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El Camino de Santiago

The camino only really revealed itself the moment I stopped. I had made it to Santiago de Compostela, cut across town, squeezing my army pack between its narrow alleys, via a photo in front of the Cathedral. Before me, on the home straight up to the Albergue Seminario Menor was the steepest hill I had encountered on my weeks long journey. One hundred and fifty metres of thigh-burning irony. I shared a joke with the friends I had met on the way, Philipp, Ana and Moritz, and we each grabbed the other and almost ran up the vertical thing, ignoring complaints coming in stereo from battered feet, knees, calves. Coming the other way, looking clean and rested, I shot a ‘Hola!’ at a fellow pilgrim and was roundly ignored. The same, when in the foyer, my smiles and eye contact went avoided.

This would never happen on the Camino. You walk up to, and past someone, and immediately have a friend-in-waiting. You’re bound by the blisters on your feet. You have in common the task, when you woke up that morning: to walk, just walk. There is no class. There is no status. You are equal because you walk, through blisters and heat which knows nothing of the world you live in: just this parallel universe where the only currency is kilometres. The Camino is not the destination, or even really the journey. It’s giving yourself up to simplicity, and to a world that doesn’t care about your car or job. And it’s giving yourself up to humility; you will have to ask for help. And it’s openness and camaraderie, and it’s strangers who become friends.

I usually start in Spanish, when I come across someone along the way. Sometimes, as with the case of my German friends, they screw up the top quarter of their face: brow into nose into narrowed eyes and ask if I speak English. These moments, I turn, hold their gaze and say with a flourish - I am English… as if I was a superhero revealing my secret identity. And then a conversation always flows to the soft backing of crunching twigs, how are your feet, where are you from, where are you going, what have you seen. A common one is “why?”. Everyone has a reason for walking, even if it’s just pleasure.

For me, I had just broken up with my girlfriend, throwing my holiday plans, and psyche into disarray. I went alone, with no plan, only a map, a compass and an oversized army backpack I borrowed from a friend. I felt the Camino would be a good way to centre myself, do something wholly my own and wholly unsupported. It felt like a good metaphor, and a good opportunity to write a little. For Moritz, he was in the middle of a law degree and an identity crisis. He was here to contemplate changing to focus on psychology. Philipp would soon start a high powered job and wanted a low powered trip. I met two Italian brothers, one of whom had done the Camino before and brought the other to help with his problems, drugs and crime. The brother went slow so for a while we did too. Some did it for religion. Many for pleasure. Many more were not totally sure why but hoped to find so on the way.

On the way, people are open and kind, and it can lead to all sorts of opportunities. The most memorable came on the penultimate night, when, close to Santiago my German companions took out their battered German guidebook. The next town was sure to be full of early risers with barely a bed, as all made their final sprint to Santiago. They suggested a detour, to a monastery which supposedly took guests in the summer. In the spring, perhaps not, but having drunk a beer from a roadside stall one Gallego man had set up in his workshop, and with his suggestion of a motorway motel as backup, we turned right when we should have gone straight. Into the forest, along the bank of the river, through undergrowth and uncertainty. At the end was a thick squat church, a Russian lady speaking in perfect Spanish outside, reclining. Two couples, German and Romanian would join later, and eventually our group made twelve: fitting, said Felix, for Jueves Santo.

So began an odd yet pleasurable evening, without common language and five nations between us, in German, Spanish and English there was one condition. The monks, ancient and few rattling around the quarters and gardens, wanted to kiss the feet of the pilgrims during mass. They did so, as we sat in the sheepish front row as guests of honour, then were treated to Cocido, wine and fruit together, sat at a long table. One of the Padres came with a neon green liquor, made from the Padrón Chillies, and when it burned you weren’t sure if it was alcohol or spice. He tapped his nose, said he was yet to patent it, and poured another glass. Victor worked for Romanian television as a foreign correspondent: he covered Obama’s two election victories, and that of Trump, most recently. I was out of filters, he, out of tobacco. We traded and talked about politics, Brexit and populism. The German couple were psychologists, interesting for Moritz.

These were the people with which I spent my night and these are the things I remember. Perhaps it’s the transitory nature the Camino makes of your friendships which mean people are open and easy. Or perhaps it’s the common path you walk. But the road is much more than what you walk, or who you walk with, it’s a meditative state of mind coming from a purity of objective. It gets into your bones, and suddenly you too are pure like right before left and smiling hola! at everyone you meet.

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Review: Childish Gambino - Awaken My Love

My spellchecker tells me Omnitalented is not a word but spellcheckers be damned

Because Donald Glover is omnitalented. Actor, screenwriter, director, stand-up comedian, all to acclaim. Childish Gambino is his musical alias, where he raps, produces and sings, to acclaim, and "Awaken, My Love!" is his third album, released, surely, to acclaim.

God damn it Donald, you’re making the rest of us look bad.

Opener "Me and Your Mama" acts as a précis. The three part introduction opens with the slack synth of Kool and the Gang, a jump-cut into a Funkadelic fireball and a fading away into The Isley Brothers’ ice.

He’s unrecognisable as the wink-and-nod, introverted rapper, and instead is at the helm of a luscious metaphysical psychedelia. The closest Glover comes to rapping is in the half ragga, half choking-on-a-fishbone staccato of "California". In the main, he inhabits the skin of George Clinton, James Brown and Prince with squeals and vocal gymnastics.

Although this is a departure, for us, he tackles this new language fluently. From the album title and its cognate stirrings to the first track, ‘Me and Your Mother’ it’s clear this is familial. It grows from his The tenth, "When Me and Your Mother Met" is left blank perhaps for his father’s story “I remember, this song back when me and your mother…”  

High points come when the funk is laid down slow and thick, and Gambino’s R&B crooning can rise above. Lead single "Redbone" is pure Prince, and treads the knife edge transgression between sex and danger. Bass stabs come from some deep dark place, laden with wah, whilst piano is pure and celestial, the vocal dripping with desire.

This duality comes to bear too on "Boogieman","Zombies" and "Terrified". Darkness and threat is implied in the titles, but the music behind has a magnetic pull. They deal too with the dichotomy of blackness, in which black men and women are superstars, businessmen, president, but are still marginal.

"Terrified" is perhaps the high point. It benefits from the influence of a more modern R&B, where Glover is already comfortable: a finger click groove and high-pitched croon contrast with bassline a deep heartbeat. Again, guitar caterwauls with princelike abandon and the smooth vocal paints in broad strokes, to reference an indistinct fear: “Catch a nigga coming quickly behind you / People want you underground / Do you misbehave?”

"Zombies" is more explicit, opening with a ducking, diving, distorted guitar and the same feel it in your boots bassline. It has a chanted, moaned bridge, and nods to "Thriller" with shuffle-clap and chilling cackle. It adds threat to the sultriness, but it’s the lyrics that cut deepest. Blackness is exploited, packaged and sold on. Kari Faux plays the role of an A&R snake on the spine-tingling hook, and whispers: "we’re coming out to get you / we are so glad we met you / we’re eating you for profit / there is no way to stop it".

And behind "Boogieman" is a scared child, of course. He hears the billboard top 10, raps with Kanye and JayZ, while on the street black kids get shot. His voice dehumanised Gambino half chants: “Every boy and girl all around the world / knows my niggas' words”. Yet fear of blackness and the boogieman remains: “if he's scared of me, how can we be free?”

The blueprint for a rap revolution was born in N.W.A.’s "Fuck The Police" and there is still the embedded, macho culture of battling. It’s a masculine hegemony, even now and this means hip hop’s default is to express its revolution physically, violently, and externally. On one of the most revolutionary, and best, hip hop albums of the decade, Run the Jewels II for example: “We killin' them for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom”, “Fuck the law, they can eat my dick, that's word to pimp”, “This Run The Jewels is: murder, mayhem, melodic music”.

