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Showing posts with label concert. Show all posts
Showing posts with label concert. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
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Going to an arena pop concert for someone you've never heard of is a surreal experience. After all, a good pop concert should present the performer as a kind of minor deity - descending from their digital Mount Olympus in a hazy cloud of dry ice. But when the performer is someone you don't know - it feels like you've wandered into an alternate reality.
Such was the experience of seeing G.E.M., one of China's biggest pop stars. G.E.M. (an acronym for 'Get Everybody Moving') is the stage name of Tang Tsz-kei, who is dubbed 巨肺小天后 (the Girl with the Giant Lungs) in her native land. After this gig I can see why. She can belt out a ballad like nobody's business, not to mention tightly choreographed dancing, playing the guitar, piano and drums and making soulful speeches to a rapt crowd.
The XXX Tour is a decently sized pop-production, boasting with gigantic video projections, glitter cannons, strobe lights, CO2 jets and a squadron of dancers who move in such perfect synchronisation you suspect they may be bionically enhanced. This is a slickly professional pop product where every glittery millimeter is honed to mass appeal.
Well, mass appeal to Chinese audiences at any rate. Perhaps understandably, G.E.M. makes little or no concession to English speaking audiences. When she's singing this isn't too much of a problem. Her songs are performed in a mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese (though I have no idea which is which), but while I can't understand the particulars of her lyrics, you can appreciate the sledgehammer emotions that power them.
More vexing is her habit of launching into long spoken word segues between numbers. These speeches being greeted with rapturous applause and general merriment from an audience that was 99.9% of Chinese origin. My reaction was mild confusion, having no idea she's on about. Brief snatches of English punctuate the speeches, but a sudden garbled "Thank-you Jesus!" only added to the cryptic atmosphere. By the end of the gig G.E.M. was in floods of tears, engaged in an incomprehensible (to me) act of emotional self-flagellation.
That said, The XXX Tour was still an undeniably fun time. The language of pop transcends international and language barriers: who can resist a troupe of Backstreet Boys-a-like backing dancers strutting around in hot pursuit of the starlet, G.E.M.'s emerging in an impressive sequined catsuit with a big red cape on, or simply the moment where she emits a Whitney Houston-esque sustained bellow in the middle of some particularly baroque number?
Further highlights come in a lovely ballad accompanied by imagery of a red balloon rising up to the stars - I may not know the lyrical content but I can still appreciate a lovely piano melody. There's also the inevitable dubstep-tinged breakdown that feels ever-so-slightly naff in 2015 - but which I secretly still very much enjoy. She even throws in a couple of covers toward the closing moments of the gig; going hell for leather with a muscular rendition of Rolling in the Deep and an all-too-brief snatch of We Will Rock You.
After three encores and nearly three hours of pop-fun, G.E.M. leaves the stage. By this point I'd surrendered - gleefully participating in the ultra cheesy simple pleasure of "Gimme a G! Gimme an E! Gimme an M! - G.E.M.!".
The XXX Tour is, perhaps, some undiluted essence of pop. Because I can't understand anything G.E.M. is saying I can only experience the broad swathes of her music - which is entirely clear as it commands the audience to wiggle their butts and wave their hands in the air (like they just don't care).
It's a high-sugar / zero fibre kind of show: one that whistles through the muscles rather than the mind. G.E.M. is a pop star's pop star - and wears it well.
Monday, October 12, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
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Arguably, buying gig tickets on the basis of a couple of bonkers music videos is a bad idea. Then again, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's music videos are amazing. Viral smash Pon Pon Pon is her most notorious work, but others, particularly Waste Land and Candy Candy, are a fantastic showcase of her 'throw everything including the kitchen sink into the video' style.
If you clicked any of those links having not seen her before, you've probably either closed the window in confusion or dug her super-surreal hi-octane imagery. Also, if you watched Pon Pon Pon, then congratulations! You now have that playing on a loop in your head for a week.
So it's pretty safe to say she's an acquired taste. Even as someone who enjoys Kyary in small doses, I was a bit apprehensive about a full concert of her music. Not helping matters is that her team were at pains to let the British press know that "Kyary is not supposed to be musically talented. She is more about image." So it was to some surprise that Crazy Party Time 2015 not only supplied the expected Harajuku fashion-weirdness, but was genuinely musically enjoyable.
Admittedly, I was pretty drunk, but extremely loud pounding techno and giant dubstep drops played accompanied by bright flashing lights does it for me. Kyary herself chirps away in some bizarre hybrid of English and Japanese, singing complex, almost Dylanesque lyrics like: "Chewing chewing chewing chewing chewing cutie cutie chew chewing love" or "Pon pon wei wei wei / pon pon wei pon wei pon pon." Some of her songs appear to be entirely chorus, mantra-like repetitions of five words over and over again until they're tattooed onto your brain.
