An Overview of All Tomorrow Parties curated by Jeff Mangum, Butlins, Minehead, UK, 09-11.03.12

Photography: Michele Wade

Yeah, I can see why people hate All Tomorrow’s Parties, the alterno-music festival that’s held in a seaside holiday camp. Or hate the idea of it. Running your eye down a typical line-up makes you wonder what decade we’re in. What century even. Now spreading its cardinganny tentacles across the globe with Parties in Japan, Australia and America, it’s easy to cast ATP’s USP as nostalgia-merchandising for aging indie kids, to scoff at it for allowing a certain brand of music fan whose record collection/mind stopped expanding when they turned pipe’n’slippers at 35 to indulge in “Ah, now this is Proper Music! Kids today, eh?” mutterings while closing their weary ears to the marvels that are being dreamt up now. Is ATP essentially any different to the themed weekenders that this very same Butlins holds throughout the winter months, the Disco Infernos (no, not that one) and the Ultimate Eighties parties? Well, no. It isn’t. You could argue that the line-ups are much more consciously and creatively picked by their guest curators, that ATP’s idea of “alternative” is more strictly accurate than Butlins’ own (whose Great British Alternative Festival features The Beat, The Damned, Hazel O’Connor and, uh, Eddie And The Hot Rods), but you couldn’t really make a case for it being a different order of things. It’s still just a group of 30/40-somethings gathering in a holiday camp to get drunk and watch bands whose heyday was decades ago. Bear with me. I fucking loved ATP.

First of all, it’s a festival with beds. Roofs. Kettles. Hot showers and roast dinners. A total dearth of hippies and mud. We roll into Butlins after a long and mostly featureless drive, the last hour in gathering dusk and along the twisty country roads that lead from Taunton to the small beached hummock of a seaside town that is Minehead, to find our misleadingly-named chalet is actually a small third-floor apartment with sofa, table, kitchen, television etc. Oh joy! Cue cooing over the dishwasher and microwave, neither of which we would use over the course of the weekend. Although we do bake cakes and a huge pot of soup from which we replenish ourselves on between-bands chalet trips. (On Saturday I overhead a group of people making enthusiastic plans to cook venison stew and had to stop myself from snorting out loud.)

On the whole it’s a well-dressed and likeable crowd (no hippies, remember; no trustafarian twattishness, no “Uni” students in comedy hats). Everyone I meet from Sheffield is wearing a suit. Everyone from Leeds is absurdly cool. Everyone from Scotland knows everyone else from Scotland and is magnificently drunk. By Sunday afternoon I’ve been introduced to so many youngish/oldish men with beards that I’m smiling at all of them, just in case. There are lots of people here in the same glasses, you know the ones? Everyone over 40 looks like they’re in a seminal indie band. That’s quite an impressive look for oldsters to pull off and, to be fair, most of them probably are in a seminal indie band, given ATP’s remarkable lack of separation between performer and punter. Everyone here’s a geek-level fan. I discover the man in the peculiar hat I’d noticed in audiences throughout the weekend is a key member of Olivia Tremor Control. I see Alison from Young Marble Giants who played on the first day still smiling as she queues to get into the last act on Sunday. Eye from Boredoms down the front for The Raincoats. Mike Scott from The Waterboys (who weren’t playing) agog at Joanna Newsom. Low take a 30-strong crowd jogging along the seafront on Sunday morning. It’s all rather egalitarian and lovely.

Above all, ATP brings you the music its curator loves, the music they want to hear played live even if the band in question split up years ago. It’s all about being head-over-heels in love with music.

Any festival is an interactive adventure game: you make your choices (Turn left? Turn right? This band? That band? Fight troll? Have a lie-down?) at any given point and you plough your own path through its varied offerings, carving out an experience that is unique to you alone. But ATP has always seemed a more collective experience than most. Maybe it’s simply because there are fewer options at any given point in time, fewer bands playing for fewer hours in the day and on only three stages (although that doesn’t take into account the extra-curricular activities available: the swimming, bowling, arcade games, pub grub, pop quizzes, book clubs etc). It’s like when there were only four channels available on TV: you knew that just everyone would’ve watched last night’s episode of Doctor Who and would be talking about it in class the next day. Here everyone’s buzzing with the thrill of Boredoms' performance, chuffed by The Fall delivering the goods, and – gallingly for me, who missed it – enthusing about the intensity and ohmigod specialness of festival curator Jeff Mangum’s solo set. However, even given the communal heterogeneity of the ATP experience (and this one at first glance screams “just gimme indie rock!” for all its little white boy lungs are worth), you can still pick and choose a route to make your festival less dewy-eyed, glory years rerun and more an opportunity to chance upon extraordinary music.

If you wanted to trace a Wire-ish path through the weekend, for example, you could follow the breadcrumb trail of ‘contemporary’ music laid by the avant-genii likes of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Roscoe Mitchell, Group Doueh, Matana Roberts/Seb Roachford, Blanck Mass, Earth, Demlike Stare, even a performance of Gavin Bryars’ ‘Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble and it would be blindingly clear that my indie-boy slur on Mangum’s sensibility has been skewed by the headliners. You could equally well stick to current women-centred excellence by seeking out the eerie aceness of Canadians Yamatanka//Sonic Titan, all Noh-theatre make-up, fluttering fans and drama; the elemental lyricism of Joanna Newsom; Versus’ proto-Mathy magic; Feathers’ psychedelic dream pop [presumably NOT the psychedelic dream pop of all-female Brisbane band Feathers, though? - Ed]; you could worship at the feet of rock goddesses Mimi from Low, Eleni of The Fall, Boredoms’ Yoshimi P-We and, er ... OK, so the womanly side of ATP isn’t that much in evidence after all: let’s have a female curator next time, eh?