The chastening socio-political landscape in America provides the scenery for "Awaken, My Love!", but there remains a vein of positivity and love. On "Stand Tall", "Have Some Love", "Baby Boy" and throughout he offers an alternate, more internal, revolution of the heart and soul, inspired by his family and their music and time. The album cover, a day glo pastiche of Maggot Brain, but in which his eyes roll back as much in psychomusical evaluation, as it in looking to the self. Perhaps an album about a revolution of the heart had to take the form closest to his own.

The result is an earthy, positive album that buzzes with authenticity and pride. It’s not perfect: "California" is a misfit ditty like Kid Creole noodling about, and perhaps closing track "Stand Tall" could be better focussed, and better located; as much as the tone chimes with the rest of the album. But the overall impression remains: of a powerful, socially aware album, but one with, slack funk basslines, licks, squeals, and knods to the greats

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Album Review: Goat - Requiem

To listen to the music of monastic psych-voyagers Goat is to play the part of a detective. Theirs is a stateless, nomadic sound, barely a stampless space on a fully filled passport. Their knotted blend of East and West, African djembe with Funkadelic freakouts, immediately begs questions of origin.

The question, when asked, has been answered with layers of myth and misinformation: they claim to be from Korpilombolo in Northern Sweden, although they may spell the name incorrectly on their website. The pulsating, trancelike nature of their music comes under the influence of a voodoo tradition, which inspires too their masks; although this seems equally unlikely given Northern Sweden’s proximity to Haiti.

That such tall tales have only been half dismissed speaks volumes about their mind boggling sound: Fela Kuti, with Cream as his backing band, all four of them having gotten really, really, into witchcraft.  But despite such mythologising, there is little chance of the band themselves overshadowing their work. Such tall tales serve as a smokescreen behind which the group retain their privacy. They do few interviews, fewer still in the runup to Requiem, so all the budding Goat detective has to go on, is a rambling press release which describes this as their ‘folk’ album.

On their third release the Goat sect largely give up their praise of the fire gods to worship the earth: the opening track ‘Union of Sun and Moon’ is the first indication of a new pastoral charm with which they weave. Images are of dancing in the African bush, ayahuasca in the Amazon. From the opening strains of birds tweeting, and the chanted acapella vocal, off key and charmingly childlike, that feeling of peace punctured with a primitive playground chant, you grasp for meaning, both within and without the music.

With the guitars slightly turned down, the mysticism and the spirituality has been turned up: ‘Psychedelic Lover’ features byzantine style chanting, and the vocals regularly hit that sweet spot between keys, giving them a timeless, foreign quality. Pan pipes pepper the album, as do the almost tactile sounds of güiros, Koras, and a wider range of traditional, acoustic instrumentation. This only adds to the feeling of age many of these songs have: an air of wisdom and of inheritance which underlines Goat’s stated aim, and their folk credentials.  

But Goat can still make a room writhe: their jam focussed methodology has always lent itself to trancelike, dancelike hip shaking, a solid groove laying the foundations before building layers and intensity. ‘Temple Rythms’ sounds like an acoustic cover of Aphex Twin’s ‘Didgeridoo’, ‘Trouble in the Streets’ pure sunshine ecstasy, a Cape Town carnival that plucks only the finest grooves from Graceland. There remains plenty to dig your teeth into, and Goat retain their head-thrown-back, hard rocking form on tracks like ‘All Seeing Eye’ (like Ram Jam playing a Masonic hall), ‘Goatfuzz’ (The White Stripes if Meg was frontwoman) and Goatband (Led Zeplin having taken a bunch of MDMA).

An album called Requiem begs obvious questions about the future of the band. Such a misanthropic collective could call it quits at any time. The penultimate track, ‘Goodbye’ is softly triumphant and the strains from ‘Diaribi’, the first track from the first album, close ‘Ubuntu’ the final track on Requiem. Ubuntu is a Southern African philosophical concept, roughly translating to ‘humanity towards others’ and emphasising the bond and one-ness of humanity. In this context, the album seems like a dying man pulling you close, telling you to be nice to your brother.

But to take this as a full-stop would be wrong. There is a feeling of higher power, an all encompassing truth or consciousness that pervades the album, and provides the thread to link their myriad sounds. Rather than an end, this feels like a reincarnation. They clearly do operate differently, communally, expanding and contracting and fluid, as band members drop in and out with their specific styles and instruments. Maybe it’s true that Goat are merely the latest in a long tradition of players from Korpilombolo, with its history of voodoo and unique musical style.

Often the creation of an elaborate backstory and diligent anonymity, like that of Jungle, or Deadmau5, is used to give credence to the music. In the case of Goat, the two form a cryptic, mystic, whole where it’s the music that gives credence to the myth. One comes from the other and vice-versa. The veracity of their story is irrelevant, so enchanting is the mixture of the two, in flowing robes and occultish masks. And there is certainly something heathen in the sacrificial brew, something of the Robert Johnson about it. Perhaps such music could only be made in a Faustian pact, in a Swedish voodoo commune, by a fluid group of masked musicians. However implausible that might be.

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Heard In Madrid: Vamos a la Playa

Madrid is full of things you don’t get in North West England. Tapas. Mahou. Sun. And the music, while sometimes awful (I will never, ever get down to reggaeton... sober) does turn up the occasional gem.

Above is such gem, in all its oversaturated glory. Perhaps I was blissfully unaware due to my youth (it was released in 1983), more likely because of he English averson to all music foreign language: even if it only contains a single, simple phrase again, and again, and again and...

But that really is the beauty of this track: I was propping up the bar at Lavapies’ Cevezaria Chinaski, trying some of their really delicious ales (you can take the boy out of the North West...) when the owners came in excited wheeling a dusty, kitsch jukebox. It clearly hadn’t been touched for thirty years.

Rarely does a video capture the sprit of the music quite so clearly, but the dead eyed, hypnotised stare and stiff yet funky dance are an almost exact replica of my own moves when this song came out of that jukebox. And by god did I quiero irme a la playa by the end.

It’s funky, fun, hypnoticaly danceable. An eternal summer jam. And so far ahead of its time the lead singer seems to be singing into his apple watch, with true, unrestrained joy.

My life has been changed for the better.

Vamos a la playa!

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Interview: Fresh Loaf and Snowangel

Coastal Shelf, which premiered at the prestigious Cornerhouse Theatre

Ashes, 3rd place (or was is second?) in the Guardian short film contest 

Buy Tickets here: http://www.wegottickets.com/

Fresh Loaf is a name well known by a select group of Manchester’s dramatic in-crowd, once described as ‘the Stone Roses of the Manchester theatre scene’. Or so Ollie Kerswell says, Fresh Loaf member and co-director of their latest play Snowangel. Their debut film Coastal Shelf premiered at the prestigious Cornerhouse theatre, short film ‘Ashes’ came third in The Guardian’s short fllm competition and 2013’s ‘Breathing Corpses’ played a sold-out five day run at the Victoria Baths. Original play Snowangel is their latest project, a fraught, time-travelling journey into love, relationships and one man’s psyche starring Keeley Fitzgerald and Charlie Ryan as Mia and Daniel. I caught up with Ollie, as well as writer Joe McKie and we chatted theatre, Snowangel, and life outside it.

So, play, when’s it running?

14th, 15th and 16th of August

And it’s at the King’s Arms in Salford, have you been there before?

Ollie: yes, many a time, it’s really good actually they’ve just refurbished it and they have three spaces now; the newly opened basement space, a studio space and the main space which is a 60 seater venue, really well kitted out, with wings. We’ll have a full lighting rig.

Joe: The coolest thing is the actual building, it’s a beautiful old pub with stained glass windows, and the guy that owns it is Paul Heaton, you know from the Housemartins. It’s probably the biggest space we’ve performed in?

