Dark matter and Cleopatra eyes: Austra live at Cargo

First published in Loud And Quiet

Don't call it operatic

Austra
Cargo, Shoreditch
7th July 2011

Goth is a question that cannot be answered yet will not die. What is it, exactly? No one can agree. Goth is the dark matter of the musical universe and best sidestepped as a term altogether.

And so: the current spectrum of darkwave banshees stretches from Planningtorock at the sharp end through to Zola Jesus at the rather blunt end, with tenuous foundations laid on the trembling theatrics of Kate Bush, Siouxsie and even that contemporary white witch Bat For Lashes. Austra frontwoman Katie Stelmanis's opera-trained voice is set on a constant quiver, strong but with a Bjork-ish throatiness.

Alright, listing all those left-field female pop voices is rather hackneyed, but in the case of Austra the voice is the reason we're here. Tonight it seems so faultless it could almost be – is she? Of course it's ridiculous, but at points Stelmanis seems to nail the notes so precisely you could swear she's miming.

Cleopatra-eyed and flanked by her two Coachella pin-up singers (tie-dye, suede fringing and glitter), the Torontonian marches from thumping album opener 'Darken Her Horse' to the pagan disco workouts of 'Beat and the Pulse' and 'Hate Crime'. The intensity and idiosyncrasy of that voice gets wearisome after 45 minutes, but a skilfully arranged cover in the shape of Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock' keeps us hooked until the final bars.

Departures: Why I love Amy Winehouse (Concise Version)

There are so many things to say about the recently departed Amy Winehouse, many of which were said in her short lifetime and many more of which have been repeated in the few days since her death.

All I can to add to the ever-expanding collective memory of her is my own experience of her music and the effect she has had on me. Her addictions, her fame, her disastrous performances and sporadic no-shows, her tabloid status and her immediately iconic look, from the beehive to the missing tooth to the ever-diminishing twig-like limbs... well, these are the things that the obituaries will have to talk about. But I was already a Winehouse fan by the time her personal life took over her musical endeavours, having chanced on her appearance on Jools Holland in 2003.

As a teenager who loved both the Libertines and Lauryn Hill, I was always – and sometimes still am – trying to reconcile my guitar with my voice. All the usual guitar-wielding women failed to hold my interest, like Courtney Love or Chrissie Hynde (this was just before the download age got going – finding worthy musical heroes was pretty tricky in the darkest West Country, despite growing up a few miles from PJ Harvey). Yet my favourite R&B voices seemed worlds away from music I could play myself, with their slick ProTools beats or jazz piano and vinyl crackle.

But then there's Winehouse, bashing out 'Stronger Than Me' on a Strat which even I had to admit was fucking boss, and I hate Strats. And I can clearly remember turning the TV on, in the corner of my room, standing there in a t-shirt and pants aged 16 at midnight on a Friday, as close to the sound as I could get and completely entranced by this girl combining the most unique, drawling, bluesy, growling, sweet and strange voice I'd ever heard with a guitar and a jutting chin, a macho stance and lascivious look. At the time, Winehouse had just turned 20 years old.

Departures

14 Sep 1983 - 23 July 2011

Not wholly unexpected, but no less devastating for that. 

A hugely important musical figure in my life so I'll try to put some more words together later. 

A quiet evolution in the undergrowth: An interview with Vondelpark

My 100th Helium Raven post is an interview with Vondelpark, a band from the wilds of South London and beyond and currently signed to R&S. Their new EP, NYC Bags and NYC Stuff, is very much in line with the bittersweet echo of London beats that the label has taken such a shine to with other recent releases from James Blake, Pariah and others.

Props also to Phil Sharp who took the photos for the interview, which he previewed on his blog. He's met at least two of my favourite artists of all time, by the look of it. 

First published in Loud And Quiet

Even a stagnant pond teems with life around its damp and fecund edges. There in the broken reeds and rainwater tributaries you'll find all sorts of chary and reclusive fauna, shrinking from your gaze and retreating deeper into the undergrowth to tend their offspring and forage for sustenance. So I find myself in Peckham on a rare visit to this oasis of cheaper living and isolated artistic indulgence, atmospherically a million miles from London's arid centre but really only a few streets south of the priapic new Shard development, a glassy-eyed visual metaphor for the recession if there ever was one.

