HEY COLOSSUS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Fri 15th July

Hey Colossus’ return to our shores was twice delayed by the dread C-word and, soon as they’re on stage, they gleefully tell us in that time they’ve become “progressively worse”.

They kid, of course. But they do differ from the way they were last I saw them, admittedly back in 2015. They’re still about unleashing the full force of three guitars at once. But there’s less of a noise punch, and more of those pulsing riffs. (We need a portmanteau term for music pitched between riffs and pulses. Which probably shouldn’t be ‘priffs’.) At times it got so trancy I came to think of Neu!

Which is better? Despite my love of all things Neu! I think maybe before was better. But the new stuff’s so good it’s almost arbitrary to classify. It’s not even like awarding gold and silver, more like separating silvery gold from goldy silver.

Like previous gigs, for the second half of their set they shifted to heavier stuff. Though a little internet sleuthing suggests all tracks were from their last two releases, apart from one all-new number. Then for the finale they effectively combined the two, with a long, mesmeric piece. Which more internet sleuthing suggests might be called ’A Trembling Rose’. We may still be in the honeymoon period where just getting to see these long-delayed gigs feels blissful in itself. But this would have counted as a great gig at any point.

…and special mention for Brighton noise metal band Pascagoula, who ensured the support slot was nothing to skip. Powerful bass and drums ran the riffs, leaving the guitar free to go off, to unexpected and yet complementary places. If you went to the bar for them, you missed out.

…and, speaking of that new number, though from Nottingham…

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Concorde 2, Brighton, Sat 27th Nov

Pigs x7 (an officially approved abbreviation) are a metal/psych rock band from Newcastle. Contents are: a guitarist who seems to have stepped straight from Steppenwolf circa 1972; a singer who cheerfully if a little self-depreciatingly describes himself as “a pound-shop Freddie Mercury”, whose highly theatrical and equally eccentric stage moves often look like his morning exercises; and three other more anonymous members. (Shouldn’t that make them Pigs x5?)

It starts ably enough, with a strong rhythm section laying down some thumping riffs. Though the singer has a more declamatory bellow than Ozzy’s wails, there’s a strong Black Sabbath influence, which is often a healthy sign. It’s good. Just not great.

Then a few numbers in they start up a much more meditative beat, over which the guitarists lays sharp bursts of sonic scrawl, like graffiti on a wall. Then from there things go… well into *more* of a Sabbath direction. With Ozzy and his associates, it would be hard to miss those riffs. But equally important was their sense of dynamics. Tracks would take changes in direction which seemed unguessable in advance, yet perfectly natural as soon as they were on them. 

Pigs can at times achieve similar dynamics, but with added free-from elements. They’re kind of post-Sabbath, in the way people talk about ‘post rock’. But it’s only at times. The singer abandoning his keep-fit and shifting side-stage to take up the electronics becomes a sign that’s what’s coming up will be something good.

A reliable source of gossip states: “Earlier releases tended toward longer, drawn out tracks while the more recent releases… are predominantly shorter works.” And somewhat limited on-line listening seems to bear this out. So my hypothesis is that the band were originally like free-flowing lava, which over timed ossified into something more fixed and regular. And the tracks that stand out in their set-list are now the oldies. I’d tried to see them a few times before, but life has a habit of intervening. It may be that those were the days were Pigs were flying, and I was simply not there to see.

Could we start an on-line debate over the best way to pronounce their name? I think I favour “Piiiiiigs!!! Pigspigspigspigspigspiiiiigs!!!” You?

From Sunderland, for those of you watching in black and white. Nearly two years ago, before the singer got that Freddie tash.  (Yeah, two years ago. You lot know there was a bit of an impasse as to gig-going, right?)

“ALL BEAR MY SEAL”: IN PRAISE OF BLACK SABBATH (3 of 3)

Previous part here

Gone To the Devil

Like any band, Black Sabbath were first and foremost the combination of their individual characters, granted a generous dose of serendipity. Which we’ve hopefully seen by now. But there’s a less immediate element, the milieu of their times. Fish need the right tide to swim with. And to get that we need to look at three things…

Let’s start out with the elephant in the room, which in this case is more a horned, pointy-bearded bloke. Of course, a career-launching song which name-checked Satan soon proved to be smoking from a poisoned chillum. On top of the critical opprobrium which met their music, they soon found themselves accused of following the guy they wrote about.

Originally, this may well have been part of the plan. Steve Ignorant once said of ‘So What (in many ways as much Crass’s inaugural track as ‘Black Sabbath’) “I wrote [it] to see if there’d be a bolt of lightning… in a funny way, it was daring.” And it’s easy to imagine ’Black Sabbath’ being written on such a dare, out of the devilish delight a young mind takes from dwelling on dark things. After all, that first album was pointedly released on Friday 13th.

Yet quoting the line about Satan out of context is like taking the Tempter’s speech to John the Baptist, then claiming the Bible to be the devil’s work. After all, Osborne responds to Satan’s presence by saying (and I quote) “Oh no! Please, God help me!”

With the already-seen ’NIB’ the one exception, their songs followed orthodox theology so closely it would make much more sense to call them a Christian band. ’War Pigs’ for example brings on the day of judgement, where God punishes the wrong-doers. It’s true that the lyrics reverse things around, with the supposedly socially respectable judged, the once-mighty Generals reduced to begging God for forgiveness.

Butler has said (not unreasonably): "Warmongers. That's who the real Satanists are, all these people who are running the banks and the world and trying to get the working class to fight the wars for them.” But then Christianity can claim a history of such things.

Butler confirmed his interest in this imagery stemmed partly from being “raised Catholic”. The band all wore crucifixes not out of some ironic gesture but because they’d been given them by Osborne’s father, as good luck charms.

And as they went on they became still more assertive about this. Their third album (1971’s ’Master of Reality’), often sounds like a cross between goads and ripostes in their insistence upon a belief in “God above.” “Well I have seen the truth, yes I've seen the light and I've changed my ways/ And I'll be prepared when you're lonely and scared at the end of our days”. (Though that still didn’t stop them titling their 1976 compilation the Robert Johnson-inspired ’We Sold Our Soul For Rock’n’Roll’.)

 Because, somewhat bizarrely, the Satan tag had been affixed to them via fan and foe alike. The band’s cover interview in the catchily titled ’Disc And Music Echo’ (Oct.1970) went under the now infamous header ’Fans We Don’t Want’, so sick had they become of the association. Fans would make the sign of the devil to Osborne, thinking this would make them look cool, but the habit only irked him.

True, bands which came later did go for the gormless horned-hands gesture, just as bands who came after the Sex Pistols affected the bozo nihilism. But no-one should be held responsible for the stupidity of others.

Whereas another track off the album, ’Sweet Leaf’, seems a more spontaneous expression of where the band were at. And it’s not just a love song to a joint, it’s one where the expression gets to religious levels in and of itself. (“You gave to me a new belief/ And soon the world will love you, sweet leaf.”)

The band had come out of the hippie era. They were Jesus freaks first, even if they were Jesus lover second. ’War Pigs’ is that hippie stand-by, an anti-war number, soon followed by the ban-the-bomb ’Electric Funeral.’ And the power of love? Already covered.