In fact, in the end, by failing to catch Sebadoh or either of Mangum’s sets, my ATP doesn’t much resemble the early 90s wallow-fest the line-up first suggests. I manage to miss Mangum’s first set in a combination of just-got-here high spirits, long queues and disorientation that the main stage - which is usually situated in the middle of a gigantic turreted pavilion, surrounded by bars, Burger King and covetable band merchandise - has been moved upstairs. ‘Centre Stage’ is yer typical Butlins glitter-ball and glass venue which has surprisingly excellent sound and tiers of seats and tables above the dancefloor for those as want. Which, at some point in the whirl of bands and alcohol and more bands and more alcohol, most people do. It turns out that there will be no bands on in the pavilion all weekend, a fact that enrages at first because it means that there will be no wandering in and out at will during the most popular acts, and which inevitably leads to increased queues and schedule-anxiety. But by the end of the weekend it’s clear that the decision was a good one: the sound is much better and the atmosphere more intimate in the Centre Stage space; it would’ve been a shame to lose utterly blusterless acts like Magnetic Fields, Joanna Newsom or even, presumably, Jeff Mangum, in the unenclosed vastness of the pavilion.

I say presumably because my weekend is bookended by a similar defeat at the feet of the interminable queue to see him close the festival: a queue created by the decision to boot every last punter out of the venue before he plays and which results in a line of weary festival-goers waiting to get back into the room they’d just vacated, a queue trailing from the barriers of Centre Stage, all across the pavilion, along past slot machines and the bowling alley, out of the doors the other side, past the security line-up, and straggling off into the night. I walk past it and carry on walking back to the chalet and bed.

The other immediate annoyance is that Friday night’s line-up is both full-on and full of teeth-grinding schedule-clashes. The Raincoats overlapping with The Fall?! Young Marble Giants directly up against Joanna Newsom? Thurston Moore versus Half Japanese? Minutemen main men at the same time as Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion? It’s like some kind of aging hipster bad dream, a test of loyalty and taste set up by a maniacal Cowell-a-like demon to poke the X Factor haters in their most tender of fanboy places. In the end we just have to make our choices, set our hearts against regret and go for it.

By the way, spot the odd one out in that list. Yes, Joanna Newsom is young, female and current. Everyone else, even the two outfits which are still producing new music, The Fall and Thurston Moore, are trading to some extent on past glories, are bands who maybe we’d really rather be TARDIS-ed back to watching in 1978 or 1988. There are even bands who’ve washed up here outside of their time and without their frontmen (Sun Ra Arkestra and The Magic Band: neither of whom I saw but SRA at least seemed to bring the razzle and send folk bouncing out happy after their set).

Not that there aren’t obvious pleasures in seeing bands you missed first time round - I’m glad I’ve seen Young Marble Giants and The Raincoats now - I have context; I have experience– but there is something profoundly peculiar in watching middle-aged musicians play their own music, composed in youth and naïvety and cheerful ineptitude, note-for-note 30-odd years later. That music was played by kids who were radiant with newness, whose youth was firing self-belief and fuck-it-isms at the world, who didn’t care if they couldn’t play 'properly' and were all the more glorious for it; what does it mean when these very same people, with decades of proficiency behind them, are recreating the same songs? And, unlike The Fall, say, aren’t continuing to make new music? Where does the musicianship go? Where is the wisdom and the effect of the passing years? Does it leave no mark? And although it’s undeniably enjoyable to see the songs of your youth played live it tends to be a show, rather than a revelation. It pushes different buttons. It might be unfair to cast Sebadoh, Scratch Acid, The Minutemen, Neutral Milk Hotel, Young Marble Giants or The Raincoats as merely reformed Showaddywaddyesque end-of-pier acts when their shows are so few and so good and so particular to context but it’s also worth remembering that sometimes it’s just fine to have good old-fashioned fun at the seaside.

Young Marble Giants were beautifully low-key, and like The Raincoats, appeared to be enjoying themselves immensely (I’ve written about both of these, The Fall and Joanna Newsom here.) There’s definitely more to be wrung from the experience by those who are here to revisit dearly-loved vinyl than those for whom this is new territory: memories and nostalgia add warm and fuzzy resonance to each chord struck.

The Fall have no time for look-back bores: they plough relentlessly through a set of old and new songs, the gruppe as shiny, fierce and full-on groove monster commanding a mosh pit roiling with sweaty bodies and exhilaration. And I’ve never seen such a high volume of Fall fans in one place: it’s like a lone inheritor of an obscure language suddenly finding themselves amongst a tribe of native speakers, an alterniverse where Mark E Smithisms are the lingua franca. Here, in the voluble intoxicated chatter of the outside smoking area, he is appreciated. Operation mind-fuck, indeed.

Thurston Moore - who from a distance looks exactly the same as a decade ago when I last saw him play, all hair and plaid shirt - seems to be playing material from his solo album of decade ago rather than his acoustic stuff from last year but I like it a lot. Maybe because, unsurprisingly, it makes the same sort of Moebius-twisted shapes as Sonic Youth. Moore is a master of harmonics; he coaxes microtonal dramatics out of top-end heavy blasts of noise, two guitars, a violin (no bass) whipping up a trebly squall. “What’s new?” he says. Yes, well. What is? New isn’t a priority here. Does that matter?

Jon Spencer plays his usual dirty blues – a double dose of old that has end-of-the-evening me thinking of Status Quo, despite or because of his mesmerising shiny leather kecks and the tremendous righteous battering he gives to ancient rock’n’roll tropes. By this point in the day – he comes on at one in the morning – everyone is too fucked to care; we’re down to bloodthumping basics.

Scratch Acid, Saturday’s main stage closer, pass summa cum laude the, er, acid test of whether a band entirely unknown to the listener can engage them; no enhancements, no performance-boosters of nostalgia or familiarity or celebrity or reference points or fondness, just the bare bones of an experience, the playing of the music. I know its illustrious spawn, Jesus Lizard and Rapeman, but I’ve never heard a note of Scratch Acid before and don’t expect much of it. But each successive song has me edging forward, out of my seat and onto the floor until by midset I am mid-mosh where a bare-chested David Yow is being carried aloft on the crowd. Scratch Acid make the kind of furious noisy mess that makes me want to singalong raucously even though I don’t know a single word. It makes me stamp and shout and grin. It makes me rush up to Yow an hour later and gush at him about how brilliant he was (and he seems genuinely touched by my enthusiasm, gives me a hug and wishes me nothing but the best. Agh, starstruck!).

Then, two successive afternoons, out of the Spring sunshine and into the glitterball dancehall, there’s Boredoms. Boredoms turn out to be so transcendentally awesome that their performance alone is justification for the continued existence of ATP and I thank Jeff Mangum from the bottom of my uplifted heart for having the intelligence and savvy to put them on. To put them on twice, even! No one can follow them. Earth suffer particularly in this respect, their trancey drones ample consciousness-altering fodder in the usual course of things, but no match for mass post-Boredoms euphoria. (Review to follow.)

