Posts filed under 'Music'
Vampire Weekend ‘Oxford Comma’
XL Digital
‘Who gives a fuck about an Oxford Comma?’ sings Vampire Weekend’s front-man Ezra Koenig in what has to be the most unlikely chorus for a pop song ever. This, the band’s third UK single, promises to propel the NYC band ever closer to broad, mainstream recognition. Although not as immediately infectious as last single from their eponymous long player, ‘A-Punk’; ‘Oxford Comma’s stripped down, minimalist beauty foregrounds Koenig’s sweet lyrics of high-society hypocrisy and disdain, without the faintest whiff of self-indulgence. This cracking little grower of a single deserves to be bought in droves.
Dave Allen
Add comment July 4, 2008
Black Lips The Place I Love – Birmingham 8th May 2008
With handlebar moustaches and gold teeth aplenty, what the dodgiest looking band to grace Club NME lack in innovation that make up for in perspiration.
As part of Club NME’s student launch night – although according to one website, that’s every Thursday till February -The Black Lips thrash through their set of ramshackle rock n’ roll. Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, this noisy quartet take heavy influences from everything 60’s, adding a dash of punk sensibility along the way.
The Ramones then? Well, yes and no.
Add comment July 4, 2008
Proof that I don’t wear indie blinkers… kind of.
Duffy
Glee Club, Birmingham
11th March 2008
Number one in the charts, purveyor of unmistakably retro pop and somehow not yet hated by indie kids, Duffy brings Motown chic to Birmingham tonight.
“Do you fancy reviewing Duffy at the Glee Club?” a surprisingly proactive PR agent asked me during one absent minded afternoon at work. Upon considering this perfect opportunity to take the other half out to see her favourite, Welsh, retro-pop songstress for free (all dressed up as ‘my treat’ at no cost to myself), I quickly hammered “Sure!” into the half-hidden Gmail window.
Yet seeing a teacher isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the night before the gig with lesson plans aplenty, the girlfriend pulled out, leaving me with two tickets for a gig I wasn’t fussed about and no-one to go with. Thankfully, it’s always useful having a mate easily lured to any event on the promise of booze and drugs.
So stood in the hot, tight confines of the Glee Club, high as a kite, we awaited Duffy, currently standing at number one and collecting a string of plaudits along the way from both mainstream and alternative circles. The small comedy club-cum-gig venue was overrun with all sorts, middle-aged one-gig-a-year families, northern soulsters bedecked in Lambretta and the occasional brick shithouse with a shaved head who amazingly knows the words to every song.
“Duffy? Isn’t she just an Amy Winehouse rip-off?” My friend asks. But before can I inform him of the strange irony of a white man’s Aretha Franklin being herself a source of imitation, the short blonde from the Llŷn Peninsula pops on stage to greet the crowd with a few nervy words about it being the last night of the tour.
She opens her intimate set with album title track Rockferry, and finally, we get to hear that astonishing voice. At a time when the general direction of music washes about aimlessly looking for a way forward but only hitting the past, Duffy unashamedly embraces the likes of Dusty Springfield, resurrecting Motown chic for post-modernity.
“That song’s about not putting up with any shit,” she tells us after her heart-wrenching vocals tear through album highlight, Stepping Stones, “much like a lot of my songs tonight.” Clearly overjoyed to be in front of a packed, appreciative crowd at the end of her tour, Duffy inevitably leaves the hit for last, closing on Mercy, she returns for a brief encore with anthemic number Distant Dreamer.
But it was well before that, when the backing band left the stage and her vocals were accompanied only by a simple guitar on Syrup and Honey, that her voice was fully let loose, transforming – if only for three minutes, Brum’s, smoke-free, Glee Club into a liquor-soaked, seedy, Detroit jazz cafe circa 1961.
Is she the Arctic Monkey’s to Amy Winehouse’s Babyshambles? Well I don’t know, but her potential as a future queen of pop is massive.
www.iamduffy.com
DAVE ALLEN
4/5
For fans of: Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse, Adele, Billie Holiday
pub. originally on www.subba-cultcha.com
Add comment March 22, 2008
Scouse folksters latest effort seems awkwardly over-polished
AmsterdamArm in ArmCIA Records/Universal
Best known for anthemic bit of beauty ‘Does This Train Stop On Merseyside?’, which happens to be the last song ever played on John Peel’s festive fifty (isn’t it weird to hear his name without it being prefixed by “the late, great”?), Ian Prowse’s Amsterdam have been gathering up famous fans aplenty. Even if Christy Moore and Elvis Costello aren’t exactly the coolest celebrity fans a band can have.