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| A typical Kyary Pamyu Pamyu gig-goer. |
Compared to a Western pop concert, it's disconcerting how little room Kyary is allowed to express herself. It's like watching a hyper-realistic clockwork girl; someone's wound a key in her back and pushed her out onto the stage. It's a weird sight - a rictus grin plastered over her face as she works through complex semaphoric dance moves and poses so precise she appears to be communicating in sign language.
This total absence of spontaneity makes for a odd atmosphere, contributing to the surreal nature of the music and imagery. There's something faintly inhuman about the way she marches with her legs completely straight around the stage, and the little girl kawaii poses she constantly strikes. She's the multi-coloured centrepiece of the night, yet ably assisted by some fantastic dancers clad in primary coloured wigs, similarly eye-catching dresses and masks that range from grotesque to sweet - looking a bit like a catwalk Sentai team.
All that is accompanied by a video display flashing up imagery from her videos. Googly-eyed skulls rush at us, followed by processions of candle-headed ghouls and kaleidoscope visions candy, cakes and cherries. This onslaught of sweetness is a sight to behold; gazing back over the crowd most people are slack-jawed and beaming, bright lights dancing in their glazed eyes. Lots have come dressed for the occasion, the crowd a sea of pastel-coloured pigtailed wigs, sailor suits and slightly scary face paint - stuff you just don't tend to see at your average floppy-fringed Camden indie gig.
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's Crazy Party Time 2015 wasn't the most musically accomplished concert I've ever attended. It wasn't the most catchy. It wasn't even the craziest. What it was was a hell of a lot of a fun. There was this infectiously good-natured vibe to the whole thing, a crowd buoyed up on Kyary's sugar rush music. The 90 minute set flew by; leaving me exhausted, sweaty and smiling uncontrollably. Damn good times. Damn good.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Thursday, March 19, 2015
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Jesus fucking Christ. Where to begin? I've been a lot of bizarre concerts and heard a lot of weird music. But Squarepusher at the Barbican was (by some distance) the craziest, most aggressive electronic gig I've ever attended. Firmly putting the 'mental' in 'experimental music', this was about 90 minutes of ear-splitting, atonal noise accompanied by gigantic epilepsy-inducing abstract visuals.
Squarepusher (aka Tom Jenkinson) emerged from the electronica scene of the mid-90s and has subsequently been producing music that ranges from drum n' bass to soothing ambient electro (and almost everything in between). I got into him after seeing the Chris Cunningham directed video for Come On My Selector sometime in the late 90s, my teenage self highly impressed with the equally barmy audio and visuals. Now, after forays into jazz, solo bass guitar and last year's Music for Robots project, in which Jenkinson collaborated with a team of Japanese engineers to create robots capable of playing beyond the capabilities of puny flesh musicians, he's back in the studio for Damogen Furies, his fourteenth album.
2015 is an interesting time for Squarepusher's brand of electronica. With EDM surging in popularity, temptation has come knocking at the door. Cover yourself in LEDs, laser beams and billowing crowds of dry ice, play tracks constructed around gigantic bass drops and watch the money roll in. Though this gig firmly isn't appealing to the mainstream, elements of popular EDM have nonetheless crept in. Hidden amongst the clanging atonal madness are the odd build up and big drop, a couple of synth melodies and what almost sounds like a sample from The Cure's Just Like Heaven. That aside, this is fiercely aggressive, head-meltingly strange music - bizarre to the point that I'm perplexed that enough people like this stuff to fill the Barbican Hall.
As I sat there getting my face blasted off I looked around the seated crowd, wondering just who the hell these people were. I can only assume they're old school rave casualties: so accustomed to high BPM acid-techno that they can now stomach only the most corrosive of of corrosive music. Even among this sturdy lot reactions varied; one gangly man attempted to gain access to the stage, then proceeded to cavort, limbs flailing, around the auditorium, closely pursued by security. Conversely a steady stream of people left throughout the show, presumably having been bludgeoned into submission by what was blaring out of the speakers.
As for me? From minute one I didn't know which way was up. I felt like a prospective astronaut in high-G training, spun to dizzy unconsciousness in a giant centrifuge. At times it was like I was hearing five gigs at once, jagged shards of sound jumbling up together into something weird and alien. The brain doesn't quite know which angle to approach this from, the moment you identify what could plausibly be melodic progression things collapse into a hail of dissonant squeals and beeps. At it's peak I'm listening to music so fast that's one or two steps removed from static; a decent simulation of what it's like to be a superintelligent robot with a really bad migraine.
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| One of the visuals. |
The visuals are similarly screwed. Endless tunnels of glitched out graphics and monochrome DOS smears pop up at a rate of two a second. Complex patterns, text and diagrams spin past, too rapid for the brain to process. The effect is as if Squarepusher is downloading something directly into our minds, beating the doors of perception tdown. There's a cyberpunk flavour throughout, the iconography of computing harnessed in an attempt to simulate silicon life. Eyes glued, ears ringing and mouth hanging slackly open it's as if you're living through William Gibson's wettest dream.