So what’s new? Does it matter that a festival schedules mostly oldies for oldies? I guess not. Music isn’t linear. There’s no “progress” being made, just evolution, revolution, change. What’s the difference in discovering Scratch Acid like a revelatory noise rock thunderbolt from the blue and hearing Pussy Riot for the first time if both make your heart skip a beat? Music is only notes; the listener provides as much context as the era it sprung from. Heart-racing excellence isn’t confined to the new. So party on, ATP. You bring new things to mix, even if they’re decades old. If it were me picking a line-up, I’d ramp up the girl quota and keep the dinosaurs down to no more than a quarter of the acts. But even if you’re reconfirming prejudices and preferences in some of your attendees then I’m going to have to let it go, because in the end you are dealing in love and thrills. And I’m all for that.

Originally published on Collapse Board

Jeff Mangum's All Tomorrow's Parties, Minehead, UK, 9-11th March 2012: Young Marble Giants, The Raincoats, The Fall, Joanna Newsom

(photography by Michele Wade)

Young Marble Giants are a curious proposition to someone unfamiliar with their recordings. I can well imagine how much those who’d first fallen for their sweet slow minimal precision decades ago would have sold their firstborn to be here tonight, but coming at this fresh is an entirely different experience. So while I can see the love in the air, can feel the nostalgia and the excitement reverberating in the room as if they were extra harmonics in the stately basslines and two-note keyboard melodies that trip themselves lightly into YMG songs, I'm also at one remove from the thrill. I'm not getting all there is to this experience. Alison Statton’s vocals ring with unaffected/un-effected charm but while I can hear echoes of all that came after them I can also imagine how gloriously, prettily, plain they must’ve sounded in a world of shouty punks or disco divas. This is all new, truly new, not futuristic thirty-plus years old new and, as such, I find myself wondering what this delightfully simple music, these child-like synth-plunked melodies, these tunes that bounce with unadorned naivety would sound/feel like played for the first time by actual youth, rather than (extremely cheerful and clearly delighted) oldsters. This is Youth without youth; intriguing, beautiful, sometimes heartbreaking in its poignancy. While I'm charmed, I find myself regretting my unfamiliarity with Colossal Youth and wanting to go back a couple of decades, gen up and come back soaked in years of loving this stuff.

The Raincoats, YMG’s almost exact contemporaries, are a slightly different matter in that their songs, their style, their sounds are more immediately recognisable; they haven’t the elemental strangeness of YMG. But they too are affected by the particular and slightly disquieting experience of watching songs dreamt up by scrappy young things played out so many years later by the comfortable middle-aged. What does this mean, this age thing? What does it mean, particularly, for songs that are drenched with inexperience and excitability and fantastic, creative ineptitude, to be played again – note for note – by the older versions of their creators?

Well, for a start, the Raincoats are not note-perfect! Hurrah! They re-start songs, only remember to turn on amps three songs into the set, trip up and fluff up… but this is great. They are having fun. The audience is fond and smiling and forgiving. They play the whole of their 1981 album, Odyshape, with gusto. The scrappiness remains; they are bursting with unfettered enthusiasm, as far from proficient cock rock as a skateboard from a Lamborghini. Whether this is quite enough to make them marvellous is debatable: their age-old cover of ‘Lola’ is still stroppily ace - cheerful, dirty, ratcheting the sexual ambiguity up a notch or two from the Kinks’ original - and the sound of Vicky Aspinall’s fiddle is as full of itchy joy as ever, lassoing new wave to its folk allies. But live and in 2012, the Raincoats don’t appear quite as peculiar a thing as the recorded Odyshape does, with its curious, musicologically-savvy demotic harmonies and percussion (Charles Hayward and Robert Wyatt both contributed) and its subsequent cult-status among the indie it-crowd of two decades ago. There’s too much noise, both cultural and aural, and not quite enough poise. But that’s how these things go: reforming and performing (and Raincoats have been playing together again on and off since Kurt Cobain’s championing of them in 1992) without new material does funny things to a band and to its audience.

And so to The Fall, another outfit contemporaneous with YMG and The Raincoats, but with the crucial difference that this one, this rolling rock of ages, this mutating beast, has come snarling and lurching down the years since the late 70s in a state of continual revolution. The Fall is not here to feed nostalgia-bunnies; there’s no pandering to the warm and fuzzies. They may play old material – they have several entire careers’ worth of back catalogue to pick from – but they’re here as a current outfit not to feed the ATP look-back bores.

How does The Fall fit into my woman-centred remit? They could appear as male as they come; the notorious online Fall forum is thick with “I found a Fall track that the missus likes!” comments. To which, well… ugh.  But times change; the last couple of times I’ve seen them the crowd has been noticeably mixed, including here at ATP where the hipster girls in bird-print dresses are shaking their hair to ‘Psychic Dancehall’ as if they knew every note. And it’s right and fitting that they are, because despite the grumpy-old-manness of their long-term fans (and I say this with considerable affection for Fall fans; if someone loves the Fall you know you’re in for an interesting ride) the band itself has never been “boy”. From the very start there have been capable women involved: Una Baines, Marcia Schofield, Kay Carroll, Julia Nagle and several others are among the great roll call of the Fallen, not forgetting - how could you forget?! - MES’s ex-wife Brix Smith with all her sparks a-flying, and his current wife, Elena Poulou, who has been with Smith and the band since 2002. It’s actually quite something for a long-running band to have included so many women in such a low-key and unremarkable way, as if (here we are again) women just belonged in bands.

Out of the twelve songs they play, highlights include ‘I’ve Been Duped’, a splashy/thrashy Elena-led bop, and ‘Bury’, which, with its stupendous percussive backbone, grinding riff and double-dose of synthy sneer, is simply awesome, a recent Fall song that stomps its way to classic with every shouted chorus. And Elena is fantastic. Pretty, petite and chic, she marches onstage in a classy coat and plays her keyboard with a handbag tucked under her arm the entire time, as if being in The Fall were a drinks party which she deigns to grace with her presence, all politesse and sparkle. She is endlessly patient with Smith who is up to his usual knob-fiddling tricks throughout the set, turning guitarists down and adjusting mics, and, during uproarious closer ‘Sparta FC’, banging out duff notes on her keyboard while she is trying to hold down the riff, all pretty horrible until he eventually finds a line to stick to. And through all this, she is smiling sweetly at him, a marked difference from the poker-faces of the long-suffering guitarists. The set ends with Smith cackling and Elena whooping, an arm flung up in triumph. Perfect.