Coming from the anthemic folk angle, this band of Scousers, lead by have more in common with the polished Celtic folk The Frames or even Christy Moore than the rugged, urban, anti-folk of Jeffrey Lewis. In fact Moore’s cracked Irish brogue delivers a spoken word poem on stand-out song ‘Nothing’s Goin’ Right.’
But when they’re not going all Celtic, Amsterdam go the other extreme and adopt kitsch merseybeat to mixed effect (‘Lifestyle’). It’s odd to hear a band with such a blatant disregard for music fashion. And frankly it’s kind of refreshing.
Yet despite some likeable tunes and the odd dark lyric (‘I took a real kicking/I don’t know why’ on ‘Hatred is Wasted’), it all just seems disappointingly middle-England. There just doesn’t seem to be a sizable set of testicles to give Amsterdam’s dreamy 60’s pop kitsch melodies any real edge or invention.
www.amsterdam-music.comDAVE ALLEN3/5
http://www.subba-cultcha.com/article_album.php?id=7034
Add comment March 15, 2008
Levi’s Ones to Watch: Cut Off Your Hands / Cazals / Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man
“Thanks, this has been the most depressing night of our lives”
For all the dodgy corporate sponsorship, these Levi’s Ones to Watch gigs have launched the careers of some cracking little bands over the past couple of years. Last year’s tour featured the likes of Foals, Wombats and Jolene and the Jing Jang Jong, not to mention past heroes like The Fratellis, The View, The Pigeon Detectives and other such band’s beginning with ‘the.’
So for all the moist anticipation, it was a bit disheartening to stumble into a drafty Birmingham Barfly to find more photographers than audience members, meaning the solid, if not revolutionary sounds of Cut Off Your Hands, Cazals and stupidly named Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man were belted out to a stark, cold, empty room.
The feeling must have been mutual too, Cut Off Your Hands vocalist Nick Johnson’s only words throughout his bands concise set was the ludicrously bleak closer:
“Thanks, it’s been the most depressing night of our lives”
Which to someone once subjected to a Sex and the City marathon, I find a tad melodramatic. Still, it’s hard to get exciting about any band when there’s a greater atmosphere on Mars.
But what of the music that elucidated this empty cavern of a venue? Well it all started well enough, hardcore fans of punctuation Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man opened proceedings with an epically ambitious cacophony of sinister darkness that sounded like a long-lost Joy Division EP. As we venture into their set, things take unexpected twists as lanky haired guitarist Jareth takes us down ever more experimental avenues.
If anything, the band suffers from too much ambition, despite a few impressive direct songs oddly reminiscent of a non-shit Horrors or even Black Sabbath, other tracks try and squeeze twelve songs into one, and for all the brief flickers of genius, it all ends up rather directionless. Although despite that, they emerge easily as the most interesting band of the night.
Next up in front of the dozen or so media types that inhabit tonight’s BarFly are London’s Cavals. With explosive guitar strings that lick the amps dry and an enveloping, tumultuous sound, Cavals certainly have potential. Live, they’re as tight as a nun’s vaj, but you just can’t help feeling they’re crying out to receive the giant phallus of a great tune.
Particularly irritating was Cazals lead singer, besides the fact that he looks like a rat and mumbled about how cold it was throughout, it’s sad to say that front-man Phil just doesn’t isn’t a great front-man. Plus, the lyrics that were distinguishable had the poetry of a Speak n Spell. Their best song of the night To Cut a Long Story Short, proudly stands out like Peter Crouch in a sea of midgets.
Finally, Kiwi’s Cut Off Your Hands amble on and deliver a furious set of Razorlight meets The Smiths avante garde rock n’ roll. It’s slick and tightly played, with ball shuddering bass and amp achingly loud guitar, topped off with an elastic limbed front-man akin to a young Mick Jagger. Cut Off your Hands have all the right ingredients to make their name heard, yet somehow lack that certain something.
It’s something that typifies all three young, hopeful bands at tonight’s gig; for all their obvious merits of each band, it’s all been done before. Maybe it’s due to this hacks’ perpetually high expectations to discover a band to revolutionise the tired indie scene – with all its ludicrous pretentions and shallow hypocrisy, but so many new bands just seem to equate imitation with invention.
Now there’s nothing essentially wrong with that, but when every new band takes influence from the same small handful of acts, it’s a struggle being enthusiastic about new music.
www.lifeisboring.co.uk
www.oxeaglelionman.com
www.myspace.com/cutoffyourhands
Thanks to Hannah @ Exposure
By: Dave Allen
Add comment February 28, 2008