Except there’s two twists to this. First, with a first album released in 1970, they were well-placed to witness the Age of Aquarius’ non-arrival. By that point it was becoming obvious to all but the most terminally stoned that playing bongo drums in the park was not proving an effective means to oppose the military-industrial complex. The same year saw the release of ’Plastic Ono Band’, with Lennon announcing “the dream is over”.

But more, those who dream most sweetly are those who sleep in the softest beds. The band all had working class backgrounds, born to be factory fodder, counter to a hippie culture which primarily came from the indolence of privilege.

Osborne would recall: "It was me and five kids living in a two bedroom house. My father worked nights, my mother worked days, we had no money, we never had a car, we very rarely went on holiday ... And suddenly, you know, we hear about 'If you're going to San Francisco be sure to wear a flower in your hair'. And we're thinking, (contemptuously) "...What's all this flower shit? I've got no shoes on my feet.”

As one telling example, in Country Joe and the Fish’s ’I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin'-to-Die Rag’ (1967) it’s the parents who send their sons to war. In ’War Pigs’ its generals who sacrifice the poor. And those getting shipped off to Vietnam weren’t the college kids of Berkley, they were the construction workers of Cleveland - with who the band had a stronger affinity.

And in the end, their sound… the thing they’re most famous for… is an expression of all this. Darker music with darker themes simply reflected darker times from those well-placed to see the tunnel at the end of the light. Butler recalled “you could see there was a lot of things going wrong in the world and no-one was talking about it.”

Yet it’s as important to say that if Sabbath took an almost perverse glee in decrying hippy optimism, they never actually broke from the bedrock of those values. The Man was still out to get you. Long hair was still good, short hair bad. In short, they bore the same love/hate relationship to hippie ideology as Dark Romanticism had to Romanticism. (Bowie, another significant figure of the early Seventies, had pretty much the same relationship to hippiness.)

And if hippies had stuck it to The Man, then Satan was perhaps the perfect father figure. As Mark Fisher said of the era:

“The Protest impulse of the 60s posited a Malevolent Father, the harbinger of a Reality Principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the 'right' to total enjoyment. This Father has unlimited access to resources, but he selfishly - and senselessly - hoards them... 

“It goes without saying that the psychological origins of this imagery lie in the earliest phases of infancy. The hippies' bucolic imagery and 'dirty Protest' - filth as a rejection of adult grooming - both originate in the 'unlimited demands' of the infant. A consequence of the infant's belief in the Father's omnipotence is the conviction that all suffering could be eliminated if only the Father wished it.”

(Yes, as said earlier, at the same time he could represent the egotistical self. Symbols are slippery things.)

But to complete our trinity let’s go back to that Butler quote, and this time take it in full: “I was raised Catholic, so I totally believed in the Devil”. True, the physical existence of the Devil is more part of Catholic doctrine than Protestant. But that last word still sounds like something of a switch.

And the era often felt just like that. Though the film they named themselves after dated back to 1963 their day saw many Satan-centred horror films - among them ’Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968), ’The Exorcist’ (1973), ’The Omen’ (1976), ’To The Devil a Daughter’ (also 1976) - you wonder if he’d got himself a new agent. Butler’s quote is reminiscent of the title character’s line in ’Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968): “I was brought up a Catholic... now, I don't know.” It’s a film which has little to no mention of God, yet is saturated by his antagonist. While in music Sabbath’s contemporaries King Crimson (formed in the same year) were named after one of the many terms for the Devil.

And this rise of Satan as movie star, once too ‘hot’ a figure for mere entertainment, went alongside the slow decline of the Church as an institution. Social upheavals led people to demand stronger meat from their movies, as a way of working through their anxieties in a newly uncertain world. It was the clash of these opposites that threw up the Devil to exemplify them. ’The Exorcist’ sums up this clash with a torn protagonist who is half priest half psychiatrist.

It became routine for horror films to be set not at a safe distance but in the modern, everyday world. Even Hammer abandoning their patented Victoriana with ’Dracula AD 1972’. (You can guess when that one was made.) Things unthinkable only a few years before became almost routine. Redemptive endings were no longer insisted on and the forces of darkness could even win, as if the world really had gone to the devil.

Sabbath instinctively tapped into that feeling through being part of it, having been brought up with a Christian moralism they now saw as falling into decline. Their dirge-like music worked as a soundtrack to the era, as if we were all transfixed by some strange new figure no-one could comprehend. But lyrically they were forever torn between the sense of falling into the blackness, of giving in to the beckoning devil and a residual hope that the kids might somehow win out. Their music became a battleground between Romanticism and Dark Romanticism. “Soundtrack to an era” might seem a cliche. But really, there’s no better term.

“ALL BEAR MY SEAL”: IN PRAISE OF BLACK SABBATH (2 of 3)

(First part here)

”Has he thoughts within his head?”

’Iron Man’, on Sabbath’s second album released later in 1970, was another song built around a riff that represented a figure. Famously, on first hearing the riff Osborne commented it sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about”. (And legend has it ’Iron Bloke’ very nearly became the title.) So this time the music comes to convey his ponderous pace, crushing all before him. (“Heavy boots of lead/ Fills his victims full of dread.”) The vocals so closely match the guitar it sounds almost double-tracked. Solitary figures tend to stalk Sabbath songs, but perhaps never more than here. 

Butler was later to explain:

“It was about a guy who had gone into space and had seen the future of the world. He came back to warn everyone about what was going to happen to the world, and he got caught up in a magnetic storm when he was entering the Earth’s atmosphere and got turned into iron – but his brain was still working. he’s trying to warn everyone about the future of the world, but he can’t speak so everyone is taking the mickey out of him all the time.”

…and there’s one thing we can be sure of here. That’s not got anything to do with what ’Iron Man’ is about. The third verse kind of takes a vague stab at it, but it’s still not something you could glean from listening to the song alone. This feels like the foot being changed to fit the shoe, a story made up around the song.

Let’s try a more literary quote. In Mary Shelley’s ’Frankenstein’, the Creature rages:

“I have love in me the like of which you can scarcely imagine. A rage the like of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one I would indulge the other.”

So the mocking misunderstanding words of the humans around him (“has he lost his mind?/ can he see or is he blind?) is the words of parents and teachers magnified. Iron Man’s destructive rage at being shunned by humanity (“Nobody wants him/ He just stares at the world/Planning his vengeance/That will soon unfurl”) equates to the more familiar “then they’ll be sorry.”

After all, rock and roll is rooted in the articulation of adolescence, in the understanding that electricity and amplifiers were invented solely to magnify your strop, when slamming doors no longer seemed enough. You don’t just get what’s in your head out into the world, but the way you feel it - turned up to eleven. Volume is one method to convey that. Grandiose metaphors is another.

So by the same token Hawkwind’s ’Orgone Accumulator’ was a science-fictional, Reichian means of describing the not entirely prepossessing subject of hippies getting stoned. (“It’s no social integrator/ It’s a one-man isolator/ It’s a back-brain stimulator/ It’s a cerebral vibrator.”) Genesis’ ’The Musical Box’ is a surrealist fairy tale about a boy murdered by a girl, whose amorous spirit then resides in a musical box, while ageing rapidly. But at root it’s a boy-loses-girl number.