O: I think so, in terms of theatre, we had a film play at The Cornerhouse, and ‘Ashes’ came second in that Guardian competition

J: Third…

That minute-long Guardian film showed the entire arc of a relationship through snapshots. I see definite parallels between that and your new project; what’s Snowangel all about?

J: Yeah, I do really like being able to get a feel for someone’s whole life and relationship. It’s about a guy who breaks up with his long term girlfriend who he’s known since school, and he’s so devastated by the breakup that he either begins to time travel, or he thinks he can. It’s as a way of him trying to figure out what went wrong and the play is him asking the audience for help in figuring that out.

The script reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Is Vonnegut an influence?

J: Slaughterhouse Five is one of my favourite novels, I really like magical realism, and the supernatural or sci-fi, fantasy elements combined with the everyday. I love the way he writes, it’s really fluid.

And time travel is a great tool, giving a feel for the relationship as a whole. How is that going to work on stage?

O: We want to keep it open; we don’t want the audience to go away knowing he can time travel for certain. It’s not as clear cut as stepping into a Tardis and ending up in whatever year, but equally we don’t want it to seem as though he’s definitely mad.

Is it a struggle for you as a director?

O: We’re going to play around with the lighting, and we’re also thinking of using a leitmotif, a bit of music played whenever time travel occurs, but hopefully it’s going to be clear in the acting. We’ve tried to make sure that they make it very clear when their objectives change, and of course their objectives change significantly when they’re either in another time or thinking about another time.

J: In practical terms, they’re both constantly on stage; when one is talking the other is partially lit, but it’s going to be quite fluid. There are only three or four occasions when they actually interact.

O: We’ll keep it as natural as possible during the dialogue as it’s the only time the audience gets to see an unadulterated version of events, not through the eyes of either Daniel or Mia, or visiting a time in the past.

J: Sound and lighting will definitely play a part, but it’s not going to be cheesy, it’s not going to be a Tardis.

O: It may be a Tardis.

If I turn up and there’s no Tardis I’ll be deeply disappointed. What about the title, Snowangel?

J: The first time they meet they make Snowangels, it’s quite an innocent image and from then on it’s about a loss of innocence; it all goes wrong, and there’s a lot at stake. It’s also the point at which we first see him in the play, either he’s travelled back or it’s in his head, but if he can time travel he’s returning to a safe place after all the shit that he’s been through.

Snowangel is his point of reference...

O: If the whole point of the play is him going back to see why it all went wrong; if it’s all about destruction of innocence then this is him asking to wipe the slate clean and go back to that point.

The play is structured around the relationship between Mia and Dan, but what does the play say about love?

J: Daniel is always questioning ‘am I in control’, of Mia, of the relationship, and even of his own actions. He wants to know if he had a choice in the matter or if it was all predetermined.

I got that, he almost seems carried along by the relationship, often unwillingly.

J: He has an unhealthy attitude toward women in general and there are elements of blame culture…

O: It’s about dependency as well; love is a crutch for both of them. For Daniel it’s a means of maintaining control, because neither of them is happy, but neither one knows what they would do without the other. Daniel needs Mia there in so many ways, he needs to be in control and will do horrible things to maintain that control. By that same token Mia isn’t happy but she needs him despite knowing she would be better off without him.

You mentioned blame culture…

J: there’s no actual rape, but it’s indicative of Daniel’s attitude towards women, he desires Miss Chadwick in particular and he seems to think his desire is courted because of the way she dresses.

O: That’s one of the major themes of the play, when did that attitude to women begin? It started off so innocently, with the snowangels; how did it get to the point at the end of the play? I won’t spoil it…

J: Again it’s a loss of innocence, and his grappling between free will and determinism; was it always going to be this way? He looks over the points in his life in search of some agency, and to a lesser degree it’s about the dangers of that kind of escapism.

We get another pint, and chat a little more about theatre in general, especially whether theatre can be populist. This is something they are both passionate about, and the boys sincerely hope that they can attract a few unfamiliar faces to the Kings Arms next week; although they would never be force people to watch theatre in the name of culture. ‘I’m never going to tell anyone to turn off The X-Factor and go to see a play’ Ollie assures me, but what they are doing is putting on an affordable, quality production in an informal space in the hope this will encourage as many people as possible to come down and check it out. As Joe puts it: 'It’s not all silence and no sweets… The Kings Arms, and a lot of similar venues, you pay £5, get yourself a pint, and sit upstairs watching some good theatre. It’s a great evening’.

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Pantha Du Prince: The Triad

The Triad: an album in which the tin man finds a heart.

Techno’s appeal is often its inhumanity. Recondite, Shed, or Surgeon make fine-tuned, precision instruments with which to beat you over the head. It’s about total submission, as the listener becomes a part of the machine’s inner workings: a machine seemingly more engineered than written. 

Whilst that has never quite been the modus operandi of Heinrick Weber (Pantha Du Prince), his music has never yet borne a human face. Although far from muscular, robotic creations, his were still mathematical in nature, but tapping into the golden ratio: star filled vistas full of twinkling bells, forming constellations from polyrhythms. They were beautiful for that: but they remained slightly distant, somewhat lifeless.

Perhaps the tin man is an unfavourable comparison to Scott Mou (of Queens) and Bendik Kjeldsberg (of The Bell Laboratory). Neither lacks brain nor courage. Perhaps better would be to talk of a star man making human contact, to form the Triad central to Weber’s latest project.

In his own words, 2010’s breakout Black Noise was ‘about me being alone in a small room’. The Triad is about ‘jamming’. The three collaborators coming together to create the moment of charge shown on the cover, subsequently captured. Dusty synthesisers like the CS-80, ARP, and even Synthi 100 replace the digitally snipped and manipulated sounds of previous releases, and the result is as much jazz-jam as it is techno.

Whilst the album that unfolds is a world away from his early cloistered minimalism (it’s maximalist, sometimes poppy, and yet as complex and evocative as ever), it synthesises two strands of his sound: the glacial beauty and the underground crunch of heavy machinery. Lightly coat it with a plaintive vocal, reverb drenched, and you have a new breadth, more textures to play with, more capacity to excite. Yet the sound remains entirely, distinctively, his.

Opener "The Wynter Hymn" begins in crystalline form, Mou’s voice up in the ether, lends human, almost spiritual warmth. It fits, nestled above Weber’s trademark chimes, and the same vocals give sad-sack-tech-banger "Frau im Mond, Sterne Laufen" a kind of Gregorian religiosity. Whereas between the two, ‘You what? Euphoria!’ bubbles and pops with an almost childlike wonder, living up to its name. The heavenly saccharine synth of ‘In an Open Space’ rapidly fractures into banjo-down-a-staircase electronic pulses: but once its Escherean edges are smoothed by the vocal, and the synthline reforms for the rousing chorus, all bets are off.

It’s closer to someone like Junior Boys than Ricardo Villalobos, and signposts an album that delights in making unexpected twists and turns. 10 minute oddesy "Chasing Vapour Trails" is perhaps the highlight. A brash body pop techno becomes obscured by a white noise blizzard, one that you don’t realise was there, until the fog clears to the sound of a deep, swaggering bassline. It’s a drop of near EDM calibre, yet done with such subtlety it somehow sneaks up on you. It segues slowly into a reverberating electropop number with the slightly vocoded lyrics: '‘we will fly you to the moon". Over the trademark bells, it completes the last stage of takeoff, into pure euphoria, and neatly encapsulates Weber’s career to date.

The charm in that track is, in microcosm, the charge that runs through the whole album. It has this live, skittish energy as ideas form, are discarded, reform as inspiration and improvisation dictate. It holds your attention, because it’s a bucking bull that could any moment throw its riders as it crashes through genres but somehow doesn’t.

‘Dream Yourself Awake’ is a jackin’ tech which gets the electropop treatment, ‘Lions Love’ has a synthline that could be Coldplay but winds up sounding like Gui Boratto (and is sure to become a sunrise summer anthem, up and down the Croatian coast this summer). Closing track ‘Wallflower For Pale Saints’, not only reads like a band I would have liked when I was sixteen, but sounds like one in the best possible way, layers of delay and echo even sounding like the rose tinted glasses.

