live review: the black keys. alexandra palace, london. 10 february 2012.

I’d never been to a gig at Alexandra Palace before. The setting is of course beautiful. The acoustics not bad (also not perfect). The bar large enough to cope with the crowd. And it’s five minutes from my flat. Perfect basically. It is not your usual venue. It’s much closer to a festival set up with different food vendors and a large open space for the bar. I saw Bloc Party at Olympia a few years ago and it’s the same sort of set up.

Nobody gives a shit about me describing the venue though. Let’s talk music. The Black Keys are so damn good live. Dan Auerbach’s voice is as good as ever, whether revisiting older tracks from The Big Come Up or playing the brand new El Camino album. I love Patrick’s energetic drumming, although I’m convinced that he will end up with some serious back problems thanks to how hunched he gets over the drums. The way he bobs along means that even I, with my absolute lack of rhythm, can attempt to nod along in time.

It’s the combination of the band and the venue that really makes this worth talking about though. Just look at how big The Black Keys have become. It wasn’t so long ago that the band were considered a good, but low key, rock band with a blues edge. Over the past two albums they have become one of the biggest rock band on the world. Somehow they have managed to keep to the ideals that made them stand out in those early years, but also become huge. Properly huge. Huge enough to pack out Alexandra Palace for three straight days. And the venue and the band are the perfect match

Oh, and I hit a man for spilling my pint.

live review: toy. shacklewell arms, london. 25 january 2012.

“If you like the Horrors, you’ll like Toy” was the line I was using to get someone to go with me to this gig, the second week of the band’s monthly residence at East London’s Shacklewell Arms. It worked, I got gig friends, but I think it does them a disservice.

While they have the Krautrock and psychedelic wig-out of Southend-on-Sea’s finest, Toy have something different going for them. Less posturing, less 80s synth and a more authentic 60s sound are three things, and one of those rotating kaleidoscope projections that make you feel like you’re in Performance is another. Oh and hair. This London five-piece has lots of hair. Lots of hair grooving to long, proggy tracks. We, the audience, had earned our prog stripes by enduring the support band who never announced who they were, but whose songs were so long, it made Toy look like they were three minute power pop wonders. Toy’s latest single ‘Left Myself Behind’, clocking in at nigh-on eight minutes, was a walk in the park by comparison.

The fact I’m obliged to drop about Toy according to the lore of music reviewers is that three of them were in the ill-fated Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong. But you don’t really need to know that. What you do need to know is that you’ve got two weeks left to enjoy them for free at a Dalston dive bar and say you saw them before anyone else.

Words by Helen Parton (twitter)

live review: atp, nightmare before christmas. butlins, minehead. 9-11 december 2011.

And the live tweeting of #atpnbc begins. In fact, it begins with a coach transfer between Taunton and Minehead

— Tim Brown (@sockformation) December9, 2011

when i first posted a review based solely on my tweets it was basically a lazy way to review field day a couple of years ago. i developed the idea and wireless 2011 was what i perceived was the pinnacle. now, with the ability to embed tweets (you may have always been able to do this but i’ve only just found out), we’re taking it next level motherfuckers. you can reply, retweet and favourite. go fill your boots. it seems to slow down the site a bit though, so you’ll have to click to read… (more…)

live review: summer camp. efes pool bar, london. 17 november 2011.

i could write about how great it was to see such a huge crowd. i could write about the brilliance of jeremy and elizabeth kicking off with an acoustic version of ‘better off without you’ while walking through the crowd. i could write about the girl who i was convinced was about to vomit on me throughout the gig. i could write about how much i want to find out where william got his shirt from. i could write about the second acoustic performance of the night for ‘losing my mind’. i could write about red stripe for £3. i could write about the superb company. i could write about summer camp’s rendition of r kelly’s ‘ignition’ during the karaoke after party. i could write about how this must be the eleventh or twelfth time i’ve seen summer camp at least and this was also the best.

i think the best way to tell you about just how good this gig was though, is by telling you that i fought through my hangover on friday morning to buy tickets to their scala gig next year because i am so convinced that every single person in that crowd would be doing the same thing and i cannot miss out.

live review: mayhem. rockheim, trondheim, norway. 18 october 2011.

ed note:i know this isn’t the usual type of band that you’d see reviewed on here, but come the fuck on. this is mayhem. they’re proper legendary. what’s more, this was in their home country of norway. i haven’t checked it out, but i’m pretty sure this must be a uk exclusive. let’s assume it is.