If you don’t like the Fall or recognise none of these songs you’d be forgiven for hearing nothing but Smith’s tuneless drawled yelps and the din of a riff-based rock’n’roll band trying to stay afloat; you’d have good reason to believe that the gnarled old man who prowls the stage bothering the help in dress trousers and shiny shirt - looking every inch the Butlins performer on home turf but sounding anything but - has an increasingly tenuous relationship with functionality within the unit. Fair enough. But afterwards as people tumble out of the venue all hot and happy, the talk is that the band are on top form: they play a decent mixture of old and new songs, the current line-up is stable and tight and they’re not in the least bit murderous towards each other. Above all, they are clearly revealed as a total groove fest, a trancey, motorik monster that has the packed venue in a sweaty moshing roil; they are, in fact, a great big shiny dance band! It must be Butlins. Carry on Falling, Mr and Mrs Smith, carry on.

Friday ends with boys rocking out: Thurston, David Yow, Jon Spencer, Watts and Hurley... It’s all a big dark guitarry whirl and we go to bed tired and full of music!

Saturday is a breeze compared to Friday’s schedule-clash anxiety. The afternoon is full of the miraculous Boredoms and once their mega-kit is cleared off stage (it takes over an hour either side of their performance to do this) I wander back up to Centre Stage to watch Joanna Newsom, all alone with her harp on a big dark stage. It seems wholly appropriate that she plays before a black cloth dotted with stars to a packed and hushed house; it’s all about the beauty and wonder. Newsom is almost unbelievably lovely: she wears her pretty dresses and her Alice in Wonderland hair down and TGA photographer Michele confesses to being mesmerised by her glitzy heels, stamped with elegant precision onto harp pedals. Not that her loveliness (musically or otherwise) is uncomplicated and, OK, so you might have to work at getting over the voice: if you think that this is all contorted affectation then you’re going to struggle to fall in love as you should. But once you do, oh! Newsom catches up the strings of our heart and strums them into submission. Her songs (indeed, her sets) are rolling wonders, streams that sparkle and run, sometimes eddying round a particularly pretty phrase but then hurrying on, never to return to it. Her lyrics are a delight; she spins a silken string of meticulous bons mots for the crowd to hang on; we have skeins of words looping round our heads for days after: “And down where I darn with the milk-eyed mender, you and I, and a love so tender, Stretched-on the hoop where I stitch this adage, Bless our house and its heart so savage …”

There’s a uniformity to the texture of her songs that makes both her sets somehow monochromatic despite the tumbling iridescence. Sometimes we recognise tracks, sometimes it’s just the narrative that holds us, but it’s clear that Joanna Newsom, for all her winsome ways, is no simple soul. The textual complexities of her songs both belie the peculiarly childlike quality of her voice and reinforce the sense of a small wide-eyed someone screwing their face up in a huge effort to wring just the exactly the right words out of themselves. It’s a trick that perhaps only Björk amongst Newsom’s contemporaries manages to pull off. Catch her if you can.


A version of this review was originally published by www.thegirlsare.

Beautiful Things of 2011: Scandipop goddesses

2011 was a wonderful year for music. For listening to music, dancing to music, thinking about music, writing about, watching, falling in love with, dropping what you were doing, grabbing your keys and running full pelt after music. It was for me, anyway. And I haven’t heard a fraction of what was released last year; I don’t know a quarter of the records mentioned in the big intermag end-of-year lists, and the ever-tiddlier sub-genre lists of The Wire etc. send me into a vertiginous panic. There’s simply not enough days in the week or weeks in the year to listen to enough of this stuff to make any kind of coherent omniscient pronouncement on 'music in 2011'. Given that we can only ever experience music subjectively, personally, partially, through our own skewed and faulty ears, I might as well just tell you what I heard this year and why it made me happy.

And it was mostly pop. Girls making pop. Very few of the bands I loved this year consisted of four white boys with guitars, although that template has been responsible for some fairly monumental things over the last four or five decades. Maybe it’s finally as redundant as it ought to be, that kind of monolithically gendered/racialised noise. The world is busier, brighter, cleverer, oh yeah, far too clever for that particular shape to be a likely mouthpiece for any kind of zeitgeisty blurt. Is that what they mean when they lament The End of Rock? Well, sod that, rock can, if it must, go on and on and it can mutate itself quite happily thank you very much. Rock’s not dying. And as time rolls onwards in its capriciously non-linear way, rock is ultimately as unpindownable as any musical genre; try to draw definite lines and it squirms away from you by throwing up EMAs and Planningtorocks and PJ Harveys all over the place.

If I were going to draw what I listened to this year into rough circles of scribbly convergence, I’d go further than the "pop, mostly girls" and say "pop, mostly girls, of Scandinavian origin". Make of that what you will. Make a new mask for Karin Dreijer Andersson out of it or a big red cloudwig for Bjork. I've no great socio-cultural analysis of why that might be to offer and no particular knowledge of the pop histories of the countries involved: this is going to have to be a pick'n'mix type affair, as flawed, simplistic and unfair as any such grouping of disparate acts tends to be.

I’ve already written about Lykke Li’s wounded rhymes so here’s a rundown of those other Scandi-pop goddesses that have blasted sodastream bubbles through my 2011.

Stockholm's Those Dancing Days started the year with a bounce but sadly their frenetic, giggly, day-glo puppy-scrap of a second album turned out to be their last, as they split up to do other things (including going to university) with 2011 hardly begun. It's worth checking out not only Daydreams And Nightmares but also their first gem of a single, 'Those Dancing Days', recorded in 2007 when they were still at school. It is teenage thrill embodied in sequins and squelchy keyboards and barely manages to hold itself together in its headlong rush to the finish. It's a song continually on the verge of being wrong - out of tune, out of time - but finds absolute joy on that brink. There's maniacal drumming (courtesy of the pretty much the cutest drummer of all time, Cissi, who pounds her kit with all the messy verve of a toddler launching itself at chocolate cake) and lyrics that chirrup with the delight of being "high on life, high on love... living for music, living in a dance". How much more pop could you want?