It ends with a hundred ears ringing in unison and shellshocked eyes blinking in confusion. I'm not sure I 'enjoyed' this gig per se, it was more as if something had happened to me over which I had no control, like being swept up in an tsunami of noise. On a visceral level I feel (even the next day) like a pneumatic drill has been taken to my head, but I also feel a strange calm, no matter what craziness the world throws at me I can probably deal with.
Squarepusher is really pushing the boat out here - casting his net towards the bonkers end of the musical spectrum in an avalanche of unfriendly abstract sound. It's hard to imagine how much further he could go than this. It's hard to imagine that audiences could take much more than this.
Squarepusher is really pushing the boat out here - casting his net towards the bonkers end of the musical spectrum in an avalanche of unfriendly abstract sound. It's hard to imagine how much further he could go than this. It's hard to imagine that audiences could take much more than this.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
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Prior to Lady Gaga I was a musically boring fuck. The kind of chump who quivered at the announcement of a new Radiohead album or swooned over linen-shirted, bearded middle-aged men who clutch acoustic guitars like drowning men clutch liferafts. Then I chanced across her 2009 VMA performance of Paparazzi. Four minutes later, lost in a blizzard of glitter, flashbulbs, crutches, lots fake blood and demented piano playing, I was smitten.
From that point on, as far as I was concerned this was it. A perfect storm of performance art, theatre, pop and fashion - all encapsulated in a smart as hell, beautiful and risk-taking New Yorker. Everything else in music seemed suddenly desaturated; as far as I'm concerned there's more honesty, truth and beauty in lyrics like "Let's have some fun / This beat is sick / I wanna take a ride on your disco stick" than there are in a thousand albums by noodly, string-backed acoustic warblers.
For a couple of years it was good, and we enjoyed Lady Gaga's imperial phase. The triple combo of videos for Bad Romance, Telephone and Alejandro cemented her as the pop vision of the future; suddenly everyone started to look a little cooler. Then came the colossally hyped Born This Way, which despite a tonne of great songs felt slightly bloated. Then out came ARTPOP, which is actually pretty good, but the knives were pre-sharpened. The pop music mill hungers for new flesh; and even Gaga, a popstar who shuffles personalities like a cardshark shuffles a deck, couldn't ride it forever.
And so we come to the artRAVE. Is this Gaga's Waterloo? One last big budget, stadium-sized splurge of extravagance before she slips into a comfortable place in the pop firmament; beloved by her fanbase, fondly remembered but never again truly on top? If it is she certainly isn't going quietly; from start to finish we're dragged into a shimmering slice of pop nirvana. Perspex walkways snake in organic shapes around the arena floor, allowing Gaga and her dancers to move around and over the audience.
This 'Little Monsters' friendly staging gives this night a unique sparkle. With the heavenly scenery, the arena takes the aura of a religious revival with Gaga as high priestess leading us to sartorially adventurous promised land of sexual tolerance and unlimited self expression. I imagine that if you're not a fan, Gaga's messianic streak might seem a touch egotistical. But she's among her die-hard fans, and to them she's divinity made flesh. You can taste their rapture it in the way they stretch their glitter-polished fingers towards her, hoping her touch will cure them of some modern scrofula.
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| :3 |
This builds to an emotional pinnacle when a note is thrown on stage. Gaga picks it up and reads out a message from a cervical cancer sufferer who explains that Lady Gaga's poptimistic message has helped her fight it. Gaga summons her up to the stage and in a flurry of hugs and kisses grants her personal blessing, then she parks her on a piano stool and devotes an acoustic reworking of Born This Way to her. There's not a dry eye in the house. Oh well, if you're going to have a pop messiah you could do far worse than Lady Gaga.
What surrounds this particularly special little moment is a totally competent pop show that's only slightly hobbled by being based around a slightly below-par album. Of the new songs the perverted mud fuck stomp of Swine is an easy stand out, bleepy/bloopy aerodynamic mission statement of Artpop and the sincere loveliness of Dope and Gypsy. In a 'fuck you' move to her detractors she opens with five songs from her newest album and delivers a slightly out of character broadside against people who are "just here for the hits".
After that it's a relief to hear the still-futuristic ultraparty beat of Just Dance kick in. Cheekily she mashes Poker Face and Telephone into a mini-medley, before launching into a top class Paparazzi. All these are stone-cold poptimistic stunners, and with bass thudding throughout the arena, lasers blasting to the rafters and bewigged, joyful punters bopping around with dopey grins on their faces.
I was one of them. The simple sight of her dancing around on a stage in increasingly sillier outfits (cow patterned octopus girl, furrily-winged Koons-balled angel, what appear to be some folding chairs) flicks some innate joy-switch in my head, sending me spiralling into a blissy paroxysms of joy.
That said, as ace as this was, it wasn't as good as The Monster Ball. That was a Gaga resplendent, confidently perched at the top of the pops. artRAVE finds Lady Gaga ever so slightly on the back foot, obviously stinging from the critical and commercial reception of Artpop and taking solace in the unconditional love of her hardcore Little Monsters. This makes artRAVE more of a transitory show, one eye in the triumphant past and one looking towards an uncertain future.