…which may come across as a belittling of the track, pricking its pomposity. But it’s the opposite. Sometimes hyperbole works just by relabelling itself as metaphor. Art is not about what happened, we have the news for that. Art is about how it felt. And art less often shows us something new, and more often reframes the familiar so it appears to us anew.

”Some people say my love cannot be true…” 

...which makes ’NIB’ a sort of sequel song, even if it was written first. (Time travel, right?) Ostensibly, it might seem about the Devil getting himself another disciple. Well, selective quotation can prove most things. This time let's listen to the guy who wrote it, who said "the song was about the devil falling in love and totally changing.”

And yes, far from being some black mass hymn, this is Sabbath’s one love song. (The next nearest contender, 'Sweet Leaf', is after all sung not to a person but a joint.) In fact, it may be the consummate love song. In the greatest triumph of hippie values possible, Satan himself is redeemed by the overwhelming power of love, and becomes one of the good guys. He’s portrayed as master of creation (“the sun, the moon, the stars/ All bear my seal”) yet until now held outside of it, as if stuck in solitary.

In short its ‘Black Sabbath’ the other way up. She does not become like him, he becomes like her. The payoff line “my name is Lucifer” line is, I suspect, the Devil hanging up his title and reverting to his Christian name. (And while Satan was the Antagonist, Lucifer was a fallen angel so remained at some level redeemable.)

And there is something both glorious and endearing about this reading. Nevertheless, I think it is only the surface reading – it’s not what’s really going on. Instead imagine the crazy Iron Man trampling the whole world underfoot, then spotting one pretty young face in the crowd and pausing…

The Devil can be used to represent the point where the infantile ego runs into more adult drives, where sentences still normally start with “I want…” but no longer necessarily end with a toy being named. And so Satanism can appeal to the young because it seems a philosophical justification for playing your music as loud as you want to. As Rationalwiki have correctly commented “LaVeyan Satanism... is essentially Ayn Rand in a goat mask.”

’NIB’ presupposes this (if mostly likely instinctively), and smartly moves the story on a step. The adolescent boy’s first crush, when everything stops being about his establishing his difference to his parents and becomes about making a connection to someone else, that sudden burst of unfamiliar feelings, at the time it feels monumental. Of course it’s not “what if the devil fell in love?” That sounds more like a theology paper. It’s “what if I fell in love?” That’s what makes it such a classic song.

The line “you are the first to have this love of mine” sounds suspiciously virginal, while “some people say my love cannot be true” conjures up disapproving in-laws more than orthodox Churchmen. But it’s the extended, repeated “I’m going to feel”, throwing that feeling business into the future tense, which really gives the game away. The imagery is about the old world being over, and the bonding of the new world being love. (“Leaving the life you led before we met.”) Now, suddenly, it’s all about the sharing.

Final part of our unholy trinity coming soon...

“ALL BEAR MY SEAL”: IN PRAISE OF BLACK SABBATH (1 of 3)

”Figure In Black Which Points At Me”

Any band’s first task is to sound like themselves. That’s if they want to climb out of the footnotes of music history. Which is not as easy as it sounds, in fact arguably they’ll face no harder task. But it’s like shaking a six. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the game, that’s the point everything actually starts.

And with Black Sabbath we can pin the moment quite precisely. In 1969, then still a heavy blues band called Earth, they wrote a track the decided to call… well, ’Black Sabbath’. Later described by guitarist Tommy Iommi as “the first time I knew we had something different.” Their contemporaries Led Zeppelin continued with the blues covers, which they were able to adapt. Whereas for Sabbath to be Sabbath, they needed to abandon them.

We fans can fixate on lyrics. But bands normally come up with the music first then devise words to fit. Rather than developing some philosophical point, lyrics come to be about evoking and amplifying the music’s mood. Sabbath were no exception, Iommi normally finding a riff on guitar, Ozzy Osborne then scatting lyrics over it which would be later worked up into actual strung-together words by bassist Geezer Butler.

Except this time everything, even the riff itself, seems devoted to the sound, so ominous as to be almost droney. While the words ostensibly describe some malevolent apparition (“what is this which stands before me?”), what the dread figure mostly seems to manifest is the power of the music. There’s an almost brazen lack of context, in which the nightmarish figure just appears in order to evoke the mood which powers the song.

The mood’s set in the opening seconds with the tolling of a bell - doleful, intonatory, resounding. When the guitar breaks in it’s more powerful, but it takes up all those elements. (They’d later play a similar trick by starting ’War Pigs’ with a siren.) Brian Eno was later to compare hard rock to (yes, really) bellringing, pointing out both evoked the feeling of “immersion in solid, thick, dense sound.” In other words, where sound stops being intangible and becomes almost a physical presence, something you feel as much as hear.

Where the song has the line “turn round quick and start to run”, the ominous music has quite the opposite effect. Chords don’t make their point and leave; once struck they hang around ponderously, thickening the air. There’s a terrible stasis to it. The drums do most of the work, but rather than drive the track along they cycle and shuffle. The oppressive, momentum-less sludge of sound adds to the (in about ever sense) heavy notion that time has stopped for you just when you needed it most. It’s reminiscent of the way horror fiction can used stopped clocks as a sign of the supernatural.

The ‘poem’ on the sleeve, mostly an overblown emulation of Edgar Allen Poe, refers to “the silence that surrounds and threatens to engulf all those that would listen”. And that silence seems pretty close to their sound.

Butler has claimed the song came from a dream he had, of a black-hooded figure appearing at the foot of his bed. And the track conveys that fever-dream feeling of immobility, of being in the presence of danger but unable to run from it.

And Osborne’s vocal performance adds to this notion. He was, to use a much-misused term, a natural. He never seemed to be performing the songs so much as living them, and here he sounds a mixture of mesmerised and petrified. Hard rock singers tended to be either Teutonically heroic or sexually frustrated. Ozzy, conversely, is a powerless protagonist. Imagine Robert Plant singing about meeting Satan. He’d either strike a deal or strike ol’ red down. Ozzy emits a high-register wail. (And frankly, so would I.) Typically his voice often works in counterpoint to Iommi’s riff, sitting above it and offering a more melodic line.

The feeling is so funereal it almost becomes liturgical. Is our narrator transfixed, unable to escape the pull of this malevolent power, or does some part of him want to stay where he is?

It epitomises this music’s predilection for Dark Romanticism. It’s a self-styled ‘black’ number whose darkness is strangely ambiguous. The creeping dread, the fear of dark forces is combined with a feeling of sublimation which is almost comforting. Our narrator seems simultaneously marked man and “the chosen one”.

In Dark Romanticism, the supernatural is often a means of conveying the natural, reframing it as an incomprehensible and overwhelming force. Being overcome by the ominous presence is akin to the surrender of being swept up by a raging storm, a sense of rejoining the all just as you’re obliterated.

A subject on which Wikipedia quotes GR Thompson: “Fallen man's inability fully to comprehend haunting reminders of another, supernatural realm that yet seemed not to exist, the constant perplexity of inexplicable and vastly metaphysical phenomena, a propensity for seemingly perverse or evil moral choices that had no firm or fixed measure or rule, and a sense of nameless guilt combined with a suspicion the external world was a delusive projection of the mind - these were major elements in the vision of man the Dark Romantics opposed to the mainstream of Romantic thought.”

