle: 'Train Song'
Fotheringay: 'The Ballad Of Ned Kelly'
Sandy Denny: 'John The Gun'
June Tabor: 'She Moves Among Men (The Bar Maid's Song)'
Richard Thompson: 'King Of Bohemia'
Current 93: 'Kings and Things'
Tunng: 'King'
Mission Of Burma: 'Trem Two'
The Fall: 'Riddler!'
Gillian Welch: 'Wrecking Ball'

”I met a lovesick daughter of the San Joaquin

She showed me colours I'd never seen

Drank the bottom out of my canteen

Then left me in the fall

Like a wrecking ball"

MARIANNE FAITHFULL/ GOMEZ (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MARIANNE FAITHFULL

Royal Festival Hall, London, Sat 29th Nov

Now on her fiftieth anniversary tour, the Sixties survivor par excellence takes to the stage with a steadying cane (still recovering from a broken hip) and a rapturous round of applause only rivalled by Patti Smith. (She also seems to share Smith's deep wells of formidableness, slapping down a heckler who tries her patience.)

You tend to think of Faithfull as someone who came to inherit the chanteuse and diseuse tradition. But musically speaking only a couple of tracks take up Weill or Eisler's minor-key angularity. The music itself is much more straightforward and melodic. When it works is when the sandpaper of Faithfull's husky voice scrapes up against the softness of it.

And work it mostly does. Some of the time it strays too far into the non-stickness of soft rock for me. (Though mostly during solos, over which I guess I'm generally impatient.) And Faithfull has lately been doing some more living in that lived-in voice of hers. This was mostly evident in the older songs, some of which sounded like garments she couldn't really fit in any more. Singers do need to ruthlessly drop songs, however classic, once they stop reaching the notes.

However, even though the Sixties seem almost another world compared to her later music, there were some of the old songs which still cut it. These included a mesmerising version of 'Sister Morphine' (a song she co-wrote, though she had to go to court to prove it), perhaps given a greater poignancy by her tales of her recent drugged-up hospitalisation.

However she need to rely on her Sixties or even Seventies heritage, for a good few of the brand new songs are really very good indeed. They included a declamatory number in which she takes on the persona of Mother Wolf to give her verdict on humanity and how its been faring. (Summary version – must try harder.)

If the format of her music can tend to be sandpaper against fine cloth, then the tone and subject matter of her songs tend to be bittersweet. In fact, spending an evening listening to Faithfull, you come to realise how straightforward and certain most songs are. The singer is quite definitely in love, has quite definitely fallen out of love or is absolutely sure of something in both verse and chorus. Standard songs are standardised. Faithfull tends to let a little of the ambiguities and contradictions of the real world in. (It might seem the attitude of an older and wider person, though it even goes back to her first ever single, 'As Tears Go By'.)

In some of her best songs she sings not emotively but wearily, as if the song represents not a moment of clarity but an ever-pressing burden. She covers for example the Everley Brothers 'The Price of Love'. But in perhaps the best demonstration, she opens the night with 'Give My Love to London', taking home a song about the city which took her from swinging Sixties icon to Seventies homeless junkie. As she reveals, she cannot help but have mixed feelings about the place.

This, however, is from Vienna...

GOMEZ

Concorde 2, Brighton, Thurs 21st Nov

”I wear the same shoes as anyone,

I share the same blues as anyone”

While there's that adage about not judging a book by its cover, there's no corresponding saying to stop you judging a band by its look. The Velvets, the Magic Band, Joy Division... the shots of them, the record sleeves seem inseperable from their music. So strong is the link that even when bands don't have a look, that simply becomes their look.

It was more than a decade ago when I last saw Gomez, here in this very venue. I remember being struck by the discrepancy between how they looked and how they sounded. They looked avergae, blokey, like fresher students. But shut your eyes and they sounded lived-in and weathered, making a music so soulful and rootsy it surely must have been marinading through years of experience. In particular, the rich baritone voice of Ben Otewell must surely have been shipped in from elsewhere. And yet they made those Americana-inspired albumns from a garage in Southport and a studio in Portslade. (For non-native readers, Brighton's equivalent of New Jersey.) Sometimes it really all is just a matter of being in the blood.

A decade down the road, and while they inevitably look a little more lived-in, their sheer unspecialness still appeals. (Check the photo above, they look like they came third in an ordinariness competition.) Dali famously said the only difference between him and a madman was that he wasn't mad. While the only difference between Gomez and us regular folk is that they can make the music we all like to listen to. It somehow seems to deepen the rapport, with audience singalongs induced easily despite the infamous English reserve.

However, my memory does seem to have skippied over the Sixties pop element of their sound. Sprightlier, uptempo numbers contain memorable melodies and sharp, witty lyrics. Tijuana Ladies seem able to coexist with day-trips to Manchester, in some unlikely but virtuous combination.

Everybody, including at times me, does the lazy journo trick of finding a mirror to the Beatles and Stones in two modern bands. But perhaps Gomez are the Beatles and Stones at once – rootsy and urbane. As the gig continues, I even start to picture them as some successor to the Beatles. If Ottewell is Lennon, bouncier and poppier Tom Gray would be McCartney - leaving Ian Ball as George Harrison. Like Harrison, Ball seems quieter of temperament and has a thinner voice, but one with a pleasing ability to meld to the music. And like the Beatles their various vocal and songwriting styles combine into something greater than its parts.

Quite late in the gig, Gray cheerily confides that this is their first gig for over two years. And yet it sounded they'd played every single night for that amount of time. Here's hoping it won't be another decade before I get to see them again.

'Here Comes The Breeze', one of Otewell's songs. Not a lot to see for long stretches beyond the back of heads, but the sound quality's decent...

Coming soon! More gig-going adventures...