it is 17 years since de mysteriis dom sathanas, the album that, in the wake of mayhem’s murders, suicides and church burnings, put black metal on an obscure part of the northern european map.

atilla csisar, the norwegian band’s hungarian front man looks like he’s had a few goulashes since then, but still puts his sometimes operatic voice though the tonsil cheese grater. he’s daubed in bloody-faced corpse paint and black cape, and performs to the skull he holds in his hand. the noose which hangs from the high ceiling looks tight around his neck. he sways around the stage, pulling the rope yet tighter on his throat as he fights imaginary demons with some kind of pissed-up martial art. at his best he’s like a drunk boxing-announcer, vomiting sandpaper onto a broken microphone.

beside him, the band’s living co-founder and bassist, necro butcher, still shirtless and buff after all these years, allows himself the occasional smile on the stage while the two session guitarists thrash with the black metal look of pained determination. at the back of the stage, the band’s iconic mentalist drummer, hellhammer, hammers away with artful violence.

today’s black metal bands work hard with professionals to achieve the genre’s signature unprofessional sound. mayhem practically invented it with that 1994 album. but mayhem’s core members are regarded as atistes and the trondheim club, rockheim, has the best acoustics in northern norway. (it is, says the roadie, effectively a large recording studio.) so the dose of unprofessionalism comes from a weird shaky-cam, back-stage interview with the band after the gig, broadcast onto the club’s big screen. csisar doesn’t understand the norwegian questions so just growls drunkenly into the microphone to the audience’s delight.

hellhammer is pissed off, he tells me later, that the pig’s heads, which the band like to fling at the audience, did not arrive in time for the gig. the crowd don’t seem to mind. a huge, grimy, fat guy at the front of the club punches nearby strangers in the arm in what he imagines is a black metal approximation of a pill-head hugging a stranger in an early 90s warehouse. one guy faints. a young girl, no older than 18, with coiffured hair and fashionable jeans, wears bright yellow ear plugs. she is far too hot for the ugly, raw sound coming from the stage, and the sweaty headbangers stinking up the floor.

she may not even have been alive when varg vikernes, mayhem’s then session bassist, murdered band-mate euronymous in a frenzied, 32-stab, knife attack in 1994 – nor even when hellhammer released the album later that year with the murdered and murderer playing together on the same record. she was no more than an idea when dead, the band’s aptly-named front man blew his brains out in euronymous’s flat in 1993. in 1992, when vikernes was burning down 12th century churches, the young reveller’s dad was probably just plucking up the courage to feel up her mum-to-be in a shitty trondheim cinema. and her parents had probably not even met when necrobutcher and euronymous started the band in 1984.

but when csisar dedicates a song from de mysteriis sataanis to dead, the young girl headbangs enthusiastically with the rest. even if her hair doesn’t move very much.

words by mark lewis (twitter)

live review: pete and the pirates. scale, london. 4 october 2011.

as the sweat dripped off the end of my fringe (not my most ladylike look), a couple of things struck me about this pete and the pirates gig 1) i should really have taken my jacket off before going into the mosh pit, 2) my fringe seriously needs a trim and most importantly, why don’t more people know how good this reading five-piece are? well obviously the full to capacity crowd here at the scala do. i thought it’d all be teenage (and one, ahem, thirtysomething) girls swooning over pete, pete, tommy, david and johnny but no, pete and the pirates have seemingly made a huge impression with the big, burly bald blokes you usually find at kasabian gigs too, judging by tonight’s audience.

the crowd swelled and pogoed for the singles off one thousand pictures, the band’s second album: come to the bar, winter 1 and united. the latter is an undeniable indie pop classic: even people who don’t know anything else about the band are, well, united in their love of it. re-release it please stolen recordings! but keep the accompanying cat-themed video, that’s ace.

pete and the pirates continue the british songwriting tradition of putting irresistible melodies beneath bittersweet tales of fumbling, stumbling relationships set out by the likes of squeeze, buzzcocks and blur before them. downtempo numbers such as half moon street and washing powder show how pete and the pirates have progressed in songwriting terms from the simplistic perkiness of earlier songs such as mr understanding. my only gripes with this performance was a lack of inter-song banter (i like my frontmen flirtier, chattier and cockier) and that it was all over in just over three quarters of an hour. with any luck, this uk tour will propel this clever, likeable bunch to much greater things.