Most people know how the track and the quickly renamed band got their name, a phrase which shows up nowhere in the lyrics. It was from a poster they saw for a Mario Bravo film. And horror films rely more on evoking a mood than ostensibly similar genres such as thrillers. They can be cliched or even ludicrous but if they can succeed at tingling your nerve-endings you’ll carry on watching. And they can rely heavily upon music for that effect. For fear is almost the opposite of reason. Unlike words or plot, music can bypass the brain and provide a short-cut to the senses.

Horror worked for Sabbath the way science fiction worked for Hawkwind. It was more than just a gimmick or handy tag, it was a perfect analogy for their sound.

Most people also know that impetus for this sound came largely by accident. Literally so, Iommi injured his fingers and adapted by tuning his strings more loosely. Yet just as importantly there’s something reductive about it, taking a hard rock sound that most had thought simplistic in the first place and condensing it further. And this is precisely where the genius lies. Taking something out can add to the overall picture, just as adding too much starts to take away. And Sabbath were consummately creatively reductive, boiling music down to some primordial essence.

The track also demonstrates how much the band were masters of dynamics, with an unerring instinct for just when to break it up. Each section of a Sabbath song can be in itself bone-crushingly simple, yet as it arrives it takes things into a surprising turn. Their talent lies in putting the pieces together. (It’s only really the singles which follow the straight verse/chorus structure.)

It’s bizarre now to think how derided the band were by the contemporary music press. But this stripping-down, combined with their working class origins, goes a long way to explain it. In the early days of Prog this was proof positive these Brummie oiks were know-nothing numbskulls!

What gets written about is often not what deserves to get written about, but what is easiest to write about. And Sabbath weren’t like a jewelled mechanism composed of a thousand intricate and glistening parts, something which requires an expert to explain to you how it works. They were more a simple implement such as a Neolithic hand axe, something that wasn't altered much over millennia because it couldn't really be improved on. They defy analysis the way Homer Simpson defied brainwashing by the Planetariains, by sheer dumb insolence.

Of course as we all know now it was the critics who were cretins and Sabbath created a whole new style of music. (More than one if we were to count black metal, sludge metal and stoner rock as different things.) But they also had a huge influence outside of all that. In his seminal treatise on post punk ’Rip It Up And Start Again’ Simon Reynolds compares Sabbath to… deep breath… early Pere Ubu, early Joy Division, Wire, Black Flag, Killing Joke and Tubeway Army! And I say, why no Throbbing Gristle while we’re at it?

Alas however, first drafts of history are most commonly messy and that first album caught them too soon, mid-transition. ‘Wicked World’ is the only song to survive from the Earth days, but more than a few plodding blues numbers cleave to that earlier time. It’s a bit like if tracks from Warsaw had made it onto the first Joy Division album. Luckily for us, they went on to do five further albums where none of that would be a problem…

Second part incoming…

SLEEP/ PARTIAL FACSIMILE/ ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

SLEEP
Concorde 2, Brighton, Thurs 3rd Oct

I possibly enjoyed this gig by classic Californian doom metalers Sleep even more than the last time, perhaps due to the smaller venue. It remains the combination of heaviness and unhurriedness which is so masterful, tracks developing at their own pace, the sound taking time to marinade. (Creatively described by the band as “rifftuals”.) It thickens to the point where it’s impossible to tell bass from lead for long periods.

Though another change from the earlier gig is the release of their post-reunion album, ‘The Sciences’. In fact the set list leans heavily towards it, not always a welcome development but which happens here without marring things in the slightest.

Perhaps a factor here is their original split being caused by outside events. Their label baulked at releasing ’Jerusalem’, consisting as it did of one long track, a blow which effectively killed the band. (Though happily it was later released in a still-longer version as ’Dopesmoker’.) Which led to a decade of what would have been their history being snatched away.

But now it’s as if, after being rudely awoken, Sleep went back to their slumbers and picked their dreams up precisely from where they left off. (Some tracks were already demoed pre-hiatus.) True, they’re no longer with their original drummer Chris Hakius. But Jason Roeder, having sat the stool with Neurosis for nearly two decades, makes a fitting replacement.

I’ve never heard the first album, made when they were still a four-piece, but the consensus seems their sound was then still emerging. Maybe they needed to reduce to a trio to hit on it, simultaneously tight and enormous. There’s one long number…. well there were lots of long numbers but one in particular… where each instrument took it turn at the fore. You might expect it from the guitar. It also included the drums, while the fret players threw out resonances. And, believe it or not, the bass. When there’s effectively a bass solo and I’m staying with it, that suggests a band which could do pretty much anything.

’Sonic Titan’ from London…



PARTIAL FACSIMILE PRESENTS ‘MEDIA OS 5.1’
Rilato, Brighton, Sat 28th Sept

Partial Facsimile describe themselves as “a Brighton based surround-sound and visual-art collective specialising in research based projects, film soundtracks and site-specific performances.” I caught them four years ago providing a splendidly sense-shredding soundtrack to the classic ‘ Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’.

This show, ‘Media OS 5.1’, is about our modern information-drenched world. Or, as they put it, “the piece discusses the present overconsumption of digital information and its entertaining, yet beguiling effects on human behaviour.”

The two pieces are almost entirely different, as if each were worked out from the ground up. The only real similarity was the live film, though this time it was their own work and very much an accompaniment to the music. It felt, truth to tell, like a gig with an accompanying film. A series of songs, even if they were given linking sections.

The music was very post-punk in nature, channelling Joy Division down to the clattering metallic drums. If that description makes them sound derivative, it shouldn’t do. It was at the same time highly inventive, with each track being given a distinct character. Musicians swapped around, but the best moments may have been when three guitarists amassed for a sonic onslaught - post-punk into post-rock. And besides, as they say themselves:

“Partial Facsimile, has taken its name because we believe there is no such thing as any concept or product truly being original. We build on previous knowledge and apply our interpretation of the present through improvisation and composition.”

The weak spot, however, was the lyrics - which tended to the hackneyed. Pleas to consume less feel like the equivalent of those Sixties songs which went “hey Mr. Businessman, throw your tie away”. When the music’s effective at evoking a mood, as it is here, there’s no need for words to spell any of that out. It’s show not tell. (And let’s remember with Joy Division the lyrics tended towards the personal, any application of them as social comment lay in the mind of the audience.)

Perhaps the main thing about music should be the music. After all, many of those Sixties songs about “Mr. Businessman” are still good musically. Yet the film-show kept dragging your attention back to the lyrics. It was bookended with footage of tube travel. Which didn’t go well with the retro sound, as tube stations have scarcely changed any since Joy Division were around.

One sequence showed a QR code (those things which look like a crossbreed between a barcode and a crossword, and link to a website) as captivating a hopeless consumer with its array of wares, the Mephistophelian demon which has you convinced that it’s your servant. But there was also a QR code onstage which we were encouraged to snap to get extra info. (Useless to those of us without those cleverphones.)

The problem with this isn’t hypocrisy (we’re all going to be consumers to some degree so long as we live in a consumer society), so much as missed opportunity. With this sort of material there’s always going to be some conflict like that, and the best thing to do is to play into it rather than avoid it.