I'm still deeply smitten. I'll always be. But I'm hungry to see where she's going next.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
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“Gotta make way for the homo superior”. Amidst a din of clattering guitars, maniacal whoops and digital noise, Bowie's words ran laps around my head. Why? Because I'm pretty damn sure Annie Clark is the next stage in human evolution. On stage she mixes up slithery, chaotic punk rock androgyny with dance moves like an android struggling to break free of its programming – all underscored by guitar virtuosity that's as gobsmacking as it is effortless.
As 2014 began I was already pretty appreciative of St Vincent. Their 2011 album Strange Mercy had rolled around in rotation for a couple of weeks upon release and their 2012 David Byrne collaboration Love This Giant had tickled all my tastes. Then I heard their latest release, the eponymous St Vincent. Hot-shit-god-damn what an album! Shot through with haunting, cryptic vocals that combine the domestic, the technological and weirdly erotic (“Oh what an ordinary day. Take out the garbage, masturbate.”) I was hooked.
Then at Glastonbury I finally saw them. They were up against stiff competition, Jon Hopkins, Disclosure, Jack White and the outstandingly fun Dolly Parton, but emerged by an inch as the best thing I saw all weekend. After a horde of fey young men sitting around mournfully plucking at acoustic guitars and warbling about their feelings, St Vincent functioned as musical electro-shock therapy. As Clarke dove from the stage and thrashed around on the muddy floor, fingers a-blur on the fretboard, fizzling with manic alien energy I fell a tiny bit in love.
The day I got back from the festival I got online to see where she was playing in the UK next. Cambridge? A little far from my usual stomping grounds but fine, whatever. It was worth the trip. It would have been worth going to Mars. At times I thought I was on Mars. Annie Clarke occupies the stage with supreme confidence – her every motion radiating style, every idiosyncratic lyric spilling out of her like she's carved a hole in her head and let her thoughts run rampant.
In person she's some fucked up hybrid of all my loves - like someone's stuffed my favourite musicians into the telepods from Cronenberg's The Fly - the woozy electro lyricism of Bjork with the guitar skills of Prince and the eccentricity and self-assured weirdness of Kate Bush. Wearing a dress covered in sequinned eyes and brace-toothed mouths (all bleeding) and moving in a way that suggests she's communicating secret codes it's difficult to take my eyes from her. Standing pressed against the front row centre I fool myself into thinking she's often staring right at me, making me feel like a deer caught in a hunter's spotlight.
My highlights are all songs from her most recent album. Digital Witness is elegant and precise, a circus stomp pah-rump paean to the blurred lines between fleshy reality and the electronic world. To hear Bring Me Your Loves live is to tumble down a mountain in a skip full of broken synthesisers, her guitar sounding like an old modem screeching down a phone line, the song punctuated with killer, crunchy-as-hell riffs. Best is Huey Newton with its hallucinatory painkiller lyrics. Midway through there's a bass drop so fierce that Skrillex stares on with envious eyes, and Clarke launches into a guttural stream of consciousness about “fatherless features, you motherless creatures” and “the pop and the hiss in the city of misfits”. The fluids in my body are fizzling with bass, strobes are threatening an early epileptic end and once again, she seems to be singing these words right at me.
Being stage front for a show like this is like chewing through a high voltage cable. My musical tastes tend towards the energetic and pounding, but here even the slower, more emotional songs reek of majesty. Temporarily shorn of her guitar, Clarke mounts the giant pink steps at the rear of the stage and poses like a renaissance painting. She's illuminated in bright primary colours, singing softly through Prince Johnny and I Prefer Your Love – delivering them like torch songs from the year 2200.
So yeah – I had a pretty goddamn great time. St Vincent feel tailored to me in particular, though given the rapturous reception the band got from Cambridge I suspect everyone feels this sensation, just as I'm sure they all felt like Clarke was singing directly at them too. The climax of the concert is the epic Your Lips Are Red – a Class A freakout of clattering, punished guitars and a band going bonkers. Clarke climbs into the audience and starts grabbing people's camera, snapping pictures and grinning madly.
And with that she was gone. St Vincent have had a stratospheric rise in my estimations this year; landing right on the list of bands that I will pull out all the stops to see; regardless of price, location of time. Right now Annie Clarke is at the top of her game; she's Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon, she's Dylan at Newport Folk, she's Hillary on Everest. Go and see her, dammit.
First two pictures courtesy of Matt Thorpe (http://www.matt-thorpephotography.tumblr.com/), last crap one courtesy of my cameraphone.
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Saturday, July 5, 2014
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Kanye West might be the weirdest performer I've ever seen - and I've seen some pretty weird shit. I adore a bit of personality in music; I'm magnetically drawn to big personalities with a penchant for crazy shit, high fashion and, most of all, being totally unpredictable on stage. With all that in mind, Kanye West is an abundance of riches. The man is straight up bonkers in the same vein as Michael Jackson or Prince; having gotten so big that any crazy idea they fart out is indulged by a smiling team of yes-men.