It also reminds me of a festival I went to around that time, and that’s perhaps the crux of the album. It evokes in me a feeling. I don’t remember what band I was watching at that festival, or who I was with. In reality it probably isn’t a real band but a blurring of all the bands I was into back then. It just pulls on the same heartstring, and I’m back. I just feel it.

And that’s just what this album’s got. A heart. Mathematical, mechanical parts that once evoked landscapes, snowscapes, a view frozen in time now evoke emotions and memories. Fleshy stuff, any mistakes made with a smile. It’s that searched for human touch, something no mere tin man could create.

https://play.spotify.com/album/5mAQk1Ql6pkJAI9GofIOpT?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

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Yung Lean, Unknown Memory and the Psyche of Modern Rap

Yung Lean is a post-modern rap star. Or post-post-modern depending on how you look at it. 

It’s fitting that he began life as something of an internet curio; “Ginseng Strip” and “Motorola” were shared between friend groups next to Four Tet Remixes and cat videos. At first it wasn’t clear if he was for real,and it didn’t particularly matter. It was this enigmatic stage persona that was so captivating: the rap wading through treacle, lean tripping slowly over rounded nouns, white and cherubic like a hip hop Michael Cera. bucket hats, North Face and Arizona Ice. 

But he’s in every way a child of the internet so it’s no surprise his tropes are always rendered meme-like in a myspace technicolor of word art and grainy video. It’s impossible to talk about his music without talking about his popularity and why. Because so many people vocally just don’t get it. So many forcefully take him as a joke; think of him as a musical meme. But he’s not a meme. Lean and his sad boys are merely off the deep end of a new rap spectrum, and sophmore release Unknown Memory is the ultimate embodiment of this.

Finding substance in the phrase ‘postmodern’ is often difficult, so here’s what I mean. 

Dr. Dre called his first solo album The Chronic. Hip hop relished, and was in many ways defined by a bravado and hard headedness. They smoked ‘erryday. Snoop hasn’t had a day off in three decades. Yet Gambino describes himself as an “existential asthmatic/puff puff pass addict”, Earl Sweatshirt“could get high every day/but I’d be sleepy, OCD and paranoid”.Chance The Rapper and his hip hop generation openly “think we all addicted”. The vape-Rappers; the new generation to emerge over the last half a decade, don’t fit the mould of the previous two. In December, Childish Gambino (the omnitalented Donald Glover) was nominated for two Grammies, cementing his credentials as a bona fide rap star. Relevant is that he appeared red eyed on an album cover named in stilted subreddit syntax: Because the Internet. Chance helplessly holds your gaze from his technicolour cover while rapping about missing his mother. Like hip hop anti-heroes, modern rap stars can be introspective, they can express emotion. They can be Sad.

But as their name would suggest, the sadboys aren’t casually emotional. They have taken the complex schizophrenia of the weeping rap star, and made it central to their artistic being. And having taken this idea to the extreme, Lean and his crew could be considered truly postmodern rap stars; the sharp end of a changing game.

Forget rap, on the back of an only decent flow, Kanye’s talent for production has made him one of the biggest celebrities in the world. The same goes for Tyler, The Creator. Production matters, and on Unknown Memory it’s Yung Sherman and Yung Gud who take centre stage, fading in with “Blommor”. It’s glitch hop, a shadow of a beat enters stage left and segues seamlessly into Lean’s flow on “Blinded”. That flow is leaden footed, evoking his trademark codeine haze, but what makes it captivating isn’t its superhuman display of wit and dexterity. Technically and traditionally, he’s always been a bad rapper. But its charm is in the manner in which it evokes, sits perfectly on the beat, and compliments the production. The voice is another instrument with which to conjure their futuristic rap world. Autotuned to within an inch of its life, it nestles on the trap cloud the producers build out of sub bass, arpeggiated synths and a scattered, syncopated 808 hat. Yet it feels somehow distinctly European; less midnight in Vegas more dawn over Berghain, the robotic voice oddly reminiscent of Kraftwerk.

One of the beauties of hip hop is its ability to tell a story in three minutes but Lean would lake hours, with his slack-jawed slack rap. Instead he conjures with tropes and social signifiers, giving off a feeling instead of a narrative. On “Blinded”, entwined with stabs of synth, a choir of lost souls and a thick blanket of sub bass he raps "pull up with a black car/gotta hit the snack bar" and "they say I’m too bizzare/but I done make it this far/might smoke a fat jetpack out to myannmar". It’s nonsensical but not nonsense. More what Lean does is paint with an abstract paintbrush; (in a poststructuralist sense) acknowledging the listener’s primary role in creating that narrative. On “Sunrise Angel” he slurs "got that orange juice and gin/throw my conscience in a bin/blowing smoke, neo rings/dead soul within". There’s hip hop excess and futurism, but above all his lyrics earnestly evoke the millennial problem; introspection, feelings of alienaton, ennui, boredom, all with that vague, dull ache.

This is encompassed in their sadboys persona as much as their music, for in an age where hip hop is consumed en masse via youtube the two are almost inseparable. Lead single “Yoshi City” is perhaps where this integration is clearest; the title references classic Mario character Yoshi, and here the arpeggiated synth comes filtered in 16 bit soundbites. They’re kids, but for a rapper, Mario’s a kid’s game, far removed from bottle poppin’ and beauties. It’s a trope they mine deep, and It shouldn’t work, but here again they have made central to their stage act an ironic duality. Weed, Whips, brands bitches and lean. They’re present in spades, still retain their status as signifiers of status and hip hop masculinity, despite the irony inherent the delivery and the deliverants. That they do, despite the ironic incongruities reaffirms their unique surrealist take and their message; it’s not Crystal but Arizona Ice. Their whole stage persona manages to retain the rap game allure whilst eschewing its psychology and aesthetic but with a surrealism which practically screams ‘rap can be anything!!’. It’s the unbound imagination of youth which with its white stoney face holds your gaze and throws awkward ‘rap hands’. It’s It’s still all about whips and hoes just in the sadboys’ world it’s smart cars and Zooey Deschanel.

And they do it unabashed; calling out those who just don’t get it. On “Don’t Go” he uses the couplet “fuck what you heard this city’s mine/this city’s mine I’ll put it down”, on Monster he says both “they call me crazy at least they talking straight/shock first so they listen now that’s my faith” and “I’m a weirdo so to the weirdos I give back”. On “Leanworld” he literally raps ‘only the fans get it’. It’s textbook rap bravado, but combined with their unique sound and their many detractors it becomes a powerful signal of intent.

Crucially they’ve got the sounds to back it up. Ghosttown is a particular highlight, featuring a verse from Kanye prodigy Travis Scott, and the trademark trio of ominous space-synth, machine gun hi hats and shag pile sub bass. Lean hits the verbs a little harder here, to match Travis’ more conventional style, and whilst this may feed the theory that those beats would be better served by another rapper, for me, the album’s highpoint comes when Lean forgoes rapping altogether. “Leanworld” is almost saccharine sweet in its heavenly clubland trap – and Lean slows his flow to the point of breaking out in song, wistfully speaking of “the key and the gate it’s a leanworld/heavenly kingdom with a lean girl”.

His flow has been so radically revamped that on occasion songs blur into one, but it’s hard to criticise Lean for focussing on his strengths rather than his weaknesses. And although because of this I have the niggling feeling that one of his tracks might turn up on the Made in Chelsea soundtrack, or at least that it wouldn’t turn many heads piped out of a supermarket, it’s abundantly clear he’s no joke.