Vondelpark, despite being named after a green space in Amsterdam, are a distinctly British proposition and a band that have made London's anonymous southern borders their home. Though apparently influenced by a trip to America's West Coast (as hinted at by California Analog Dream, the opening track of last year's Sauna EP), there's something about the mottled patina of their songs – warm yet cool, fond yet distant – that's exactly the opposite of the Golden State's freewheeling optimism. The vocals are submerged and rarely decipherable, floating above reclaimed garage rhythms on 'Hippodrome' or trip-hop shuffle on 'Jetlag Blue Version', and seem to be calling back to warmer, easier times. The Sauna EP is a document of that longing – for sunshine, a younger youth, a smoother toke.

The past is ours for the reaping: The Horrors release third album 'Skying'

SPF 50 all the way.

Dummy Mag asked me to write about The Horrors' new album, and you can read my words here.

I've been listening to Skying an awful lot this week. At first it almost made me laugh, playing spot-the-influence and hearing the band march ever nearer to the present day in their journey through the decades. But as I listened again and again, the album opened itself up to me in the way all great albums do. Things finally fell into place riding home along Great Eastern Street (left earbud only, you understand), drumming the handlebars and singing along to previously meaningless words that had somehow become the world to me. "La la la la..."

Primary Colours was an album I played too much in the space of four weeks and have rarely returned to, although hearing it now does bring me back to a very particular time and place. Will be interesting to see if Skying carves a permanent niche in my life or just my summer. The Mercury shortlist awaits, I expect.

Tie-dyed in knots for Blondes at CAMP Basement

Went to see Blondes just over a month ago. For some reason there weren't many people at CAMP (maybe because it's a shithole with very optimistically priced beverages), but they stepped up and gave it their best for a motley crew of weeknight wreckheads and silent head-nodders. A very good band indeed, and their John Talabot remix is on Myspace, which is worth checking out even in this Murdoch-boycotting age.

May I take this moment also to recommend the head-spinning disco-but-not-rubbish deliciousness of John Talabot. His XLR8R podcast has been keeping me toe-tapping during the daily grind.

First published in Loud And Quiet

Blondes
CAMP Basement
26th May 2011

At quarter past eleven, CAMP Basement contains just 40 people, give or take some smoking stragglers outside. Those in attendance seem bemused at the low turnout – seems we all expected a roadblock for this mid-week nugget of sensual synth grooves and retro-future-trance. 'Cos everyone loves retro-future-trance, right?

Anyway, Blondes take their position behind an impossible patchwork of hardware, keys and cables, embarking on a slowly building set that gently coaxes us into its ambiguous emotions, involving and evolving through dischordant horns, fuzzy analogue warmth and big, big beats. On record it seems cerebral, almost cold, but by the set's halfway mark we've got a rag-tag anti-rave going on down here, 40 of us locked into the beat, arms raised and heads nodding like clockwork.

Zach Steinman, one half of the Ohio-via-Brooklyn-via-Berlin duo, says of the semi-improvised show, “I'm not really sure if it would work in a huge club. If someone tried that I'd be scared.” Don't buy it. Despite the low turnout, Blondes could easily wave their hypnotic rave wands over a huge club – or better, an arboreal summer festival – and have a thousand-strong crowd tie-dyed in knots for their elegantly engineered free-flowing trance.

An interview with Husband: Lusty pop-noir from Bologna

First published in Loud and Quiet

Maybe it's no coincidence that one half of pop-noir duo Husband, the bedroom producer and musical director Gianlorenzo, is called Giallo for short. The Italian horror genre most famously affiliated with Dario Argento is a tidy hook on which to peg the band's lusty voodoo rock, which has more than a touch of the George A. Romero about it too. Their debut single 'Love Song' lurches into view like a Zombie Pride parade, beating fleshy drum skins with half-gnawed thigh bones and tapping dead-eyed rhythms on your skull, sending a short, sharp dose of the heebie-jeebies down your spinal cord.

Picked up by Robot Elephant Records after the No Pain in Pop blog spotted their Myspace page, Husband’s output so far is minimal but striking. After putting out a couple of tracks backed with a handful of remixes and playing their first live shows, they're now back in Italy to work on more material and play a stretch of shows on their home turf over summer, including a support slot with the rejuvenated Battles.

An apparition of dub: This Peaking Lights record is ruling my summer

Peaking Lights are the sound of hot sun blazing against your neck, a drop of sweat meandering down your cupid's bow, sticky hands clutching a cold can. The sound of distant buzzing creepy crawlies and squinting against the late afternoon glow. An apparition of of dub bass pounding from under the earth, disturbing the ladybird hanging shell down from an arching blade of grass.

