BOREDOMS
Scala, London, Mon 18th April
Boredoms are not an easy band to peg to
a soundbite description. People normally reach for the term
Japanoise, and certainly when they choose to they can raise a right
ruckus. But they present something of a moving target to description. Thrilljockey comments that “across nearly 30 years, founder and leader
Eye... has taken the band on a cosmic road trip... through times of
tribal frenzy, oceanic tranquility, and massive sonic
constructions.... Boredoms expanded their ideal of ecstatic,
thunderous, repetitive music, steeped in power rock, electronic
rhythms, and psychedelic incantations.” Alas I missed last year's gig performed with eighty-eight cymbalists, and this was
the first time I've seen the band in more than a decade.
The set starts with a long section
where the four players stroke and tap long metal rods, conjuring
sounds somewhere between chimes and temple bells which simmer in from
the edge of hearing. It gives proceedings a ritual sense, like
they're not concerned with playing or performing so much as getting
us all in the right mental state. Think of those spacey sounds in old
sci-fi films as the flying saucers land. Only this was designed
around calling the flying saucers down.
Last time three drummers had pounded
out Krautrock beats with compelling and almost intimidating
discipline, while Eye provided keyboards, cries and wails over the
top. He was effectively riding the wave powered by the other players,
a centre-forward propelled by his team, a general raised above his
army. Tonight he takes up the classic back-of-the-stage drummer
position, even though two of the other players commonly take to drums
themselves. Rhythms aren't smooth, regular and Neu!-like, but
pounding and tribal, at times approaching Tom Waits troglodyte level.
To add to the chaos he drops crockery and cutlery onto his bass drum,
sometimes attacking them with a fish slice. (Handily projected onto a
screen behind him.) The centre-forward's become the tribal shaman,
guiding the ceremony.
Which makes the electronics player the
devil clown. In the opening, as the sound of the struck poles mounts,
you figure it will be brought to a crescendo. Instead, at an
arbitrary point he wilfully disrupting everything with sudden
ear-piercing screeches and slurps. And he continues to play the same
role throughout, somehow participating in and disrupting proceedings
simultaneously. (From my original vantage point he was obscured,
making his interruptions appear out of apparent nowhere.)
As events unveil beats rise, crest and
fall, often going back to the ethereal sounds of the beginning. I
find I'm unable to intuit how composed or improvised it is, only that
it's somewhere in the spectrum between the two. It's a study in
contrasts, one of those ying/yang, frost/fire, compose/decompose
things, the music in some volatile primal state where it's constantly
making up to break up.
Things pull together for the finale,
Eye's wails and cries becoming a steady chant over a thumping tribal
beat, sounding like they're punching a hole straight through to the
spirit world. You're told, when structuring novels or films, to find
the end in the beginning. And this gig was remarkably similar, it's
finale both the return of and the opposite bookend to the ethereal
opening. A point proven when the struck rods return for a brief coda.
The balance may have swung too far to
the freeform at times, like they were upending themselves almost as
soon as they'd re-righted. But then Boredoms gigs aren't supposed to
be tidy in that way. There's something irrepressible about them, some
restless creative energy. And that force which propels and envigours
them leaves little time for quality control. Besides, like the
English weather, even if you don't take to what they're doing right
now they'll be onto something else in a minute. Yamataka Eye is the
Miles Davis of noise.
From London! But an old gig from six
years ago which alas muggins here missed...
JAH WOBBLE + THE INVADERS OF THE HEART
The Haunt, Fri 15th April
It would probably seem remarkable, if
we weren't so used to it, that when Jah Wobble's played bass in the
legendary original line-up of Public Image Limited that was how his
musical career began. That surely should be the high point, rather
than the starting point. However as the Eighties and Nineties wore on
his love of dub, Krautrock and world music became less marginal and
more prophetic. You could play a good game of 'Where's
Wobble?' in the history of that era, his trilby
ever-present if rarely centre stage. This was, by reckoning, the
first time I've seen him since the Nineties, after – in an already
somewhat elliptical career - he effectively took a gap decade.
Things start of with... well, there's
no getting round it being a lengthy jazz fusion section. Slightly
perturbingly, for those of us who don't take to that sort of thing.
Then just when I was starting to figure I must have imagined this guy
ever having been into reggae, those bass lines begin. However it's
quite roots and ska oriented, almost as if he'd assembled a set to
convey the music that influenced him more than the music he makes.
More contemporary sounds creep in only slowly.
The band are quite impressively tight,
though at times the musoish tendencies of the opening do creep back
in. Yet, and despite his description of the bass as “the king of
the jungle”, his playing doesn't dominate. He's as often at the
side of the stage serving up extra percussion. Expectations are often
confounded. One track is based around a house beat. But rather than
treat that as a substitute for a live rhythm track, the guitars play
around it – adding pitch-shifting near-drones.
Famously Wobble rejected Lydon's offer
to join the reformed Public Image, instead mischievously taking up with Keith Levene and the singer from a Pistols tributeband. And while, as I can attest, Lydon's set-list had focused on the
better-celebrated 'Metal Box', Wobble draws more
from the first album. Overall, the PiL tracks were inventively
reworked but suffered from Wobble's strange insistence on reciting
the vocals, particularly on 'Public Image' itself.
(Perhaps he was not keen to imitate Lydon's vocal tics.)
He even revives the infamous
'Fodderstompf'. The track from that album most
built around his bassline but using it as aural polyfilla,
ever-repeating while in their Derek and Clive moment the band
improvised words over the top. (“In order to finish the album with
the minimum amount of effort”, as they gleefully admitted on the
track itself.) Here that same bass line is turned from workhorse into
workout. The one 'Metal Box' number is, inevitably
enough, the classic 'Poptones', transformed into
something glacial, as if Joy Division had ended up releasing it
instead.
Wobble's 'cosmic geezer' persona is now
well cemented. He is, after all, the guy who called an album 'Full
Moon Over the Shopping Mall.' While other bands, concerned
about keeping their cool, barely mention their merch stall Wobble
waxes as lyrical as any East End trader over the “luvverly
qualtertee” of his T-shirts.
My personal favourite Wobble era, at
least post-PiL, is the Deep Space stuff. Because... well, it's deep
and it's spacey. (Imagine Krautrock blended with dub, seasoned with
some Miles Davis.) Little of which gets a look-in here. But he has
too much and too varied a history to cram into one set-list, and you
should probably look to what a gig is doing rather than what it
isn't. Caveats aside, and ignoring the distraction of the opening,
what Wobble gave us was qualertee.
And speaking of 'Poptones',
from Manchester...
THE EX
The Hope & Ruin, Brighton,
Wed 13th April
The Ex are always awesome, of course.
But having previously written about them not once but twice, I wasn't thinking of doing so again. Only to find
that this is the one gig which actually has YouTube footage. So let's let that do the talking. This is the classic 'Double Order', done
as the encore.