Which may be why music to capture our new quasi-virtual world is more commonly the electronica overload of Black Dice and others. Psychedelic music’s disorientation of the senses was back then an antidote to the workaday, suit-and-tie world, the sonic equivalent of Dali’s distroted timepieces. Electronica virtually reversed that, capturing the fear but at the same time the seductive sense of information as intoxicant.

My reaction to this mixed-media show was… well, mixed. My immediate reaction was to try and focus on the music itself and disregard all the surrounding themes. While… oh, the irony… the multi-media effects made that difficult.

A track from the album (as in not live)…



ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE
Patterns, Brighton, Sat 5th Oct

I could not now tell you hopw many times I’ve seen Japanese psychonauts Acid Mothers Temple, though it’s possibly now more than any other band. And I think it’s been long enough to pick up a change in their approach…

Time was when their fluidity seemed their strength. Their name was always appended with an ever-shifting second half (such as the Melting Paraiso UFO Club), with it shifted their line-up and with that their sound. All of which seemed part of the hippie philosophy of constant change, to give routine a moving target.

Their most recent release, ‘Paralzyed Brain’, bought at the previous gig to this, still specifies their line-up as “at the time of this recording”. But this may be the first time I’ve seen them with the same line-up twice in a row. And they’ve now dropped that second half to their moniker. (There’s still countless side projects, but they stem from an Acid Mothership.) Perhaps, after years of permanent impermanence, all that stardust is finally starting to coalesce into constellations.

Not that any of this holds them back in the slightest. Even when they play classic tracks from their catalogue, they always give them a new twist. Try this version of ‘Cometary Orbital Drive’, (actually from Brighton) with the languid mantra-riff guitar offset quite awesomely by the tight, urgent rhythm section…

'SILENCE'/ GNOD/ THE NECKS (GIG-GOING + BRIGHTON-FESTIVAL-ATTENDING ADVENTURES CONTD.)

‘SILENCE’
Black Rock, Brighton, Fri 24th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

Teatre Biuro Podrozy (aka Travel Agency Theatre) is an alternative theatre company, operating from Poland since 1988. The publicity reminded me of those Nineties-era performance outfits that came out of squat culture, such as the Mutoid Waste Company or the Dogs of Heaven, some hallucinogenic blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Mad Max set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Yet squat culture was essentially extinguished by Britain, by the simple if brutal expedient of extinguishing squatting. But the Mutoids themselves left the UK for less oppressive climes, so perhaps all that survived elsewhere…

This outdoor performance was described by the progamme as concerning “the continuing story of refugees and migrants caught up in a spiral of war and the dream of escape”. They specified this was in relation to the Middle East, but I was soon wondering whether that was being filtered through a Polish experience of history, a country in Sylvia Plath’s phrase “scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars”.

The fiery wheel from the publicity image soon appears and becomes a defining metaphor for what followed, as settlers were plagued by successive waves of marauders. The first batch (seen in the illo) look Medievalist, but are soon replaced by a more modern army - as if we’re watching history on fast forward. While the settlers inhabit the stage the marauders often raise themselves off the ground, through stilts or wheels.

The performance well employs the physicality of the theatre. We’re well used to upsetting images shown via a screen, to the point they don’t upset us any more. Whereas you have quite a different reaction when the smell of real fire reaches your nostrils.

But the circularity of the fiery wheel, while driving force, also become a confine. It’s a short show, less than an hour. But to escape repetition each iteration has to add new props. Which at times make it one of those theatre shows where everything is doubtless symbolic of something or other. (Those metal poles, presented by the marauders as if a gift? Not a bleedin’ clue, mate.) Not performed with direct sound, the show had to be highly choreographed, which might well have added to this ritualised sense.

But there was an effective ending, largely through presenting so seemingly prosaic an image. The settlers, presumably realising their only choice has become to flee, made paper boats. A Council worker in high-vis then ambled on to hose the stage down. It’s an open note to end on. Was this the boats finding a tide so they might set sail, or just being washed away like street litter? Something no refugee can know before they start their journey.

It has not, to be honest, been a great Brighton Festival. I found there was less I wanted to see than normal, and from my admittedly limited perspective general attendance seemed down. It’s not that stuff was bad, so much as promising but with promises that were continually not fully fulfilled, the cumulative effect of which is frustrating.



GNOD
Patterns, Brighton, Sat 25th May

Gnod are a band I’ve meant to catch live long before now. But somehow events have conspired against me, and things got to their thirteenth year before it happened.

The gig starts with the double drummers predominant, pounding a circular motif around which the rest of the band arrange themselves, almost like the Butthole Surfers. But the combined force of three… yes, three guitars soon kicks in in earnest. Gnod are, it would be quite hard to miss, a heavy riffing band. Their riffs are powerful and yet unpropulsive. They effectively hang in the air. They’re not just heavy, they’re dark and viscous. Tracks don’t progress so much as thicken.

There are vocal sections, but they don’t really seem the point of the exercise. The music itself does the talking. The set runs all the tracks together, joining them by patches of feedback, which adds to the overpowering sense. The set seems a single thing, a black monolith.

Though at times they lay on repetition to insanity and beyond, just like Sabbath back in the day they’re able to throw in unexpected changes. Guitars gang up in the onslaught but can turn against one another, less counterpoint than counter-forces in grinding tectonic plates of sound. It feels entirely unpredictable at the same time it feels unescapable.

Getting all carried away in the heady atmosphere, I came to see the set as like falling into the power of underworld demons, being smashed into pieces then reassembled in a different order. And, reading a few online reviews, I don’t seem the only one to go in for such fancy talk.

They have a (kind of) religious name. But perhaps more importantly like Swans, who they to some degree resemble, their music isn’t just powerful but overpowering, essentially oppressive. Yet, like Swans, people often talk of it in quite spiritual terms. It’s like the act of surrendering to its onslaught is in itself quite blissfull, as you trust it to take you where you need to be.

Nigh-on thirty minutes of earshred from London the following night…



Then after something that could scarcely be any more of a Saturday let-rip, along came Sunday and...

THE NECKS
St. Luke’s Church, Brighton, Sun 26th May

If I’d not had the pleasure of knowing Gnod before now, in happier news I’ve managed to catch the Necks numerous times, stretching back to Lucid Frenzy’s Ye Olde Print Days. (Even if I missed the last show.) They come self-described as “one of the great cult bands of Australia. Not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz, the music of The Necks is possibly unique.” As ever the trio provided two long, improvised pieces separated by an interval.

The first was perhaps the classic Necks experience, slow to find its way but progressing like a trickling stream with soon becomes a surging torrent. Lloyd Swanton’s hands on his double bass neck proved almost a timeline for the piece, initially providing brief snaps on the upper neck, slowly migrating down before finally starting with the bowing. Much of Chris Abraham’s piano was quite Minimalist in nature, short phrases played circularly.

Yet, however good it is to hear more Necks, the second piece was more unique and so the one which really made the night. It got going much more quickly, with Swanton bowing from the start. Abrahams played longer, more rolling melodic passages while Tony Buck largely kept to percussion. Combined with Swanton’s slow, measured bowing the effect was mesmerising.

Despite originating in Jazz, surely one of the more urban music forms, and in Sydney, not the smallest of towns, nature analogies do seem to lend themselves to the Necks. Partly to do with their unhurried pacing, partly to do with their music having a kind of understated might.