It's also clearly more of a movement or trend than an anomaly. Google ‘bronies’, ‘seapunk’ and ‘p.c. music’ and you will see that this is the forefront of a wave of post-irony, self referential, internet kitsch. He embodies duality, irony, boredom and excess and has clearly taped into something. On the back of this and a broadband connection, an eighteen year old has a big enough following that he can live out his own surreal rap fantasy. He’s the new archetype and as the album fades out and finds catharsis with the same left field electronica as it began, you wonder whether this is rap at all. By his own assertion he is, and with his tropes and bravado he certainly balls in the same league. Or at least the ball is the same shape. But perhaps he would get less hate if we just removed the genre moniker altogether, to prevent dudes looking for boom bap calling him out. It’s not like anyone’s browsing through genres in HMV any more.

[bloguffin-blog]

Live: George the Poet - Antwerp Mansion, Manchester

There’s a palpable sense of excitement in the line for Antwerp Mansion. 

Down an unlikely sidestreet, off Rusholme’s cumin-flavoured neon strip, I wait with the gaggle in the rain. I’m waiting for the paper-street grandeur of Antwerp Mansion, where ornate ballustrades rub shoulders with mysterious graffiti and flaking paintwork. It’s a rough edged deathtrap, with a grubby charm all its own; set apart in a club landscape ruled by the unholy triumvirate of replication gentrification and homogenisation.

And in many ways it feels like the perfect venue for George the Poet. If you didn’t know George, the frissant in the queue would tell you this is one of the hottest tickets in the country. His sound and his story are in equal measure captivating, and rightly or wrongly, his origins and education have made him an artist to be heard rather than just listened to. His given name is George Mpanga, born to Ugandan immigrants on London’s St Raphael’s estate. It’s a place described by one M.P. as ‘Lawless’, but through these disadvantages, George did something uncommon among his peers and attended Cambridge University. He studied Politics, Philosophy and Sociology and developed a passion for poetry, which easily integrated into his existing passion for rap.

So he raps about social issues, but does it with a fierce intelligence and deep theoretical knowledge. His message isn’t new; it’s the same story of hopelessness and a lack of options for underclasses across the world, from the West Coast projects to the North London estates. But his education at one of the finest establishments grants him the power to express it in same vernacular as the establishment itself. Structured points, in poetic parlance are hard to decry and while ‘Hood rat slang’ is easy for a suit to ignore; George’s structured, poetic manifesto is not.

It’s clear he sees himself as a political force, and someone who can have real political impact outside the conventional channels: as long as people will listen, he has power. I think in many ways this is a perfect venue for the event, looking at the vaulted ceiling on the top floor. It’s like some grassroots political rally, in a church hall, waiting for the firebrand preacher. The DJ spins a dub version of ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’, James Brown, Zulu Walk by the Mighty Mocambos. Suddenly the crowd thins, then thins again and I go with the tide, sure of something happening elsewhere. Elsewhere is a low ceilinged room painted red, stoner blues playing from the front.

Time ticks on and it’s past one when George takes to the stage. I’ve just been mobbed by some amicably rowdy friends in the smoking area; it’s Friday night, and the crowd is warming down from the working week. I’ve been here for a while, assuming George would be on early, in the calm before the storm where the crowd would listen and engage. I expected part gig part poetry slam part rally. But his hype man says otherwise, asking the crowd if ‘anyone came for a fucking disco’. I feel sure those who did will be disappointed, but I’m puzzled. It seems at odds with his deeply thought and complex art.

He opens with a piece of performance art – a dancer half signs half body pops to George’s voice – lip syncing a la Mulholland drive, in what I hope is an indication of the show to come; filled with metaphor and subtext. ‘Grinding’, a ringtone sampling track with a splash of funk enters with the crowd, whipped into a frenzy, screaming in affirmation of George’s rising star. His flow is on point; more potent than I had expected, especially on new track “Alice in Wonderland”. But the levels don’t seem quite right, at least his voice seems muffled, and with the frenzied late night crowd, some of the message is lost.

He speaks between tracks, on politics and society, about the upcoming election. He has a sign up sheet for an email list – ‘all I need is 50 man’ he says, to help him change things. He begins wearing a white shirt, suit trousers and belt, every inch the modern politician and only increases this impression when mid-set he puts on jacket and tie. He has a message to convey, he orates, consciously channelling Malcom X on the severe housing crisis in London. But like most clubs, in the wee hours, a suit talking politics doesn’t hold much sway. Rather than being silent and rapt, carried along by George’s words, the crowd talk amongst themselves. With big Friday night arm gestures, and raised voices. And that is the primary problem. When he puts on his suit and talks about his ‘search party manifesto’ the room noticeably empties, and it’s clear people don’t particularly want to think that hard at 1.45am.

His most powerful tracks are those with less repetition, less instrumentation, where his voice can preach in verse. ‘If The Shoe Fits’ is one such track, charting the dialogue of two complex lovers and their infidelities. George opens with an explanation in the tone you use co-ercing a drunk friend home: he explains whenever he changes character, introduces them, their name and explains how they are feeling. It’s perhaps necessary given the circumstance, but It breaks the flow of the song and you get lost in the wrong turns of the unfolding story, muffled as it was. On his E.P. its beauty was how it conjured the image and emotion of those characters, and spelling it out seemed to treat the audience as either a little dim, or more than a little drunk.

Tonight, his delicate wordplay and Harvard references are, for the louder tracks, lost in the bass heavy rig. The production caries these tracks, but when the band quietens down, only the crowd comes through clear; unwilling to listen to shout-outs for the likes of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Somewhere in the transition from social poet to social rapper it was decided he should also be a headline act. Whether this was because of the critical acclaim or vice versa is perhaps a chicken and egg thing (excuse the pun), but he’s certainly seen as the next big British rap star. Of his new releases “Cat D” is clearly airplay material, but retains a good measure of his poetic foundation. ‘1,2,1,2’ however, seems to water it down to the point of banality: perhaps consciously as tonight, before launching into it, he talks about ‘infiltrating the airwaves to talk some real shit’.

I can see it, he wants to influence as many people as possible, and this is one way to do it. But he’s not Dizzee Rascal. He isn’t founded on singalong hooks, but on thought and books and he genuinely has something important to say. Tonight, and perhaps going back some months, someone, somewhere, lost sight of what really makes George the Poet Britain’s hottest property. It’s in his academic, nuanced, footnoted flow and how he taps into the social reality for millions in this country. But he won’t be heard so late in the day. He’s not suited to late night party slots, bass heavy setups and hype men. Because they obscure the message. He clearly wants to enact change, and he knows that if people listen, he has power. But tonight, as hard as he tries to get his message across, it falls on drunk ears, mixed slightly wrong. What could have been a night of inspirational oration I will remember as a slightly blurred mess. And so will everyone else.

[bloguffin-blog]

Kode9: Nothing

If the Hyperdub aesthetic soundtracks an urban worst case scenario it comes as no surprise that Nothing hints at a neon requiem. 

Steve Goodman (Kode9) lost two friends within eighteen months, and now the dubstep originator turns its portentous drone to loss and emptiness.

The hybrid, dubbed out sounds of Kode9, and much of his own Hyperdub label, have their foundations planted firmly under crumbling concrete, stories high. The sound of both is now more varied, but they share a common tone to the nascent dubstep they raised, seeping around London’s paving slabs at the turn of the century. It’s sci-fi speculation but also a gritty realism: dance music that does more, tugging on brains not just Friday night heartstrings. For many that represents reality in a way piano house, say, can’t. Most people’s reality is far from a piano break, and the futurism, the dystopia is just extrapolation from that fact.

Kode9’s reality is loss and lacking, and he has the means to make it hit hard. Merely tracknames illustrate this: “Void”, “Zero Point Energy”, “Zero Work”, “Vacuum Packed”, “Nothing Lasts Forever”. There are footwork tributes to DJ Rashad, deeply entwined with Hyperdub in the years preceeding his death, but it’s The Spaceape’s passing which has left an indelible mark on Nothing.