'Fuckarias', their first single of 2011, finds TDD stomping on solider ground, four years (and not just any four years but those which bump one painfully, wonderfully, from child to adult) older, wiser, more proficient but thankfully just as ferocious and which, whether through youthful gawky genius or second-language-itis, has lyrics as magnificently wrong as you like: "You're an uninvited clown/A foolish puppy with a too long tongue/You stumble and fall, you're the worst of them all/You're in my space, get out of my face". Fuck what's right, let's dance.

Icona Pop, in contrast to TDD, have just left the starting line, are on the B of the bang, with no physical product at all yet as far as I can see, just a handful of perfect synth-pop digital darlings, bristling with smart and sass and tunes. Never mind about albums, ‘Nights Like This’ and ‘Manners’ are ace on their own. There's some of TDD's sheer enjoyment of sound, particularly in the way they revel in the parps and stabs and swoops of aged synthesisers, but considerably less of the speed. "Manners!" they chorus "Take a second look and you'll see / There is no-one like me!", a mixture of threat and promise in a perfectly adroit pop package: "You'd better reconsider/You will never do better!"

I saw Robyn at Bestival, wowing a hillside of festival partyers with peculiarly solipsistic takes on her icy pop songs; she has that trick of throwing such awkwardly heartfelt shapes – the kind you’d usually keep behind teenage bedroom doors – that you don’t know whether to cringe or cheer on her courage in laying her heartbreak out, stadium-huge, for us all to gawp at. I'm going for cheer, because she's such a remarkable performer and her songs slot so neatly and fittingly into canonical synth pop that you’d think she was already the global megastar she dances as if she were. Both 'Dancing On My Own' and 'Call Your Boyfriend' have jaw-dropping videos, controlled desperation writ large in spikily dramatic narratives of the kind that swamped the charts in the 80s.

I also saw Björk at Bestival. Lucky me. It was a contrary thing; she didn't use the huge video screens at the side of the stage to relay her performance to the back of the enormous crowd, instead filling them with Biophiliac squiggles which, while disconnective in some ways (it meant most of the thousands gathered to watch her couldn't see her flamboyantly peculiar outfit or the skittery dances of her massed female chorus or the strange, custom-built instruments the music was blossoming from) also had the effect of making the experience less gawp-at-the-popstar and more lose-yourself-in-the-music. If you could do that and stop pining for the hits – which it was apparent not everyone could – then the show was an incredible, immersive, gorgeous thing to be part of, a sweeping up of people and notes and colours and patterns and grassy hillsides on the Isle of Wight into a big wowy beauty. A synaesthetic, meterological trip of a show. It certainly had me believing that 'Crystalline' (whose pretty icicle showers shatter into THE most remarkable Aphexy percussion coda: complexity and order and counterintiutive marvels measured out in rattling beats) was the most beautiful music in the universe. And oh my god! 'Declare Indepence'! One of the few non-Biophilia tracks of the set and the best grimy distorto-bass line since 'Dr Buck's Letter', thumping up from the stage in fat curls across the crowd, sending visible shockwaves up through the dancing bodies. A song to make you open your throat and howl. Fucking wow.

I Break Horses do the Austra/Zola Jesus/EMA kohl-eyed noise’n’pretty schtick that I'm a sucker for. There are muzzied vocals and urgency and swoons aplenty, and on Tom Rowland's dark and delicious remix of 'Hearts' they are a bleepy-bleeped-heartbeat away from swirly perfection. I suspect they’d be headswimmingly monstrous live.

Sacred Harp are, er ... strange. Strange good and strange confusing and sometimes strange really quite fucking alarming. If I said "impro jazz, classical, film scores, pop, Fever Ray, experimental, prog rock" at you all in a fevered rush it would – quite rightly – make you wary and possibly irritated. So instead I will tell you how (adopted Scandinavian but originally Dutch singer and main Harp) Jessica Sligter’s vocals slip and slide out of key and out of easy melodic tropes with infinitely precise control. She sings like comfort is a dirty word. She sings like a cat stuck in Mike Oldfield’s recording barn. Like a dryad stranded in the big city, caught between marvels and mayhem. By hooking her calculated tonal mis-steps around our ankles and sending us lurching into unknown territory, Sligter gives us a ride that thrills, bothers and allures. Marvellous stuff.

Sacred Harp - Found In The Open Country (The Underlying Deep Structure) by brainlove

First published on Collapse Board

The Curious Case of The Antlers

One of the strangest musical experiences I had in 2011 was trying – and failing - to listen to highly-praised Brooklyn-based indie rock band (ouch: there's a phrase guaranteed to strike ennui into the heart of any music lover) The Antlers. They've been getting good reviews from the usual suspects and are playing on sought-after bills. But an unfortunate convergence of band names in the last couple of years - Deer Tick, Deerhunter, Deerhoof, Chrome Hoof, Crystal Antlers, Crystal Fighters, Crystal Castles, Crystal-Antlered Wolfdeer etcetera etcetera - didn't help my confusion about who they were or what they sounded like so I did what I usually do when tipped off about a band: opened a YouTube video in a new tab and carried on replying to emails, browsing Facebook, reading online newspaper articles.

The odd thing about listening to The Antlers was that time and again the track would run its course and I’d notice eventually that it had stopped. It had run its course without leaving a single trace and I’d failed dismally to discover why it was being promoted by whichever media entity had brought it to my attention, where to locate its particular click or to contextualise the damn thing ... so I’d “huh” a bit to myself and press replay, try again. The track spun itself out over and over; I’d get distracted by whatever else the internet was shimmying in my direction and I’d get to the end of the song none the wiser.

This happened five or six times. The track was sliding down the wall without sticking at all. Not a single little clawy hook to lodge itself in my head, no grit, no grain, no grab. Every time the song finished I’d be left as ignorant of who and what had just played as when I started. If forced at gunpoint to say something about the Antlers I could have bodged a line about white boys and guitars - I knew it wasn’t Chinese funk or an orchestra of theremin – but that was about all.

It was disorientating.