Having seen pictures of the man meeting Jesus on stage, or perched up a laser-lit stage mountain I was a touch disappointed that his only UK shows this year were as the headline act in the Wireless Festival. But then Yeezus was the best album of 2013, so I dutifully bought my ticket and waited with baited breath. To summarise the rest of the acts I saw; that day, Iggy Azalea was dead fun, Angel Haze (who I was seeing for second time within a week) was off the hook ace; Giorgio Moroder appeared to have hit 'play' on a prerecorded 80s playlist and Pharrell Williams was great to dance around as the sun set.
Any other day they'd have been highlights ('cept Moroder), but not today. Today was all about the egomaniacs, geniuses and nutjobs - a category within which Kanye West slides perfectly into. Having wriggled my way to the front of the jampacked crowd, I was fully psyched. As the corporate advertising wrapped up, the screens on stage went blank, the crowd whooped and.... The Beatles began playing? After Come Together came Time by Pink Floyd - the very last band I'd have expected Kanye West to take the stage to.
Eventually the man of the hour arrived. Bathed in eye-stingingly bright red light, wearing a tattered looking quasi-camouflage jacket and a full head mask he strode to the middle of the stage, grabbed the mic and launched straight into the rabid glam-rock stomp of Black Skinhead. The crowd, quite understandably, went mental. A mosh pit instantly formed nearby and right away I got a full faceful of someone's CKOne scented back as hundreds of people sway dangerously around in a sweaty soup of sweat, weed smoke and rolling eyeballs. It's all too much for one poor girl. She goes all Mia Wallace: collapsing, juddering and foaming before being dragged backwards by her freaked out friends. I hope she's okay.
Through a tangle of pogostick bodies and arms waving like riverside reeds I occasionally get a glimpse of the man himself. He looks amazing and absurd; his mask like chainmail armour, the fabric gently oscillating as he furiously rat-a-tats lyrics into the cool Finsbury night. It's a testament to Kanye's stage presence that even with his face completely obscured he's still an impossibly charismatic stage presence; entirely at ease being the dead centre of the world.
The mask is difficult thing to ignore; but in a perverse twist damn near everything on stage is set up to prevent us ever properly seeing Kanye's face. Throughout the entire set he's constantly lit from behind, rendering him a bouncing silhouette in front of his gigantic video screen. Earlier in the day the video screens to stage left and right were crammed full of Wireless branding and closeups of the grinning crowd. During Kanye they're mostly blank, occasionally lighting up to reveal his bemasked figure with the colours inverted - a black-clad, superhero/villain BDSM preacher with a neon electric blue sea behind him. The cumulative effect is that he looks oddly computer generated: his outline jaggedly pixelated and his body language sharp and statue-like.
His control over what the audience sees of him is so complete that at one point he stops mid-song, (having angrily noticed that Wireless have switched to a non-inverted, stageside view) and gives precise directions to the cameramen on stage what he wants to see on the monitors. To go to these extremes means that Kanye must have a reason for all this obfuscation - but what the hell is it? What kind of man stands in front of thousands and won't let them see his face?
We get a clue during a trademark rambling rant. After 10 minutes or so of excoriating an apparently racist Nike for not allowing him to design shoes for them (I.. think?) he launches into a vocoded sing-songy caricature of a shoe executive advising him that he should stick to what he's supposed to do and save face. Kanye responds (to himself); "That's why I got this fuckin' mask on, because I ain't worried about saving face. Fuck my face! ... Fuck whatever my face is supposed to mean and fuck whatever the name Kanye is supposed to mean! It's about my dreams!".
Well I'm glad he cleared that up. For me, the idea of the multimillionaire international superstar Kanye West whining that he's not allowed to do whatever he wants is so perverse it rockets right past offensive and lands comfortably a couple of miles into straight-up deluded territory. To make things clear; this is a man who is currently standing in front an audience of thousands lecturing us about how no-one listens to him. A man who is apparently soon to release a three hour spoken word album. Damn Kanye, if you don't think you can do whatever you want now have a go living our lives.
Kanye West is, without doubt, a dickhead of the highest order. So it's fortunate that he's an interesting, enormously entertaining dickhead. His complete lack of modesty in proclaiming himself a genius at every opportunity ("At the end of the day I'm going down as a legend whether you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain.") is both hilarious and accurate. Given a choice between the fake modesty of your Chris Martins and your Ed Sheerans I'll take the frothing, theatrical self-involvement of Kanye West any day of the week.
It's this invincible ultraconfidence that made this show so fascinating. He's never bashful or polite, speaking everything on his mind secure in the knowledge that he's right about everything. He closes with the epic Blood on the Leaves, an audacious mashup of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, a killer bombastic horn drop and Kanye equating him not being allowed to sit where he wants at a basketball game to apartheid. I don't even know where to begin unpacking all that. What I do know is that with the stage transforming into a stygian crimson nightmare, Kanye wildly yelling into the mic and the crowd going fucking bananas the place becomes a frantic psycho whirlpool of bass, sweat and happiness. The very ground quakes as countless trainers tramp the grass down.