And the very last sighting, in fact, I was comparing their sound to wide open spaces. Which well matched the first section of this second number. But like a river the Necks can take strange curves. And from there it grew sharper and tighter, like a panorama shot across rolling hillsides which then shifts into close focus. (And if that seems a curveball, wait until you hear what happens mid-way through their latest DC, ’Body.’
There are several bands who could be said to match John Peel’s description “always different, always the same”. But the Necks must be prime among them.

A nigh-on seven minute excerpt, a mere smidgen of a track in Necksland…



… plus the trio in fine form in their home town. Forty-plus minutes duration, but worth staying for…

Coming soon! Blog hols...

FUCKED UP/ MESSTHETICS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

FUCKED UP
Patterns, Brighton, Thurs 24th Jan



You don’t necessarily expect a band chiefly thought of as hardcore punk to start their set with wah-wah guitar. And things gets stranger when the guitarist then pitches in some Madchester vocals, with the main mike left unattended. Finally frontman Damian Abraham (aka Prink Eyes) erupts, in about every sense of the word, his Gruffalo roar a gratification finer for being delayed.

And there seems a story behind that. The last-but-one album, ’Glass Boys’, had featured the lyrics “Life turns a page/ When we turn away/ The kids just aren’t the same/ New ways to vibrate/ I can’t hear, I can’t relate/ I can’t change again”. Leading to the suggestion its theme was “growing old in the punk scene while trying to stay true to one's youthful ideals”. (Though to listen to it was as musically impassioned and inspired as ever.)

Whereas the new album, ’Dose Your Dreams’, arriving four years later, opens with the lines “I came the way I always do/ But the things here all seem somehow new.” There’s some suggestion the band had come to regard Abraham’s distinctive voice as a bit of an albatross. Which would be like Sabbath saying that about Ozzy’s voice. But perhaps it’s so distinctive, so dominant it’s like having an obelisk in the centre of your lounge. You’ll end up arranging everything else around it.

The gig gives almost a visual metaphor for that. The previous times I’ve seen the band were in the larger Haunt, which gave Abraham more scope for stage - and often off-stage - antics. Much of what makes him such a great front-man is his ability to engage with the audience, often at quite a literal level, without getting lost in it. He is, at heart, a free range chicken. Here the smaller venue, complete with crash barrier before the stage, pens him in. Even if he continually presses ragingly against it, he’s like a battery hen pecking its cage.

Those vintage Fucked Up gigs did for your ears what spinach did for Popeye’s arms. They were all-pistons-firing shots of energy, with those added catchy tunes ringing in your ears. Here the new songs scatter like corn - some catch alight, some sound merely mainstream rock, a few like some kind of in-joke. At times all they do is disrupt the momentum. While, when they get back to the songs of the days of yore, Abraham passes around the mike, sure all assembled know those words.

Buying the album at the gig, and discovering it to be a double CD, my first thought was “okay, they’ve gone and done their ’Sandinista’.” Which, for the youngsters among you, means a band no longer sure what to do and so spreading out into trying anything. Seen that way, ’Glass Boys’ wasn’t their mid-life crisis moment at all - that’s actually happening now.

And, on first listen, I was somewhat befuddled. Even with ’Glass Boys’ effectively walling off the more-of-the-same option, it’s less a departure than a set of departures of each track from the last. It sounded like Abraham’s voice being put through a series of musical blind dates. But, it does coalesce more.

The conceit, insofar as its decipherable, seems to be that the Neo-like central character drops out of his workaday life, falls into the bigger picture and embarks on some kind of shamanic journey. Hence Abraham’s voice appearing in a series of strange encounters. (He’s called David, making this a nominal sequel to ’David Comes To Life’. Though rather than recording ’What David Did Next’ they’re really just recycling the name they hit on as a signifier for the everyman.) 

It seems entirely possible this concept was born from necessity, a thread to run through what would otherwise be a highly disparate album. (The band have said it arose some while into recording.) Still, it’s fun for all that.

I’m still not sure I’m quite ready to agree with the Guardian’s five-star review and claim it’s “an extraordinary palette of sound… the best songs of the band’s career”. There are tracks best filed under ‘fought and lost’. There’s numbers you wouldn’t recognise as Fucked Up tracks until Abraham starts signing. There’s numbers you wouldn’t recognise as Fucked Up tracks because he doesn’t sing.

This new direction seems to have come about through guitarist Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco’s newfound dominance. They both sing at points (both on album and during gig) and, it cannot be avoided, don’t have particularly memorable voices.

But the highlights are high indeed, worthy additions to the band’s canon without being merely more of the same. It contains brilliantly bonkers moments, such as a boy’s choir joining in the final chorus of a spiky punk song. It closes with ’Joy Stops Time’, a worthy addition to their catalogue despite sounding like nothing before it.

In a genre particularly beset with bands who couldn’t keep things going, in an industry that seems to more and more favour crowd-pleasing predictability, that seems a particular accomplishment. Perhaps there’s simply too much of it to ever come to a final judgement about.

The main problem, with an album heavily dependent on guest artists, may be the band beinhg challenged by ways to perform it live. Though even given that the set list is full of eccentric choices even by the band’s eccentric standards. ’None of Your Business Man’ kicks off the album with some very high kicking indeed but, despite no obvious impediments, doesn’t make the gig. Whereas the really-not-even-bad-in-a-good-way ’Love Is An Island In the Sea’ inexplicably does.

That wah-wah opening, which in police parlance I now know to be the title tack ’Dose Your Dreams’, segueing into the classic ’Son The Father’…



MESSTHETICS
The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Sun 27th Jan



During the support slot, I suspect it was not my eyes alone alighting on the king-size cowbell at the back of the stage. An icon which signifies the drum kit of Brendan Canty. For Messthetics regroup one of the greatest rhythm sections in modern music - Canty and bassist Joe Lally, ex of legendary post-hardcore band Fugazi.

Yet, though they may be the ‘names’ of this all-instrumental trio, the outfit’s dominated by the guitar playing of Anthony Pirog. Armed with an array of pedals, he’s able to make his guitar sound ever-changing. He’ll go from soaring arpeggiating, which verges on prog, to the most thumping heavy riffing. More than once, he seemed to be playing two lines at once. (I couldn’t tell you whether that was done through looping or sheer dexterity.)

Canty effectively duets with him, playing far more expansively than in Fugazi but always rhythmically. (The nearest comparison spied on these shores in recent months would be Jim White.) Whereas Lally tends to be the one holding it together. In fact, while Canty does something new to our ears, even amid the sonic assaults Lally looks as calm and measured as he ever did in Fugazi.

The challenge in describing Messthetics may be in not making them sound merely musoish, when the effect of watching them isn’t chinstroking so much as exhilarating. It’s not a series of guitar solos, it’s very much a trio and very much not a guitarist with a backing band. But it manages to retain that let-loose, all-holds-off feeling guitar solos can convey as they’re launched into. Only it keeps that feeling for pretty much the whole gig.

Amid the overall furious pace there’s a couple of slower, more serene numbers. One’s played mid-set, like a pastoral valley between jagged peaks. Canty plays brushes during it, surely a sight never before beheld.