I gave up eventually. Yes, I could’ve stopped all that email-reading and smart-arse Facebooking to focus entirely on the song but really! If after six plays of a song you are left with absolutely no idea what it sounds like it has surely failed some kind of crucial test; it could perfectly well have stopped me in my frittering tracks and forced me to sit up and pay attention to it. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t have hummed back the tune to you: I was left without any recall of the tone of the thing. Immediacy isn’t everything but however much you may loathe Fleet Foxes (I don't) you’d have been able to say “tremulous man sings pretty folk rock backed by multi-layered vocal harmonies” after a single listen to ‘White Winter Hymnal’, no probs. The Antlers? Er...

I did try to get a grip on those slippery cervine bastards a couple more times during the year, letting other tracks of theirs run past me, but even though I have (as a good conscientious music crit) listened yet again this morning, I’m still left with a great big smear of meh where I should be getting a picture.

I am prepared to admit the fault might be mine; there's got to be a reason why other writers are getting the thrill. Maybe I have faulty Antler antennae. Maybe my whiteboysandguitars receptors are failing. Maybe I have a psychic head cold which has reduced The Antlers’ delicately-flavoured aural bouillabaisse to wallpaper paste. Maybe highly-praised Brookyln-based indie rock bands are actually Doctor Who aliens that can’t be looked at head on, whose features turn to generic lost-in-a-crowd blankness when observed and have the power to beam positive reviews into the heads of music reviewers. I must've been wearing a tinfoil hat that day.

The Antler Effect is not restricted to this one band: I am similarly un/effected by Noah And The Whale and Grizzly Bear inter alia, despite the fact that NatW’s (insert appropriate adjective here; since I can’t recall what the hell they sound like, I’m obviously not the woman for that job) rock has sold by the warehouse-load and that both Grizzly Bear and The Antlers have had streams of positive words written about them while I’m left standing all forlorn at the side of the dancefloor.

I'm still willing to be convinced on The Antlers. It's perfectly plausible that I'm missing something remarkable and need a critical prod to set me right. But until then I'm left thinking that if music isn’t extraordinary I can’t be bothered with it. There’re billions of songs in the world and not enough life left to listen to the merely average: I'm going to limit my remaining ear-time to songs I can crush on desperately, songs I'd want to wrap around me forever, songs whose names I’d remember in the morning.

Quite apart from anything else this is a pretty clear example of why we still need music writers to take such aurally-challenged dolts as myself by the hand and show us the dance moves one careful step at a time. It’s entirely irrelevant to my ability to appreciate the Antlers whether or not music is readily available on the internet, whatever the guy from Spin wants to froth about.

Having the notes at hand to hear isn’t even half the story.

First published on Collapse Board

The Unthanks perform the songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony Hegarty @ The Dome, Brighton

This is a more complicated affair than first appears: Mercury-nominated folkies The Unthanks are already better known for their canny interpretations of traditional folk songs than for their original numbers but it’s curious that they’ve chosen to sing the songs of those who are not primarily famed as songwriters themselves. Antony Hegarty is a regular guest vocalist/collaborator, lauded for his remarkable, querulous, avian tones, while by far the best-known song Robert Wyatt ever recorded was written by Elvis Costello and much of his output has been co-written with his lyricist partner Alfreda Benge.  So despite initial assumptions there’s not really any place for the auteur here: the Unthanks are a truly collaborative effort – a band not just sisters – and this evening is a demonstration in practice of interpretation as a creative act in its own right. Once you stop frowning pointlessly over who’s responsible for the song or where exactly the magic is located (in the voices, the words, the instruments, the arrangements, the chords, the melody, the occasion itself?) you can just let the beauty of the moment wash over you.

The first song in the Hegarty half of the show, ‘You Are The Treasure’, gets eyes prickling with tears and the second (‘Another World’) is so shivery with melancholy and imminent loss that it provokes strangers to grin at each other, delighted that they’ve been privileged to witness something so very special. The Unthanks’ voices are extraordinary instruments; as unaffected as childhood and as lovely as a bright clear morning on the Northumberland shore. There’s something intensely touching about the grain, the burr, of their voices, because it reminds us that this glorious sound is coming straight from fallible, fragile human throats. This is the very opposite of unearthly; it’s grounded, ringing with stone and sea and wind and it’s as moving as fuck. Becky Unthank could sing the phone directory and make it sound like sunshine over storm-tossed oceans.

Their performance of ‘You Are My Sister’, as Rachel confesses, verges on the saccharine; there isn’t the darkness and tremble of Antony’s version, but it does end with the sweet sight of the two sisters reaching out to touch fingertips. Without their originator’s presence, his story, his fragility, his soaring tremulous tones, Hegarty’s songs don’t quite have the dynamics to carry the first half entirely successfully; after those first two gut-wrenching glories, they come across en masse as pretty but flat. There’s the slight tinge of the cruise ship jazz band about proceedings, balding bearded men in waistcoats tempered by the all-female, be-frocked string quartet.

It is in Wyatt’s delightfully quirky compositions that this project really comes alive. There’s ‘Dondestan’, clog-danced and chorused into merry existence; ‘Free Will And Testament’, an articulate polemic bemoaning the lack of free will which is turned into a gently heartbreaking Unthank anti-hymn; Alfie Benge’s ‘Out Of The Blue’, in which a man walks through the remains of his bombed-out Beirut home, all violence and surreal imagery, and which has at its core the repeated phrase “You have planted everlasting hatred in my heart”; words which take on a different tone when sung with sweet ferocity over dissonant strings by young women rather than in a squall of noise by a grizzled old man. The result is subtle and chilling and here’s where the real art of the cover lies: in the transformative effect of new voices, new context, new tones that can deepen, clarify and reconfigure familiar songs.

Of course ‘Sea Song’ is what brought us here In the first place. It’s a slow unwind of a thing, even more measured and luscious than the 2007 recording of which Wyatt himself famously and heartily approved, Rachel’s softly sibilant vocals washed by piano cords and the odd sharp clog click until the whole song breaks like surf over the beach, in massed “aahs”, strings and beautifully spiralling trumpet.