When asked what his biggest regret was, Kanye once responded "That I will never be able to see myself perform live." Having now seen him I've got to admit he has a point.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
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Maybe booking tickets to a gig the very day I arrive back from Glastonbury wasn't the best idea in the world. I'd partied my little heart out until 7am that morning before grubbily hopping on a coach to London and shuffling zombie-like back home. Perhaps, I thought, I should skip this gig. After all I haven't really slept in days, I've watched tons of live music and, to rub salt into the wound, it's just started raining. I was so done with rain at this point.
If it were any other band I'd have shrugged, climbed underneath a big blanket and enjoyed 12 hours of loglike slumber. But eels aren't just any other band. The very first album I ever bought was their debut Beautiful Freak back in 1996, and the subsequent releases Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy meant an awful lot to teenage me. Their high water mark was the 2005 release of their magnum opus Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, and attending one of the best concerts of my life at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall to see it played live. Since then I had the uneasy feeling that eels had settled into an overfamiliar rut. They put out a run of middling albums (all of which I dutifully listened to once) populated by melancholy tracks punctuated with one wearily upbeat song to close out. It had all got a bit formulaic.
Even so, I've been an eels fan through thick and thin and even exhausted and fuzzy-headed I'm going to drag myself down to see them at the Royal Albert Hall. Supporting was Melanie De Biasio, an ethereal singer whose minimalist, haunting compositions completely filled the enormous auditorium. She was amazing. I instantly fell asleep. As I jerked back to consciousness I thought maybe this was a bad idea: if I slept through an eels concert I'd absolutely hate myself.
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| Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen |
These fears were instantly banished as E took to the stage. Reassurringly bearded and dressed in a simple grey suit, his husky voice enveloped me like a much-loved old coat. With his similarly suited band behind him surrounded by a jumble-sale of acoustic instruments everything seemed right in the world. After a short instrumental introduction he sat down at his piano and began a straight up heartbreaking cover of When You Wish Upon a Star. My malfunctioning brain, already perched on an emotional knife-edge, was sent into a total tizzy, my eyes welling up and a lump forming in my throat that remained for the rest of the gig.
There's a strange disconnect at the heart of eels. E is a famed purveyor of misery; a man who converts the loss, depression and bereavement in his life into (as he describes it) "sweet, soft, bummer rock" so beautiful it may as well whip out a scalpel and go straight for the my heart. Emotional highlights are a crushingly sad A Daisy Through Concrete that had me sniffling quietly into my drink and the disturbingly morbid Gentlemen's Choice: "The life that I've led / I'm better off dead / The world has no room for my kind". You just want to give him a big hug.
And, amazingly, we can. Despite his morose lyrics E is a remarkably chipper chap. In fact he's often full on hilarious, explaining that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones once played this stage on the same night, and bending down to kiss the floor where John Lennon once stood, before wiping his lips and remarking that that spot tasted more like Keith Richards. As he self-deprecatingly apologises for his songs being so depressing (introducing It's a Motherfucker as "a next-level bummer") it's almost as if we're going through therapy alongside him, the audience sensing that it's our participation and applause that's spurring him on. The emotional climax comes towards the end when E beams out at us and says he wants to give us all a big hug.
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| Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen |
He proceeds to do just that. Clambering off stage he makes his way around the vast room, hugging everyone on his way. Countless people with tears in their eyes embrace him with open arms. He must have hugged about a hundred people by the time he makes his way on stage ten minutes later, his suit and hair rumpled. He then explains that he's going to ditch the encore bullshit and get straight back to business.
After Blinking Lights and Last Stop: This Town, the band leave the stage and the audience rises to their feet and raises the roof with the most enthusiastic applause I've heard in a very long time. Boots are stamped on the floor, hoarse cheering drifts up the rafters and palms turn an angry shade of red as they're enthusiastically beaten together. A consensus quickly forms among the crowd that we're not going to stop until they return to the stage - which, after ten minutes of this din, they do. The tip-top of the second encore is an absolutely wonderful piano cover of Can't Help Falling in Love, E's warm, sad voice injecting a ridiculous amount of pathos into the song.
More crazy applause. Still the house lights don't come up. What can they possibly do to top this? Earlier in the night E had bemoaned that the last time he played here they wouldn't let him anywhere near the Royal Albert Hall's famous pipe organ - not without joining The Royal Society of Pipe Organists anyway. He vows that one day he'll get to play it... One day...
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| Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen |
Suddenly the lights dim and maniacal laughter rings through the room. A huge sheet drops to reveal E, dressed in round shades and a theatrical cape standing in front of the organ. With a silly, joyous grin on his face he sits down and blasts out a instrumental version of The Sound of Fear and Flyswatter on the gigantic instrument. Woooooooooooooow.