Though there’s CDs for sale by the door, it’s very much a live experience. The thrill lies in seeing it all unfold in front of you. Catch ‘em if you can.

Same tour, but Newcastle. And with some cowbell action…

Coming soon! More gig-going adventures...

CURRENT 93 + NURSE WITH WOUND/ BO NINGEN (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

CURENT 93 + NURSE WITH WOUND
O2 Arena, Shepard’s Bush, London

Having spent the day in London, I arrived at the venue an hour before the doors opened. To discover a queue already so long it was taxing security’s ingenuity over where to put us all. With many folk who seemed to have travelled from foreign parts just to be there.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s been over three years since “everyone's favourite hallucinatory cuneiform super-group” (as they style themselves) played London, while Nurse With Wound barely perform live at all. (One between-gig gap lasted twenty-one years. I once considered a trip to Glasgow just to catch them.) The two together is pretty much the dream ticket for us post-industrial obsessives.

Nurse With Wound began with some inspired shaking and rattling. Only main man Steven Stapleton seemed to be playing anything electronic, everyone else in the ensemble has an actual or extemporised instrument. From what little I could tell, at least part of what he was doing was treating the other players until you could no longer tell the ‘real’ sounds from the processed. Always an effective way of achieving the uncanny.

From there they went into something more like ambient funk. This developed as it went on, and it was very much a buzz to see people dancing to NWW. Though it was the most conventional part of their set. But then… If generally thought of as specialising in Dadaist sound collage, in practice they’re more unpredictable than that. They’d started off like an improvising troupe, working off and around each other. (Not unlike their actual origins as a trio.) But they became a band, with an effective rhythm section. A very off-kilter band, true, but still a very effective one.

Beneath a fractured lead guitar the rhythm was lurching but firmly controlled, like a great beast familiar with and able to utilise its own weight. It made me wonder where that dumb cliche ever came from, where pre-punk bands got dissed as dinosaurs. If dinosaurs had made music it would have been awesome, and this could well be our living proof.

Their final number was, formally speaking, more familiar - electronic beats with weirdness piled up on top of them. But the beats were so relentlessly menacing and the weird sounds so weird it transcended any sense of formula. It points to the problem in spatial phrases such as ‘edgy’, which suggest you require a norm to react against. Stapleton’s been following his own pulse since ’79, and there could be years yet to come.

As with their last outing, Current 93’s set was the new release, ’The Light Is Leaving Us All’, in track order. Front man (and sole constant) David Tibet’s speciality may be song suites rather than individual tracks, disregarding all that ‘end of the album’ chatter. (The merch stall was doing a brisk trade in vinyl.) And as usual he’d completely shifted the line-up, with only two players reappearing. (Reinier van Houdt and Ossian Brown.)

With the last album/gig I’d thought of them as a jazz cabaret act double-booked with a left-field experimental troupe, playing aboard a schooner sailing into the night. Whereas this was more a return to the earlier album ’Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starr’, described as “courtly” by David Keenan in his splendid and essential history of post-industrialism. But there was also a hefty dose of folk pastoralism, with folk artist Alasdair Roberts stepping in on guitar and snatches of birdsong peppering the set.

Some while ago, I found midwinter to be the most fitting time to see Sigur Ros, when light has become a rare and precious substance. Similarly, this time of year – when the light still shines but a chill is rising – was the right time to first hear this album. Virtually the opening line is “the shutters shut dark”, with “the light is leaving us all” reiterated on each and every number. (Pitchfork are probably correct the album started with the title.) In fact as I’ve been striding through these low-sunned, leaf-littered Autumn days the phrase has kept running round in my brain. Let’s remember Autumn’s original name was the rather more religious Fall. But still, that’s setting rather than theme…

With folksy song titles such as ’The Postman’s Singing’ and ’The Kettles’ On’, Tibet’s perennial theme of the end of all things gets applied to provincial England. Which might sound like that thing where you juxtapose the horrific with the childlike. (You know the sort of thing. “Dude, it’s a kid’s cartoon character with like a hatchet in her head! Bodacious!”) Of course this is nothing so trite. 

As Aimee Armstrong puts it in the Quietus “Tibet’s music is very English and is primarily concerned with a queering of this supposedly idyllic landscape.” And “queering” is very much the right word here, rather than “despoiling” or “rending”. Is Tibet coming along and unsettling that folk pastoralism, or just revealing what was queered to start with? If we knew, he’d be doing something wrong.

Just like the band historically travelled from noisy industrial soundscapes to neofolk like there was no real border to cross, the music here morphs between one state and the other as if defying you to spot the join. In their world one thing is always found in the other. The present-tense title suggests an ongoing process, rather than a sudden event. The poster and CD image, which might initially seem to depict possession, are demonstrated to convey the opposite - mapping the soul’s departure via the light leaving the eyes.

The highlights were high indeed. The keyboards would pummel and the violin and hurdy-gurdy drone like the Velvet Underground had been reincarnated as an English folk band. But overall the set seemed uneven, straying too far into the straight folk pastoralism. The first time I saw this band, I found it too overwhelming to take in. This time, there were parts I waited out. Bizarrely, given the long queue to get in, a fair section of the audience had decamped before the end.

At the time I assumed the album must have it’s share of sameyness, a default setting it needed to rise above. But, listening to it afterwards, it’s actually consistently strong - in fact I’ve been listening to it as intently as I did ’Field That Fell’.Partly it may be that the previous venue, the Union Chapel, suited the band better than a regular rock haunt. (Current 93 isn’t Saturday night music. Even if it is Saturday night.) But perhaps the action of playing the songs through blunted some of their individual idiosyncrasies, even if they’re made to be heard together.

A brief snatch of Nurse With Wound…



…plus C93’s opening two tracks (which I’ve tried to wind to the point they actually start, if it doesn’t work for you jump ahead past the four minute mark)…



…. and finally, the ‘video’ (actually just the film backdrop, but still cool) for ’Bright Dead Star’…



BO NINGEN
The Haunt, Brighton, Thurs 18th Oct

It might sound arbitrary to start out by comparing Bo Ningen to the last band I saw in this venue, especially if I admit upfront they don’t sound anything like each other. While Preoccupations’ sound is haunted, Bo Ningen’s is most definitely spirited. But both not only switch between guitars and keyboards, they modify everything to the point where it’s hard to tell one instrument from another. Which leads to an enticing sense of off-kilterness, of nothing sounding quite what it seems.

My previous reviews seemed happy to label them a psychedelic/acid rock band, something their Wikipedia page says they don’t understand. True, at times they sound like Hawkwind’s space rock, or Sabbath’s ponderous heavy riffing. Though formed in London the band’ are all Japanese by birth and there’s many Japanoise elements, such as the furiously barked vocals.

But they also take in dub, with one highly dub-drenched track, and for another number stripped-down, urgent funk. They come across as a band with their own style, but who are ever-restless in the expression of it, never falling into a pattern. Young fellows all, they look to be another band exhibiting the upside of the YouTubeability of music. Rather than cleave to one genre and hone it, the natural tendency is to take everything that catches your interest and throw it all in together. They describe themselves as “fusing disparate sounds and influences into a fierce, eclectic torrent of grooves”, something they live up to.