It’s a lovely occasion, a proper concert in a proper hall with disorientatingly proper, dressed-up, people. There’s cheery banter and moments of shivery delight: the acapella ‘Paddy’s Gone’ when the ten members of the band cluster front of stage to sing in layered harmonies for us; the only non-Wyatt/Hegarty number, ‘Tar Barrel In Dale’ a New Year carol written by their dad, George Unthank, which the audience joins in on. There’s nothing like communal carolling to warm the cockles and so we are sent off into the December night, ablaze with song.

First published by thegirlsare.com

Live review: Low, The Old Market, Hove 3.12.11

Last time Minnesota trio Low were in Brighton they played St George’s church, where their songs reverberated through the rows of pews and Alan Sparhawk sang his dark hymns from beneath an enormous suspended golden crucifix; it swung gently overhead while he swayed gently below, apparently a fair way to drunk and the target of irritated mutterings from his wife behind her drumkit. The Old Market tonight can’t really compete with that kind of spectacle but this big beamed barn of a venue does benefit from remarkably clear sound, a seemingly sober Sparhawk and - not being seated and this being Low - the satisfying dynamics of a capacity crowd which is partisan, enthralled and not out to squash anyone. You get reverential communal rocking rather than elbows and lager in your face.

Few bands would chose to open with a long, slow, relatively new song but Low have their principles; ‘Nothing But Heart’ is eight minutes-plus of stately minimalism and blistered guitar whose lyrics consist pretty much entirely of Sparhawk singing ‘I am nothing but heart’ over and over and over, the crescendos and diminuendos of bass, guitar and drums keeping up an ominous pulse that throbs and roils below. And just as the immutability of the words threatens to tip the song over into dullness the sense of that small phrase is morphed into something other by the transformative effect of repetition; from a straightforward declaration to a mantra, a charm, an invocation, a blessing, a plea, a threat, a lament… eight minutes suddenly seems ridiculously brief, we need days of this stuff. The myriad ways of being “nothing but heart” hang over the audience, evoke images of all-embracing love as well as those of a twitching bloody mess on a surgeon’s tray. It’s quite a start, quite a song.

Halfway through their set, Alan looks out at the packed hall and praises the people right in the middle; says he couldn’t be there: “I get real nervous unless I can see the edge of nothing”. That’s Low for you: comforted by proximity to the void, disconcerted by crowds. Drawn to the darkness beyond the light, to the implicit threat contained within words of love, to the horror that lies at the outer edges of faith.

There’s something blood-curdling about being feet away from a man offering up his body as a weapon of death and destruction in the service of his god, as Sparhawk does on ‘Murderer’. The way his voice trips over the edge of the abyss on “Cos I’m CRUEL” is totally chilling. Yes, yes, it’s a song, a role, but y’know, it’s funny cos it’s true. I don’t know any other band who could write a song like it, could describe their complicated relationship with God as articulately as Low.

But Low is not just Alan and his slow-burning aches: there are times when Mimi’s voice is the most beautiful thing in this dark and endless universe. (Halfway through ‘Just Like Christmas’ is one of those times. The crowd is rapt, the air still, Mimi’s honeyed cadences ringing out as if Christmas Day itself hung on the continuation of her song; we’re all half expecting to leave the venue to find she’s conjured up a freshly-fallen carpet of snow.)

Ah, she’s not recognised as the goddess she should be, the centrepiece of this quietly raging band. She stands midstage behind her simple kit, brushes in one hand, fluffy drumstick in the other, beating out Low’s steady but compelling heartbeat. And her voice is quite, quite gorgeous. More gorgeous than you’d expect of something most often pitched as harmonic foil above or below husband Alan’s grainier lead vocals, but there she is on the cover of this year’s album C’mon, Low’s 9^th LP: the everso-slightly grumpy but wholly magnificent queen of slowcore. “I love you!” a punter shouts. “You don’t even know me” she retorts. And when Alan apes one of her mumbled comments, she flashes him a ferocious look and an (unfortunately inaudible) put-down.

Low wouldn’t be Low without those lustrous male-female harmonies. It’s fairly remarkable that whether Alan or – increasingly - Mimi take the lead it’s all still primarily Low; this is an Aeolian harp of a band, whichever way you strike the collective instrument it makes a pleasing and familiar sound. Its component parts chime. Low don’t go in for wild innovation or for genre-hopping, there’re no disco numbers or funky interludes, no alarms and no surprises. Dynamics, tone, harmony, two or three lines of lyrics: the alchemy of performance makes something extraordinarily magnificent from such simplicity. Low storm the place.

Originally posted on thegirlsare

The Withered Hand Christmas Special

I do love a Christmas song. I really do. (Except when sung with lacklustre perfection by Zooey Deschanel and her indie-pop “I wanna band for Christmas, Mommy!” cohorts, in which case I am reduced to spitting turkey feathers at the internet and wishing it would stop.) The best Christmas songs can sweep you up in an orgy of hopeless communal ache for what never was and never will be again, will get you joining impromptu choirs and crying into your eggnog. And even the worst have sleigh bells. Pretty much everything benefits from sleigh bells.

Anyway, I got an email from Dan Willson last week, informing me that his band had a Christmas single out. His band is Withered Hand and if you weren’t paying attention when I raved about them halfway through the year, then prick up your ears right now, because by the time they release their next LP, whenever that turns out to be, they will be HUGE. I promise. Their 2009 debut, Good News, has been the very definition of a slow-burner; it’s still getting discovered and reviewed by interhacks the world over today, who, quite rightly, have been enthralled by just that precise combination of self-deprecation, vulnerability, foul-mouthery, bitterness, heart-grabbing melodies, reedy vocals that shake with an honesty that verges on masochism, and an adroitness with a strummed guitar that gets me where it matters. Dan, who was raised in a strict Jehovah’s Witness family, writes about the sordid realities and the luminous glories of a life strung through with guilt and godliness. His songs are studded with Biblical imagery but with a lightness of touch that avoids any vicarish awkwardness; his verses, with perfectly pitched alterno-god worship, also contain reverent references to Sonic Youth, Nirvana, REM, Pavement and Silver Jews.