It's the perfect end to an absolutely perfect night. eels remain one of the warmest, musically proficient, sad, funny and straight up most entertaining live bands around. As we filed out in the London night, a bounce in our step, audience consensus was that we'd seen something really special. This was a performance to treasure.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Monday, November 25, 2013
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I've never been so profoundly affected by a gig in my life. It wasn't anything so high-falutin' as musical virtuosity or poetic, lyrical genius. No, Skrillex affected me on a far more fundamental level: by deafening me. This gig was fuckin' loud man, the kind of loudness where you walk into a place and think “ooh, that's a bit loud”. About an hour later your eardrums have been completely blown out and the jet engine exhaust screaming into your ear becomes the new normal. Even now, writing this more than a day after I walked out of the club, a shrill, high-pitched pain rings in my ears. Julianne Moore in Children of Men said this tinny scream is the death scream of ear cells – a requiem of frequencies that you''ll never hear again. I don't know if that's true or not, but the idea is disquieting. Is this kind of thing worth sacrificing your senses for?
Skrillex is the pseudonym of Sonny Moore, former singer of various hardcore bands who spotted the burgeoning dubstep trend and promptly switched genres. His brand of hyper-aggressive, pop-trash dubstep is heavily rock influenced, with powerfully pulsing synth lines in place of guitars and a constant, body-shaking boom from the bass. Since his rise to the top of the pile he's put out a number of hugely successful songs, played sets all over the world, dated Ellie Goulding and co-written the soundtrack of the best film of 2013.
Despite this success, Skrillex isn't thought of particularly highly. This is perhaps understating things: dubstep fans despise him for infecting their pet genre with a cheesy pop sensibility, serious musos won't give him the time of day and those in the general public that have heard of him regard him as a trivial manchild with stupid glasses and a ridiculous haircut. This isn't surprising - his music isn't for everyone – but for those that crave a bit of aural brutalisation it's just the ticket. I'm firmly within this group: you can only sit around sipping a glass of wine and listening to bloody acoustic guitars before you feel the urge rising inside you to freak the fuck out and go bonkers to silly/trashy music.
Before I get bonkers, I've got to get into the club. The security at Building Six is about comparable to boarding a plane. After getting my photo-ID scanned into their database, having my socks searched for drugs and my wallet rustled through I'm finally in. Stepping inside the place is absolutely ram-a-jam. Building Six is a pretty big club but you can't move without having to squeeze yourself through a mass of sweaty, writhing, happy flesh.
Eventually I carve out a space for myself in a crowd that, to put it bluntly, looks pretty damn drugged out. After a bit of straightforward dubstep to get us in the mood, the music takes a swerve and suddenly we're listening to the greatest hits of Bob Marley and the Wailers. In the stygian depths of a dark, dank nightclub Marley's positivity is a breath of fresh air.
It turns out to be an oddly appropriate build-up for Skrillex, who, for all the opprobrium thrown at him turns out to be a rather loveable sort of chap. He's short and wiry, jumping up and down behind his decks excitedly, getting off on the way his basslines roll right through the crowd. He's uncynical in way that only Americans can really be, restricting himself to platitudes like “Oh my god guys I'm so happy to be here!” or “Let's hear some noise London – yeah!”. Not exactly Oscar Wilde levels of repartee but his heart in the right place and anyway, as witty as Wilde was his bon mots never got a thousand people going mental for a big drop.
As for the music? Well, as Woody Allen said “the body knows what it wants” - and it turns out my body wants big dirty stinking bass. Skrillex's music is as shallow as a puddle, his not-so-secret weapon the big bass drop that's been endemic to pop music since about 2009. It's dumb. It's repetitive. It's completely tasteless. But boy oh boy is it fun to dance to. He pulls out some of his biggest hits relatively early on, the crowd whooping maniacally over the synth swell of the first bars of Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites: the greatest minds of my generation lolling their heads from side to side in an anoxic daze, shaking their asses hypnotically to the crazy pulsating beat.
Soon after comes his collaboration with with Damian Marley Make It Bun Dem, a car crash of dub reggae with Skrillex's wubbiness. It's great: the bass thumping through the body kinetic dancefloor of Building Six, my heart beating to the rhythm. Skrillex's rock roots shine through in the epically cheesy Bangarang, a very, very silly song with an undeniably insistent and irresistible pumping beat and one hell of a big drop.
It's songs like these when realise the genius of Skrillex's formula – a weird portmanteau of rock and dance that's neither one nor the other. This isn't just about putting some electric guitar sample in a dance song, or adding some bleepy bloopy backing track to an indie number – it's a telepod fusion of the two. Behind me forms a mosh pit full of gasping wet sweaty bodies, eyes rolling madly around their skulls like marbles in a porcelain teacup. It's primal and instinctive; the characters in a Hogarth painting wrapped in glow sticks and illuminated by sickly sharp green laser light.