His doomsday diatribes have been put to rest, but throughout you stumble across Spaceape shaped holes; the soundscapes somehow penetrating less. This is perhaps most noticeable on “Void”, an insistent protodubstep left blank, somehow lacking without the weighty rasp intended to rumble above it. “Respirator” samples the sound of a dying breath and the album closes with nine minutes of near silence in cannily titled “Nothing Lasts Forever”, a literal void owing an intellectual debt to John Cage’s “4’33”.

Alone, Kode9 tackles a different set of challenges, and a first solo effort could be forgiven for being slightly patchy. Occasional tracks suffer from absenteeism, but there are true moments of virtuosity; he’s been a solo producer par excellence for over a decade remember, just not in album form. Now he is forced to work harder to hold the listener’s attention, but with it comes a greater scope, and new: "Holo" and "Mirage show a lightness of touch, the former sounding like a Ritalin pumped arcade machine and the latter like a shaky transmission of a now centuries old Diana Ross cut. "Vacuum Packed" is perhaps the highlight, opening with looped piano snached from under the hands of Nina Simone, before that sustained Croydon kick acts as a depth charge to the whole thing, making it an intense and brooding low end banger.

And the prophetic pessimism spirals out of Goodman’s own loss, groping for something broader, more universal. Death of course is relatable, but Nothing shows a consciousness outside the self. In 2016 Kode9 will tour an audivisual set up, centred on a future where humanity alone is scarce, and, hinting at political awareness, “Zero Work” and “9 Drones” are both, unfeeling, agressive and lacking in humanity. “Zero Work” centres on this guttural burst, like a man punched in the stomach and compresses it pulling it tight to make a drum from its skin. Synth scrapes away as though at a coalface and it’s made muscular by that labour, ironising its title. It plays on the disconnect between the future we were promised fifty years ago, of zero work and robotic labour, and the grim grind of his extrapolated future. “9 Drones” is funerary to begin with, until the field gun kick pummels the ground, pierced by chattering machine gun hats. It rapidly becomes clear this is more military: gun fingers high, it’s a nightclub-death-march, whose political intent is again packaged in its title.

But it never hits harder than when it has a human face. “Third Eye Transmission”, features the reliced voice of the late Spaceape, clipped and bleeped and dehumanised just slightly, to remind you that he’s gone, available only digitally. It’s heartfelt, and that heart makes this is so much more than ‘dance’ music. Even when it's impersonal, it's as a warning for humanity, not a rejection. Kode9 bled deep meaning into ones and zeroes to make them human and were it only a series of bangers it wouldn’t be the textured and imperfectly lifelike experience it is. Nothing continues his life’s work to twist and distort. To invert boundaries and genres and do more. Yes at times it seems like there’s a little something missing. Yes at times it could use something more. But there is and it could. It’s called Nothing. Sometimes that’s the point.

https://play.spotify.com/album/1gy0UfC5pfaoNWsUGIke4K?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

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Fat White Family: Songs for Our Mothers

Songs for our Mothers delights in the disgusting.

It runs on the impulse that makes you sniff the old kebab from under your bed. The desire that makes you look at whatever you’ve pulled from your nose before throwing it away, or eating it, your choice. It has the twisted, purile sexuality that makes a Take a Break headline like “Stepdad Made Me His Sex Slave” eminently marketable. It’s the impulse that drew them to their subject matter: the bruised paradox that is an abusve relationship. And on this holiday to hell they found a mirror to themselves.

Don’t let the A&R hordes fool you, they’re no blank cheque. Fat White Family don’t have ‘crossover appeal’. Booking agents across the globe look at Lias’ flash of muff last Glastonbury, his dead eyed stare and perma-nude torso. They see his flailing limbs and flying gobs of Guinness. They do mental calculations.

You see, Fat White Family have a suicide pact. For one they’re riddled with carcinogens, un-oxides, freebases; they have everyDaily Mail death knell covered. They quite possibly have rickets and look so malnourished the Red Cross have been sniffing around The Queens Head. The band seems on the verge of unravelling. Dale Barclay, the virulent Amazing Snakeheads frontman had to step into Saul’s hole, when the hedonism took its toll last year. They’re self-flagellating, self-sabotaging, self-deprecating nihilists. And they’re here to scream it, six inches from your face.

For another thing, their album is full of Nazis, dictators, serial killers. They clearly have no desire to enamour themselves with middle England’s emerald corner of the internet.  For that’s where the vitriol will come: but dig a little deeper and it’s evident every Nazi outfit or threat to join ISIS is backed by Saul’s gap toothed grin.

It’s that twisted smile that makes "When Shipman Decides" sound like a muzac luau for the end of the world. Even in its title it stares straight into the abyss, into the soul of the man holding the scythe. The satanic waiting room is given a true crime feel with lilting lyrics like "sit down my dear/there’s nothing to fear" and "your family is fine/ just losing their minds" and it all comes at a slightly uncomfortable speed, not quite minor, not quite major. It’s on a slack Hawaiian keel, with a lap steel sway, pompous horns and a straight face: an outlet for their black humour.

Sonically, Songs for our Mothers has a two faced, twin peaks character; a ‘slightly off’ beach town by day with a dark secret coming out at night. Following the drunken come-on of "Love is the Crack" is the militaristic "Duce", complete with what sounds like Oppenheimer’s Güiro. "Whitest Boy on the Beach" is psychotic surf rock, but punctured by guitar stabs like one trollyfull of dynamite crashing into another. And directly after follows the slinking, perverted, "Satisfied", a darkened funfair, a Wurlitzer burlesque in the mould of "Touch That Leather".

The phrase ‘a more mature sound’ doesn’t really seem appropriate (and I can’t bring myself to say anything like ‘polished’), but there is a definite sense of evolution from the first record. Perhaps it’s because no tracks sound like they were recorded using a tin can, but the album carries genuine heft. "Hits Hits Hits" is a barbiturate blues which oozes in and out to light ‘oooh ooohs’, and any number of tracks will tear apart any number of venues on the Fat White’s mammoth tour.

And it remains that, despite the influence of internet buzz in their rise, this is still very much an IRL band. They haven’t quite found the key to recording that live sound, and they lack a tiny something without Lias’ every corpuscle howling. "Tinfoil Deathstar" is one of the album’s highlights; space organ, rumbling bassline, falsetto-psych vocals. Live it takes on a different dimension. Lias gobbles the mic to make shrieking, industrial hollers, and the sound careers into a distorted noise rock and subsequently off a cliff. All of this, of course, topped with his Ian-Curtis-meets-Iggy-Pop-at-a-séance act. The same goes for any number of songs, live they’re just a different beast, once the boys have had a few.

It’s a very modern paradox that means, in our desire to see more, to know more of artists, we understand less and what we do see is façade. We see sanitised, Instagram-ready lifestyles, authored Facebook posts and pull quotes. Decadence and hedonism come under strict lab conditions. It’s been a decade since anyone bought a record but from this hasn’t come the predicted kaleidoscope of independent radicals. In its place has come diversification, affiliate marketing: you no longer buy Bieber records, you buy brand Bieber.

And this softly softly approach, with the motto ‘mustn’t anger the sponsors’, has made modern rockstars little more than Cliff Richard with bottle service and sleeve tattoos. Maybe we’re in our own abusive relationship, with our musical heroes. Maybe we’re the one with the black eye.