Maybe it’s because I recognise the Christian guilt thing - moulded by shame yet still hoping for heaven - that the songs resonate so deeply with me. Maybe it’s the harmonies and the fiddles and the “la la la”s that play foil to the gritty bitterness of the lyrics and elevate them from easy folk ditties to something exceptional. He can certainly write: I’d place him with the greats who walk the line between caustic filth and raw heartbreak, up there with Mark Eitzel or Vic Chesnutt or, closer to home, Arab Strap’s pair of scabrous-savant lyrical genii, Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat.*

So, yes, I was pleased to get news of a Withered Hand Christmas single. And pleaseder still to hear it, because it ticks the boxes I like such things to tick. Bells, cynicism, big swoopy tune; the will to romance thwarted by reality; ultimate redemption found, despite the coal-effect fire and plastic mistletoe, in the real snow falling from above, and in love.

Dan describes ‘Real Snow’ as “an anti-Christmas, pro-love song”, written “cos I hate feeling like I lie to my children once a year”. Ah, yes, the parental dilemma of how far along the line of Christmas bullshit do you take your precious children, how much of the silky lie to spin when the lie can make magic. I wanted to know more about his take on Christmas songs and the tribulations of being exiled from the rest of the modern world’s consumerist/pagan festivities, so I asked him some questions to set ‘Real Snow’ in context.

Does Father Christmas exist?

"In the minds of many children, yes."

Who would you nominate as Grinch of the year?

"Myself."

Mistletoe or wine?

"Wine please. If you both drink enough wine you won't need the mistletoe."

What are you hoping for in your stocking this year?

"As a rule, I'm far more interested in what's in other people's stockings."

What’s your favourite Christmas song?

"‘The Friendly Beasts’. I came to it through my children, and Sufjan Stevens does a wonderful version."

What's preferable in a Christmas song, communal jollity or pangs of nostalgic misery? Basically, do you want ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ or ‘Fairytale Of New York’?

"I find nostalgic misery can often be a good soundtrack to communal jollity! ‘Fairytale of New York’ wins every time for me."

Me too, definitely. Did you start off intending the two Christmas singles you’ve released to be specifically Christmas songs or were they written as songs like any other?

"One on purpose and one by chance I guess. I wrote them both at the onset of winter. In fact, I did everything I could to un-Christmas ‘It's A Wonderful Lie’. So there are two quite different versions of that song. One I can play all year round. I don't think I can do that with ‘Real Snow’ though."

(Here’s a link to 2009’s song, which was recorded in Dan’s kitchen as a free gift for subscribers to his mailing list.)

Do Christmas songs have to have bells on?

"No. When we recorded ‘Real Snow’, Darren (Hayman from Hefner, who recorded the track) and I differed on this. But in the end I came down on the side of it being a full-on Christmas song and we stuck sleigh bells all over it. I'm happy with that decision now but it means it is gathering dust the rest of the year!"

What are your childhood memories of Christmas?

"Those memories are always coloured with being one of the kids who knew real fast that Santa was not real and had to keep quiet about it. We didn't celebrate Christmas in our house, in fact it was a religious observation NOT to celebrate, our brand of evangelism forbade it. Also sitting out of Christmas celebrations and assemblies was a bit heavy. I had to sit and do homework in the canteen and the whole school would have to file in right past me.

"I also remember the Christmas just after my parents’ split. I got more presents than I'd ever seen before and I didn't want any of them."

What does Christmas look like to someone on the outside of it?

"It looks like parts of the whole thing are really bogus. At the same time I could see people were happy to have a reason to take some time to be together. I still feel that way about it, like it's a good thing."

What's been the best thing and the worst thing about participating in Christmas as an adult with your own family?

"The perfect foil to all of this Christmas stuff is that I never celebrated it as a kid, so I simultaneously discovered it via my own children and wife (yippee!) and also feel real bad about the big lie I compromised and participate in now yearly. The worst thing is dodging awkward questions about Santa now I am shamefully colluding in this myself. And the best thing is it sometimes snows. To be honest, I find it hard to relate to the feelings my wife describes about the magic of Christmas but I'm happy to take her word for it and hope my kids are experiencing it. Snow, on the other hand, blows my mind!"

Who's been thrilling you with their music in 2011?

"John Vanderslice - listen to his beautiful album White Wilderness."

Who thrilled you most musically in 1981? 1991? 2001?

"1981? Adam and the Ants.

"1991? Nirvana or Sonic Youth.

"2001? I think I went off music for a few years around 2001."

What are you hoping 2012 will bring (either musically, personally, or globally, or all three)?

"Peace and clarity."

How's your relationship with 'folk music' these days?

"Purists bore me. Same as it's always been."

How's the real snow up there in Edinburgh?

"It's just about melted. We made a snowman though, as soon as it fell. He's looking a bit weary."

When's the next Withered Hand record out?

"Good question. A vinyl EP comes out on Fence in February. I have a few more recordings in the locker. But the difficult second album? Ask me next Christmas."

I will. And I will be hoping for one more Christmas Withered Hand weepie to toast the passing of another year.

‘Real Snow’ is released by Fence Records on mini-CD inside a Xmas Card. To own a copy of this song you must subscribe to Fence Records Chart Ruse EP Series BEFORE 16 DECEMBER 2011. More details here.

*If you don’t believe me, here’s Withered Hand’s ‘Religious Songs’:

I don't really know what I should do
Like, should I be passing this bread along to you?
And I don't really know what the wine was for
‘cos if it was Jesus' blood, wouldn't there be more?
I'm knocking on Kevin's front door

I'm singing religious songs
And getting the words wrong
My hair's getting too long for this congregation
Religious songs
I'm getting the words wrong
My hair's getting too long
And they're saying
"How does he really expect to be happy
When he listens to death metal bands?"

If there's manna from heaven then you're disinclined to share
You stole my heart and I stole your underwear
You said religion is bullshit, it's all about metaphor.
Well if I need a fence to sit on
Then I'll sit on yours, sit on yours
Dreaming of Babylon's whores

… I knew you so long I ran out of cool things to say
I still bump into friends that we both had yesterday
When they ask me how I am, I lie and say I'm doing fine
They still manage to tell me I'm an easy lay holiday
Well that's okay, remember you thought I was gay?

Well, I beat myself off when I sleep on your futon
I walk in the rain with my secondhand suit on

Beat myself off when I sleep on your futon
I walk in the rain, and I'm thinking
If I happen to die tonight in my sleep
I'll have cum and not blood on my hands

I’m inclined to say “Take that, Zooey!” but that would be unseasonally graceless.

(Originally posted on Collapse Board)