The dub is like a ghostly echo of heatwaves past, conjured from a ouija board mirage of heat and light; a magnetic memory buried in the foundations of city tower blocks and street furniture. Indra Dunis' words are crumpled memories of cultural commandments, almost-nothings beaten into syntactical forms for a brief moment before disintegrating into the sun-bleached haze. Heart rates slowing, pulses beating thick and hot as the daylight slips away.

Peaking Lights' second album, 936, is out now on Not Not Fun.

Still playing with the past: The Horrors perform new album 'Skying', 17th June 2011

I'm on the Number 8, heading to Bethnal Green to see the live comeback of a band now defined by their ability to make impressive comebacks. A man standing near me is talking about the gig with his friend, explaining that he doesn't know the band too well but, “I like the whole genre of the Horrors.”

Inwardly I snort as my brain chips in with a facile comeback. “What, 'the past'?”

Haha. But I'm onto something, aren't I?

Just Skyin' around. In the past.

Tonight The Horrors are previewing their third album, Skying, at York Hall in the East End, just down the road from where the band lived while putting together the first album and making waves with their bird's nest hairdos, polka dot waistcoats and hanging-by-a-thread 20-minute live shows. Given that singer Faris has spent most of the past year working on his excellent girl-group-meets-Joe-Meek side project Cat's Eyes, a vehicle that got him a gig inside the Vatican, playing in Bethnal Green must seem like something of a step back. Although perhaps it's a tradition now, given that the preview show for Primary Colours was at Rich Mix, at the other end of Bethnal Green.

And what a horrible venue. At least at Rich Mix, charmless black box though it is, you could actually hear all the instruments. York Hall, a boxing venue turned leisure centre, is a velvet-curtained, polished-wood space in the typical East End fashion; a hall where drums go to die, or in this case to boom out aimlessly while drowning guitar lines and squashing Faris' baritone voice (which has always been a bit of a weak link when he's not squawking, and apparently he doesn't do squawking any more).

Given the drastic step-change in sound, look and atmosphere that accompanied the second album, I suppose I'd expected another reinvention. For a start they look pretty similar, if even more subdued and grungy, with shapeless black sweaters and leather macs hanging limply, while Josh's trademark huge black hair now drips over his face like '90s oil slick. They remain one of the best looking bands around, regardless – a band who you believe are a band, who you couldn't miss if you walked past them waiting for a bus at Liverpool Street or buying milk in Sainsbury's Whitechapel (I can confirm).

So that's what they look like, far away on that raised stage, but what does it sound like? If you've heard the new single 'Still Life' you may have noticed people tentatively throwing the B-word out there. I regret to inform you, they may have a point. The opening bars of the first song 'Changing the Rain' kick in, all booming and chunky. “Fuck,” I say to Sam. “It's not even baggy, it's the fucking Charlatans.”

Wait up!

Let's thrash this out. I've come too far with the Horrors just to abandon them when they have their Be Here Now moment (this was the first reference that sprang to mind when I heard the brass outro to 'Still Life'). We've established that the Horrors' genre is essentially 'The Past'; this is where all their ideas and inspirations come from. I have nothing against this in principle, even if we've been culturally conditioned to demand more! newer! faster! at all times, an attitude that's crying out for political and economic critique, obviously. (I've been meaning to write about this for some time re: the various discussions triggered by Simon Reynolds' latest book, Retromania, but that will have to wait for today.) But, as I mentioned regarding Primary Colours back in 2009, scouring the past for musical ideas is one thing if you select garage rock, let's say, and stick to it. But if you then choose something else – post-punk and kraut, or My Bloody Valentine – then it can seem arbitrary, as if you're shopping for influences. The new material makes me suspicious that this is in fact the case with the Horrors. First they gave us Nuggets of flaming garage primitivism, then it was dazzling man-machine post-punkism, and now apparently they've parked up in the '90s to see what's ripe for the pilfering on the shelves of baggy, shoegaze, grunge and (truly) early Britpop. At this rate their fourth album will sound like LCD Soundsystem and their fifth will be approximately contemporary.

To wit, one of the final new songs they play (which may be titled 'Endless Blue') even sounds like 'My Iron Lung', big and grungy but with an unmistakably wan, British edge. Of course, it may sound nothing like that on the record, but the miserable sound quality contaminates all the new stuff to appear muddy and heavyweight, with none of the pristine amphetamine sharpness of the second album – even 'Sea Within A Sea', easily one of their best and weirdest songs, sounds slightly turgid.