words by helen parton (twitter)

live review: fennesz / emeralds. union chapel, london. 25 september 2011

laptop musicians, with their fingers stuck to a trackpad while adoring audiences look on, pose two eternal questions:
a) what are they looking at?
b) wouldn’t that be easier with a mouse?

in fennesz’s case, with his long hair, dark leather jacket and overwhelming soundscapes, he may well be viewing a portal to hell: both curating the horrifying and amazing sounds allowed through to this dimension while keeping watch over anything else which may try to pass through. or it might just be a series of wav files and filters. its anyone’s guess.

his opening set overwhelms with a power which keeps the audience absolutely silent. when not driving the soundscape through his laptop, his guitar playing does a lot of the work either creating the raw material for layers of sound or delivering more orthodox spectral riffs. the white noise and chord progressions swap roles, one forming an infrastructure for the other to hang off, before forming details on the other’s foundations. the overall effect is a sweeping barrier of sound punctuated regularly by formations of melody – a soundtrack to a less dystopian post-apocalyptic world.

if fennesz’s guitar scrapes the underworld for source material, emerald’s guitarist mark mcguire starts their set sounding like he is playing on a british seaside peer while we stand on shore. their largely drum-free set chimes and sequences itself, giving the floor to the guitar before swamping it in a wash of bent synth noise. walking through the halls and stairways of the union chapel as they play is an eerie sensation, as though you are listening to the hymn evolved: like a vangelis score left with an ai to mutate, iterate, decay and be reborn eternally.

the faintest whiff of a beat grows into an organic pump, taking the music in a new direction. it builds and crescendos, before being stripped out and taking emeralds back to their signature ‘does it look like i’m here?’ sound.

as with fennesz, emeralds’ tracks flow into one another leading to a classic proms like release when the set does finally reach a conclusion. an audience sat in revered silence were transformed instantly into believers in rapture.

words by saul sherry.
saul sherry is a writer on music and more. you can read more of his stuff at saulsherry.com

despite the fact that it takes away from the live tweet review, i feel i should add some more to this. i struggled with 3g and there is plenty more i could have said. i didn’t even mention wild beasts. excellent of course. i was really looking forward to seeing twin shadow and he didn’t disappoint. i missed about group which was a shame. i needed a beer though. decided on warpaint instead of the horrors in the end as i’ve seen the horrors precisely 502 times before. just imagine those in tweets and we’ll all get along fine.

i guess i could have a moan about the queuing everywhere. it was the worst field day i’ve ever been to for that. i won’t moan though because there is something i love about field day and i’ll still be back next year.

live review: ofwgkta. electric ballroom, london. 6 july 2011.

i witnessed odd future take over camden’s electric ballroom last night from the balcony. the reasons for this were three fold. i’m old these days; i didn’t want to ruin myself for today’s beach boys gig; my glasses are fucking expensive. despite my aerial view, i am still able to confirm that tyler, the creator is a superstar in waiting. yeah, he’s got the whole thing about slightly unsuitable lyrics for heart fm holding him back, but he will be a superstar.

the entire collective performed a pretty impressive, if slightly disjointed, set with each and every one of them bringing something to the table. hodgy stood out for me, but i’ve spoken to others who have said domo genesis and mike g did the same job for them. that’s the beauty of odd future. there is something for everybody.

the highlights of the gig all centered around tyler though. tyler and his broken leg. whether he was calling the guy in the purple shirt who threw a shoe up to get a beating from hodgy beats (and then advising him not to actually come up) or sitting there deciding what song to do next as there was no playlist, tyler had the crowd in the palm of his hand. he even stage dived, broken leg and all. i’ll repeat. stage dived with a broken leg. he came across a lot more human than i imagined he would. he joked. he chatted. he is one enigmatic mother fucker. he also has a new fan in emma.

any negatives? a couple. there was no frank ocean (and therefore no ‘she’ or ‘novacane’). the shoe throwing incident happened in the middle of ‘splatter’ and that was therefore cut short. it also meant that my favourite line was missed completely – “somebody tell satan that i want my fucking swag back”. these were minor though and if everybody had been there i have no idea how the (particularity energetic) crowd would have fitted into the tight venue.

this review has gone all over the place so i’ll sum it up. tyler is going to be huge. talent and personality go a long way.

update: i meant to coin the phrase hipster hop at some point in this review but forgot