At the climax of Skrillex's many thumping drops, there's a whoosh as pipes spray choking clouds of dry ice down upon us. The stuff leaves an acrid taste on the tongue, temporarily blinding you in a nightclub fug. Getting caught up in this kind of surging, searing barely controlled dance panic feels dangerous. I walk out of there a damaged man: ears blown to fuck, eyes stinging with sweat, clothes stuck to my skin, an unsettled stomach rolling in my gut and a mind ringing like a badly forged bell. Was it worth all the pain? Fuck yeah it was.
Photographs by Chris Wilcox
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Thursday, November 21, 2013
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Daft Punk's 2001 album Discovery has a lot to answer for. After 12 years the sound it pioneered continues to reverberate around the music industry, singlehandedly reviving the disco beats dormant since '78 and combining them with soaring synth lines and noodling electric guitar solos. It's a winning recipe: upbeat pop with a pumping dance edge, music that works as well after midnight with a headful of stimulants as it does cycling miserably to work the following Monday morning.
It's not really surprising that Lemaitre are so fun, after all, they are Norwegian. If there's an area of the world more likely to put out consistently great pop music than Scandinavia I'm yet to find it. Lemaitre are Ulrik Denizou Lund and Ketil Jansen, (though last night they played with third person about whom I can find out nothing). Since forming in 2010 they've ridden a wave of online popularity, their third EP reaching #1 in the iTunes electronic albums chart, as well as amassing 56,000 followers on Facebook and becoming one of the most listened to artists on Soundcloud.
From the moment they take to the stage it's easy to see why people fall for them so easily. Scandinavian pop is irresistible, especially so when it's being played by three charismatic and happy guys.. The crowd reflects this happiness right back up at the stage, the audience a sea of smiles shining out from glistening, mildly sweaty faces. The nature of the stage at Fabric means that there's no barrier separating band and audience, and the members frequently perch on the edge of the stage, exchanging conspiratorial smiles and matey fist-bumps with those in the front row.
The band have gone to some effort to make a visually interesting stage show, setting up a polygonal spiky structure to project designs onto; kind of like a budget version of Etienne de Crecy's giant moving cube. It's not really in the same ball-park as far as spectacle goes, but the polygon provides a much needed bit of scifi theatricality (even though someone inadvertently pulls the HDMI lead from the back of the projector towards the end of the gig.)
Despite the music staying firmly within the Discovery template, there's a pleasant bit of variety. Highlights are the piano and synth led Cut to Black, in which you hear echoes of the laid-back plinky-plonky minimalism of Metronomy or Royksopp. The melodies progress and overlap, instruments and vocals building into a sound that's both sincere and as light, fluffy and delicious as a well-made soufflé.
The chilled out crossroads between indie, pop and electronica is prime territory for a band to occupy: if you can please fans of all three genres you've got it made. Lemaitre's three EPs relentlessly hammer this sweet spot, so it's a bit of a surprise that they can get so heavy live. As pleasant as the melodic numbers are, it's when Lemaitre rock the fuck out just after the long build-up; a half second of silence and them *boom* - shit goes bananas. Perhaps in 2013 this is a bit played out, but dammit, it still does the business for me.
These moments of primeval musical abandon are what Fabric is designed for. Even on a work night with just two beers inside me I felt swept up in an ocean of energetic joy. As they reach the tipping point of a drop the light briefly dims and the band exchange a knowing glance. As the bassline kicks in the strobes fire; crimson laser curtains hove down through the billowing dry ice; and as one body the shiny happy people bounce up and down, the floor imperceptibly flexing as a hundred Converse clad feet impact against it.
Lemaitre clearly enjoy the effect they're having on the crowd, the band all grins and smiles. Towards the end of the gig Ulrik, mic-in-hand, launches himself into the audience, jumping around with us while singing away at the top of his lungs. Sure I've seen this kind of thing a thousand times before, but it never fails to put a smile on my face. I moments like these you sense the warmth of emotion coming from the crowd; though all too often the lyrical content of the songs is beside the point most people seem to know the words, or let out a whoop of anticipation as they recognise the opening bars of a favourite song.
The most vexing thing about the night is a problem common to nearly all bands with a strong electronica/dance element: how much is live and how much is pre-recorded. There are moments in the gig where the band surplus to requirements, the fiddling around with dials, keys and guitar having little obvious effect on what we're hearing. The multi-instrument melodies make it difficult to discern who's doing what; causing a dislocating effect when someone stops playing the guitar and the music carries on with no clear change. I get that it's not practical to recreate their sound live, but singing away to a backing track feels like an illusion of a musical performance rather than the real thing.
Fortunately this is easy to forget whilst you're in a hail of laser beams with the bass rattling the air in your lungs and bright lights flashing in your eyes. The songs are solid, the band seems nice and the venue is top notch. Sure they may be a bit derivative of Discovery sprinkled with bits of pieces of other mid-2000s-y electro, but when the music is this much fun who cares? Lemaitre: a good band.
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