The psychedelic part comes from their devotion to sonic bombardment and sensory overload. Guitars sound like they need to be cranked up, like old cars, somehow got overwound and are now shooting off all over the place. The finale’s a brain-melting wig-out. Which maybe went on a little too long, but was the way to end their set.

Graeme Virtue in the Guardian calls them “the Mothras of invention,” a tag so apt I’m now going to pretend I said it.

Not from Brighton…

OZOMATLI/ QUJAKU/ PHILL NIBLOCK + TIM SHAW (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

OZOMATLI
Concorde 2, Brighton, Thurs 23rd Aug

So I finally catch up with Ozomatli live, even if it took their twentieth anniversary tour for Mr. Tardy here to do it. Describing the band’s actually easy for once, as they’ve done it themselves and it’s even placed upfront on their Wikipedia page. Locating their sound in their native Los Angeles, they say:

’You drive down Sunset Boulevard and turn off your stereo and roll down your windows and all the music that comes out of each and every different car, whether it's salsa, cumbia, merengue, or Hip Hop, funk or whatever, it's that crazy blend that's going on between that cacophony of sound is Ozomatli, y’know?”

As band members ceaselessly swap instruments the shifts and turns in musical style make for a gig that always feels like it’s being propelled forward, while always coming across as organic and arising from the players rather than being self-consciously eclectic.

They have a reputation as a political outfit, initially intending to form (I kid not) a workers’ union. This doesn’t much come over live, bar the occasional quick intro to a song. It does seem a little strange to find that a band best known for their live shows should omit what seems an integral element. But then there is something appealing about music that’s political and good-timey. Given the state of things, there’s plenty to be angry about and of course we have a right to that anger. But we’ve got the right to celebrate resistance as well.

Though it’s quite a different style of music, the gig echoes something I came across when seeing Goat, unrelenting energy levels; “The gig's pretty much at… fever pitch the whole way through. They're quite unrelentingly up.” In fact so irrepressible is the band’s spirit, that when a phantom hum invades the PA they decide what key it’s in, and instantly start jamming around it. Complete with a vocal which plaintively wonders “where could that hum be coming from?” It actually proves a highlight of their set, so maybe they should request hums more often.

For the closer, as I believe is a tradition of their shows, they pick up their gear and relocate to various points in the auditorium. As they moved they’d trail audience members behind then, snaking in a great conga.

A slightly random clip, but a good one of the band on home turf…



QUJAKU
Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Brighton, Mon 27th Aug

Qujaku are self-described as “Japanese rock band [playing] psychedelic gothic dark shoe gaze [with] post rock vibes”, and are fronted (slightly inexplicably) by a lookalike for late Seventies Bowie.

They seem to wait before starting up, as if channelling something. They then go into a slow, soundscapey intro with a bowed… uh, bowed something and rung bells. Though the thumping riffs then drop, this intro kind of permeates the rest of the gig and gives proceedings a ritual feel.

Riffs are somewhat like houseguests. They’re going to stick around for a while, so you want to be sure not to pick the wrong one. Qujaku display a talent for finding mantra riffs, the sort of riff you want to hear over and over again. Their riff repository is also satisfyingly varied, from the slow and pounding to the agitated.

But they’re also adept at curveballing riffs, first getting them white-hot and then bending them into different shapes. At such points the second guitarist then turns back to the bowing or starts to pound a drum. It’s the upside of heavy riffing married to the upside of post-rock, giving a shot to your reptile and a stimulus to your Cro-Magnon brain.

The Bowie lookalike concludes the noise-fest by blowing a kiss to the assembled throng. Slightly inexplicably. In a good way.

The only real drawback of the set - and I know I always say this - is that there wasn’t enough of it. These aren’t short, snappy songs, the numbers are like potions you need to leave stewing in the cauldron awhile. But, with two support acts, they played for less than an hour. Bands have a natural set length determined by their music, which can’t be reduced to a meaningless mean. Sunn O))) played for two hours, which didn’t seem too long. Qujaku don’t necessarily need that sort of length, but they operate on timescales which take more than an hour.

This vid starts just as the intro section ends…



PHILL NIBLOCK + TIM SHAW
Cafe Oto, London, Fri 31st Aug

So next I was off to see a gig dominated by electronic hums and pulses. If Ozomatli had intruded with their Latino-tuned trumpets, the circle would have been completed. But they must have been busy elsewhere…

To try and explain Tim Shaw by a distinction, he’s quiet different to Cosmo Sheldrake, who assigned samples the respective roles of instruments. In fact Sahw's set did not, I don’t think, include any musical samples. But it did, I think, include organic sounds, albeit heavily treated. The effect become more like coloured shapes on various pieces of transparency paper, being shifted, shuffled and overlaid in different combinations. It produces new shapes and colours, until you’ve forgotten what you started off with.

Shaw’ set wasn’t divided into movements, as in classical music, but passed through distinct sections. While Phill Niblock performed five quite separate pieces, even if he ran them all together. Though there are those who claim this music to be samey, each piece was quite distinct in character. (Some more than others, as we’ll get onto.)

Despite each piece inevitably being shorter, they were much slower to evolve - at times feeling like their evolution was happening in Darwinian time. Duration became part of the experience.

His music’s comprised of murky drones and rumbles he refers to collectively as “tones”. Each one seems straightforward in itself, though blurry at the edges. It’s in the interchange between then at the magic happens, as subtle shifts come to have magnified effects. It all seems poised at the borderline between the liminal and subliminal, where you can’t quite perceive what he’s doing.

Where people go wrong, I think, is assume this is some sonic backdrop, an aural mulch out of which flowers will appear if you wait. But it’s in that ‘backdrop’ where it all happens. The metaphor of stepping into a darkened room, and the initial monotone revealing more and more shades and distinctions the longer you stay, I’ve used that many times by this point. But it’s the best metaphor I can think of, so it’s getting recycled again!

As often with drone-based music, what sounds rough and atonal can tip over into the serene. In fact in his second piece this was given centre stage, and the effect was quite tranquil. The music seemed to shimmer rather than move. Some of those tones may even have started life as notes - yes, actual notes!

But it was the fourth piece which was the densest, and perhaps the most rewarding. Broad rumbles provided perhaps not a backdrop but a surround for sharper sounds. It became like a sandpaper raga.

These four pieces already lasting over an hour, I figured we’d had our lot. Yet Niiblock started a fifth. It commenced with rumbles so low, so faint they could have been coming from the next room. Fifteen minutes later, with the room now mostly empty, I started to wonder whether this was going anywhere after all, and cut my losses. Are those that persevered still there now? We may never know.

Nibloch, who started as a film-maker, normally plays to a film show. Apart from the somewhat eccentric closer, this was the night’s only weak point. Reportage film of what looked like South Sea Islanders was too distinct, too of something to work with the more mysterious, suggestive music. (And yes, with Johanna Bramli I liked the visual but not the music - truly, there’s no fully pleasing me!) Before the show, a series of stills which looked to be from the same source were flashed up. With their merest hints of narrative connection, they may have worked better than a continuous film.

Precisely what makes this music appealing is precisely what makes it challenging to review. If you heard these pieces at different times, you’d not just react differently you’d quite likely actually hear them in a different way. The effect becomes individual and introspective.

Again, a fairly random clip. But again, worth watching…