Elsewhere they've kept on plenty of the Kevin Shields guitar flavours but new ingredients include – yes – a bit of Simple Minds, plus a definite '80s 4AD quality in the clever combination of density and dreamy lightness. But again, who knows what subtleties might come through on the album, because you can't actually hear it in here. They play absolutely nothing from the first album, which is no surprise but makes for a pretty static experience visually, with Faris not venturing anywhere near the crowd or embarking on his usual disruptive prowling antics.

I'm still not sure what to make of it. Buoyed by the critical reception to Primary Colours, it would seem the Horrors have moved further towards sleek, smooth, big-venue alt.rock for grown-ups. But if they wanna play with the big boys, they're gonna have to deliver the tunes, and I can't hear a 'Losing My Religion' in this set.

Three from Lefse Records: Algodon Egipcio, A Classic Education, How To Dress Well

A few bits coming up on Helium Raven:

An interview with Italian noir-pop newcomers Husband

Blondes live at CAMP and Beaty Heart live at White Heat

New albums from Julian Lynch and The People's Temple

My verdict on Nero's Dubstep Symphony for the BBC

But something else for now, looking at an interesting label you may or may not know much about: Lefse Records. I haven't worked out if the name of the imprint is a reference to the old-school Norwegian snack food (check it out), but it's run by a guy called Matt Halvorsen, which is most definitely a Scandi surname. I'm more intrigued by their odd little roster, which includes Neon Indian, Fair Ohs, Ganglians and How To Dress Well among others.

Other less exposed artists include Algodon Egipcio ('Egyptian Cotton'), a Venezuelan bedroom musician making summer-hazed, beer-goggled, echo-chambered pop with shades of Atlas Sound, Surfer Blood, Panda Bear and Girls. Okay, that flavour's been done to death in the past 18 months, but it sounds at least twice as good sung in Spanish and it's all somehow laid on thicker and creamier and denser and kind of speckled and sparkling. I'm going to call it Tapioca Pop, why not. His album La Lucha Constante ('The Constant Struggle') is a pleasingly coherent and warming little thing for sweaty June nights such as this.

My next favourite so far is the Italian band A Classic Education, recommended to me by their kind countryfolk Husband. I get the impression they're quite the elder statesmen of Italy's indie kingdom but like the vast majority of European bands they don't seem to have impacted on the consciousness of our navel-gazing isle, despite being quite radio friendly, I think. Actually I need to stop saying radio-friendly - when you've been listening to Gloss Drop all week your radio-friendly-radar gets pushed well out of whack. But A Classic Education have a lovely '80s indie scratchiness overlaid onto some quite straightforward retro melodies that might appeal to you if you ever liked Modest Mouse or even Okkervil River or something (it seems they've supported both). Personally I never enjoyed either of those bands but I like A.C.E. from a retro-pop perspective, as someone who adores Luna, Galaxie 500, Orange Juice, and now Cat's Eyes... simple stuff but so tastefully produced. If Algodon Egipcio is Tapioca Pop then maybe this is Milk Bottle Pop? Before Maggie stole it, of course:

A Classic Education seen here in a weak metaphor

They have a six-track EP called Hey There Stranger, but I think there might be more out there through Italian labels.

Finally an artist whose had a fair bit of exposure now, but I'd like to mention How To Dress Well because, erm, I just like it loads. It's all a bit du jour with the lo-fi dream-dub production and indie-meets-R&B vox, sure, but Tom Krell projects that strange and ambivalent mood that I find so appealing both in the hypnagogia (sorry) of Sun Araw and Hype Williams and in the dubsteppy mournfulness of Burial or Holy Other. Nothing is simple here, beginnings are endings, we move sideways through the songs catching half-remembered hooks and budget versions of the hip-hop staples - the razor-sharp compressed handclap is reduced to, well, just a guy clapping. I love the fact that there's no element of kitsch to be found - it's an honest appreciation of R&B that reminds me of the excellent (though sporadic) clubnight So Bones at The Nest in Dalston, where the music policy is like an anti-Guilty Pleasures of the best R&B, hip hop, chopped and screwed etc. If I had to choose a foodstuff for this type of pop I would go for Extra Thick Vanilla Shake Pop. The kind that's too thick to get through the straw without giving yourself brain-freeze.

This track, 'Decisions', is far too short and has a beautiful video.

So yeah, definitely looking forward to hearing more from this Sacramento-based label. Sometimes you can forget how brilliant labels can be as curators and exhibitors rather than companies.