The Family have, in the parlance, brand continuity. They have online presence. But it’s from the bottom up, rather than top down. What makes them special is that it’s organic. Their music is an extension of themselves, pure id, and that’s what makes them so enthralling. This is the sound of a death-or-glory headlong charge. The two fingers at everything, no fucking filter. They could fall off stage at any moment. They may die tomorrow. Despite possessing the strongest ‘buzz’ in years they may never make any money. But Fat White Family are definitely going to hell.

https://play.spotify.com/album/7jMNBKH5wRMxqXj6bMAdmy?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

[bloguffin-blog]

Live: Public Service Broadcasting - The Ritz, Manchester

The Ritz is decked out in spangled art deco. But in front, from a pulpit, dangles a rag. SF is picked out in gaffa taped juxtaposition. It’s the moniker of opening act Smoke Fairies; a five piece who richly deserve their mention. Two frontwomen harmonise in tones smooth enough to make hard men soft. They stand light and dark; blonde picked out in blue, brunette in white blonde light. Both colours bounce from the disco ball to the matching curves of their spangled dresses and across the room into hundreds of transfixed retina. They launch straight into an atmospheric blues rock. My mate Dan turns to me: says ‘she plays slide like a motherfucker’, I think. Whatever he says I nod in agreement.

They sound like Fleetwood Mac’s incestuous, Back to the Future lovechild. 60s Mac meets 70s Mac drowning in dry ice. Unafraid to be offbeat they tell baleful tales of love between balls-out blues: once a riff from ‘My Sharona’ is tacked onto a ballad and disco emerges. They are a fantastic live band but in the intermission, we bemoan that they lack a USP (or any other acronym) to get Pitchfork moist at the gills. As a result, they may fade into obscurity. I hope to be proven wrong.

PSB, Public Service Broadcasting come after that intermission. Or at least one of their creations does: It’s a public information film, a crowd information film really, featuring twee cartoon bignoses. It’s about a subject close to my heart; smartphones at gigs. It warns of their dangers (spoiler: death), and encourages everyone to watch and enjoy the band rather than the pixelated backside of a lens. It would perhaps get the biggest cheer of the night.

From the back, I barely see a single illuminated oblong. All night the crowd are enraptured, caught up in a sense of enveloping communalism. The first thing to strike the eye is the ‘spangled art deco’. Smoke Fairies almost stuck fingers to it. PSB embody it. They open with a hard 4/4: as Sankeys as it is ‘Sputnik’. Skeletal phantasms flit across the projected backdrop, static on stacked CRT screens fronting the stage. Strobes dissect that stage, and the crowd, picking out and widening each pupil. Sputnik itself hangs above the band: a celestial disco ball that sparks all night, delivering its own good-time transmissions. They build mood, feeling, and everything they do envelops in encompassing sensual experience. When they namecheck the band, the phrase ‘on set design and visuals: Mr. B’ produces a tremendous noise: whoops and hollers and the sound of hand on hand. They pull out all the metaphorical stops, every strobe in time. Imprinted on the optic nerve it creates that 4am feeing at 9.45.

The music is note for note; they replicate it with precision. The plaudits given to The Race For Space by this point speak for themselves. Live, the crescendos and the rousing, instrumental, disco inflected, 65daysofstatic inspired music combine with samples speaking of great human accomplishments. The first step on a celestial body, the first man to float unrestrained by gravity: the same gravity the spitfire defied. Something slightly below your ribcage builds and tightens when the light hit you right during the climactic scene of ‘The Other Side’. They run through the hits: with a strobe in your eye, ‘Go!’ sounds like Gui Boratto, Smoke Faries return to harmonise on ‘Valentina’, and ‘Signal 30’ is as violent as it is rampant.

The albums cling together so tightly, they are so conceptual and thematic that it creates a slight disconnect live. A little of each world: tweed suited and spacesuited, is lost in their jumbling, but it is the most minor of criticisms. What emerges above all, if I’ve not made it clear, is the sense of oneness, the sense of common humanity usually reserved for more easily definable electronic acts. While the music often leans towards noise rock, that feeling remains.

There are no egos on show: set designer gets the cheer usually reserved for the lead singer. The band’s only frontman is a series of pre-recorded samples. Ones and zeroes crack wise in clipped tones. Hollered requests from the crowd are few, partly I think because so much thought and effort had clearly gone into the construction of the evening. Much of the crowd felt they owed the band the luxury of doing it their way; we wanted to see the world they had so carefully created (in the same way they created worlds with each album) rather than merely hear the hits. One man shouts for something, and gets a deadpan, digital ‘No’. A snappy putdown with the push of a button, gets a big laugh from the crowd.

‘Gagarin’ complete with a fist-pumpng brass section forms the encore: the heckler got wish eventually, and I get the feeling nobody went home unhappy. The sensational music on record was replicated perfectly; their effort went into the extras, and into creating emotion, experience. I realised that effort paid dividends as I floated home, smiling, the sample from ‘ROYGBIV’ rattling around my head: ‘I believe in this world to come, I think It’s going to be a pretty good world’.

[bloguffin-blog]

Single Review: Kurt Vile - Pretty Pimpin’

Misissippi psych stomper ‘Pretty Pimpin’ is the lead track from the b’lieve I’m going down… album, Vile’s hotly anticipated fifth. It catches him in fine form but also incontemplative mood, and in the midst of an identity crisis.

The whole ensemble reads like the rueful dregs of a drunken weekend, swilling at the bottom of a bottle. Cluttered fingerpicking overlaps the stomp and walking bass in ordered chaos, like the strobing and pulsing of thoughtsthrough a killer hangover. The lyrics, with a singalong rapscallion freedom, come fast and measured, and provide a hypnotic thrust.

Yet it’s not the dregs of a weekend but seven years. His career to date has passed by in that kind of haze, and it’s left him wondering about the changes those years have wrought.Throughout he barely recognises himself, rushing as he is through “Monday, no a Tuesday, no Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.”

He hangover croons about hedonism: “All he ever wanted to be was someone in life that was just like/All I want is to just have fun/Live my life like a son of a gun.” He’s unsure the man made from his fantasy is really him yet laughs it off, treading the same distressed tightrope between buoyant and despondent the sonic palette does. In the chorus he dislikes what he sees before dismissing it in one titular sweep at the the coda: “But he’s wearin’ all my clothes, prettypimpin!’’

It’s a flippant, tongue in cheek conclusion, and the resulting track breaks no moulds, but shows great depth, both musical and emotional. What’s more it’s vintage Vile, and for my money, he can play his bluesy outsider psychobillyuntil the end of days.

[bloguffin-blog]

Genghar: A Dream Outside

Gengahr have trapped a little nugget of sunshine. 

A Dream Outside is music perfectly paired with a healthy dose of vitamin D. It percolates your inner ear and clouds your vision and poof: you’re at a sunny festival, on a grassy knolloverlooking satellite stage. It gives you that midway-through-my-fourth-warm-can buzz.

Although there are plenty of bright colours – in the main the psych is painted with a light brush – underneath that glaze it’s regularly indebted to 90s fuzz-pop and 90s alt-rock. Dinosaur Jr. is an obvious touchstone but so is Radiohead:there is more than a taste of Pablo Honey on tracks like ‘Where I Lie’, ‘Heroine’ and ‘Powder’. On those tracks the gossamer thin, almost ethereal vocal contrasts with a thick fog of fuzz, but every track has a hook, a riff, or a beat to make you sway. There’s just something in the Gengahr DNA that makes every track a floating earworm, hazily catchy.

There is a macabre gloom in the lyrics however. The album references vampires, sirens, angels and witches in a threatening, fantasy tapestry; Bushe’s voice has the loosest grip on reality. And although the lyrics are laden with metaphor, they aren’t with self-importance: on ‘She’s a Witch’ he opens by delicately quipping, ‘They’re coming to get you /it’s a good thing I’ve been working out’. Throughout, the bassline spins you round and the drums move your feet and those crooning troubles suddenly seem far removed. The result is tracks like ‘Fill My Gums With Blood’, a funky ballad about a lovestruck vampire. It manages to be direct and obtuse, out there and familiar through its articulatesongwriting, giving the album a playful, wistful character

The walls have been warping plenty recently. It’s been a banner twelve months for psych. Foxygen, Toro Y Moi, Tame Impala, Stealing Sheep, Pond and others have meant weirdness has been seeping through cracks all year. But in the shape of Gengahr you get the impression it could seep into the mainstream. Throughout, A Dream Outside displays nothing but great pop songwriting, with just enough visuals to keep busy minds entertained.

I’m excited, but I get the impression there’s a small something missing. Gengahr perhaps aren’t the finished article. The album as a whole does slip through your fingers just a little easily, lacking the kind of showstoppers of the above. But its sepia charm does work its magic over multiple listens, and every track seems to have an identity and purpose. No one track comes in, muddles through, and muddles out. Tracks in fact regularly come in lackadaisically enough, but get wound tight over the course of a radio-friendly three minutes and spit you out at the end humming hooks. ‘Dizzy Ghosts’ is a bushwhacking opener, ready to be hollered from massed throats in a Somerset field. ‘Embers’ has the chaotic power of a slowly derailing train. ‘She’s a Witch’ is a psychedelic rump-shaker. ‘Lonely as a Shark’ has echoes ofThe Beach Boys, while ‘Dark Star’ sounds like the contemplative Arctic Monkeys of Humbug.

And all these soundalikes are no criticism of the band. It’s a début album with all the ingredients for a glittering career to come: they might just be the latest link in an illustrious chain, and certainly add enough spice to the mix to call it their own. Guitar music never needed saving, but this might just turn out to be a big summer for Gengahr.

https://play.spotify.com/album/5rhAbIFPIKau2zKUjWC3CR?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

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Live: Woman’s Hour - Deaf Institute, Manchester

Arc lights pick out silhouettes as Woman’s Hour take the stage, pick out the edges of the pyramids that front the album, angular, scattered around the stage, pick out the softer edges of Fiona James, who fronts the band. It’s a look that mirrors the pared back, silhouette sound ofConversations, an artful monochrome which finds siblings in the music of The XX, Jessie Ware, and their other sparse bedfellows. To reduce Woman’s Hour to a ‘sounds like’ however, would be a disservice to the three years spent carefully distilling their 2011 E.P. And he result is a poised, dreamy sound, punctured by a distinctive groove.

Fiona’s vocals take centre stage on the album, all sincerity and heartfelt passion, and live she is very much the main event. The arc lights pulse in time with the music, her shadow fading in and out as she shadowboxes; throwing illegal punches and leading with the elbow on opener ‘Unbroken Sequence’. Spaced out synth builds quietly, easing the swaying crowd into the beat and she provides the stage presence, angular and flowing in equal measure. The rest of the band go about their work with a still precision, except the synth player, who swings his torso to and fro in that fit-like manner synth players do; restricted by the desk and the hands glued to buttons.

Live the music has the same inch perfect purity as on record; every track has the fat trimmed away, and the music as a result is in its purest form. The band has a synchronicity that means they almost function as one body, again with James as the head, lithely conducting proceedings, body popping, ever in time on ‘Devotion’ and feeling every note. Four hand claps sound as one to introduce ‘Her Ghost’ and Whenever the vocal soars and she holds that note, she moves in slow motion, before calling the band in, moving in time, and shadowboxing again. The slight Cumbrian twang is present throughout but rings clearest on ‘Darkest Place’, and the use of their native accent, combined with the love-letter lyrics gives the vocal a touching personal quality that wouldn’t be present in a sing-song quasi American drawl.

Those soft vowels and rounded ‘U’s are equally present on a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dancing In the Dark’ where an American drawl could be forgiven, and it comes as something of a surprise coming in at half-speed and transforming the 80s rock classic into something sensual, sinuous, and dreamlike. Curved, refracted fronds of light coat the mass of pyramids as the set reaches its climax; standout ‘Our Love Has No Rhythm’ takes your breath away from its first bars as synth fades in, lone vocal soars to sing alone briefly before the band return to woo you again. For final track ‘Day That Needs Defending’ James raises her arm high and brings it down to call in the triumphant band, for a rousing, heartwarming close. The Deaf Institute joins them in their final lovelorn plea and, standing just under his lapels, I notice it’s the first time the bassist cracks a smile.

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Single Review: Little Dragon - Underbart

‘Underbart’, in Swedish, means something akin to enchanting, wondrous. It’s a word which would aptly describe any number of Little Dragon’s releases to date – their latest release (‘Underbart’ for those who hadn’t guessed) perhaps not. 

It’s slinking, sensual, and bass heavy, indicative of a slight shift in direction on latest album Nabuma Rubberband. Compared to the bird-in-flight, fluttering fagility of much of their back catalogue this is direct and punchy. Whilst I wouldn’t quite call it realism, it does have feet planted on the ground.

Certainly, the video and lyrics seem to think so; the former centres on a simple cup of tea with a character eerily reminiscent of an aged Yukimi Nagano. The latter contrasts domestic normality with a domestic, normal kind of abnormality: “Alarm clock ring/was it your daily routine?” and “No ordinary day/he’s leaving for good”.

The new direction, leaning toward a sub-bass soul is perhaps influenced by the huge success the Maya Jane Coles remix of ‘Ritual Union’ had a couple of years ago; it takes its lead from 90s trip hop, in that it’s danceable in a late-night, indirect kind of way. Chattering hi hats, and insistent bass are borrowed directly from the Massive Attack play book, and add new weight to Nagano’s fragile yet soulful vocal.

It is unfortunate however, that they have strayed into territory largely redefined this year by FKA Twigs and her stellar debut. The comparison leaves ‘Underbart’ feeling a slightly stale, even frigid, but nonetheless solid release.

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Tracks of the Year pt 2

The Growlers – Chinese Fountain

Lo-fi disco sounds like an oxymoron, given the sparky sheen of the former. But The Growlers pull it off with aplomb and with a knowing wink: “Isn’t techno so shitty/even disco sounds punk”.

Theo Parrish – Footwork

That there is so little to it for the first two and a half minutes is part of its charm. It’s that tiny one-two two-inch punch, a deep but danceable bass melody, jittery drums and the exhortation to “let me see your footwork”. Synth stabs at the mid point are just the cherry on the cake.

Caribou – Our Love

The title track from his excellent new album, Caribou weaves the customary magic around his own ethereal voice. Soaring strings float along with the first half of the arrangement, yet the track still flirts with ‘banger’ status as he reworks its entire DNA to end on two minutes of increasingly chaotic techno.

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Robes (feat. Domo Genesis and Earl Sweatshirt)

Madlib’s sampling of jazzman Lenny White’s “Street Dreamer” makes this track, giving it the woozy feel of a summer afternoon, just before a kush coma. Tight verses from three rappers at the top of their game smack of honesty beneath the customary bravado, Earl’s off kilter delivery contrasting with Gibbs’ machine gun precision.

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Tracks of the Year pt.1

Azealia Banks – Desperado

Azealia breaths her brand of dirty fire over a beat and hook borrowed from MJ Cole; as vital and grimy as anything coming out of London this year.

Future Islands – A Dream of You and Me

Perfect, rousing synthpop, conducted by Samuel Herring’s whisky-soaked tenor bawl. Willfully retro it has all the ingredients of a guilty pleasure but with none of the guilt.

 The Wytches – Gravedweller

A psychotic, paranoid surf-punk romp as dark as its name would suggest. Above trademark whammy bar guitar vocalist Kristian Bell screams “You’re scared of the dark/you’re scared of the darkness”, and The Wytches are why

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Dark Sky – Rainkist (Marcel Dettmann Remix)

It unravels slowly, beginning life as a bass heavy, restrained and soulful track belying Dettmann’s techno credentials. Hi Hats, snares and jangling percussion enter around the three minute mark, yet he keeps you teetering on the brink for thirty more seconds, until that 4/4 kick moves your feet.

The War on Drugs – Red Eyes

It’s perfectly crafted pop, somehow every component part easily falls into place with their rough shod Americana. Drums are relentless, arrangements are thickly textured; synth and chimes lie just under the surface and the vocal is just one of the band’s many borrowed Boss-isms. Euphoric rock n roll.