East Village Arts Club
Friday, 13th September 2013
No
Ceremony, or NO
CEREMONY /// as their mother’s know them, are an odd bunch. The promo for
their debut self-titled album wasn’t so much an exercise in anti-hype as it was
an all out fucking horrorshow, filled with 20 YouTube clips of dying babies and
short audio mixes of white noise. I imagine this was to create some sort of
mystique, although it appeared to serve little purpose other than to creep you
the fuck out.
I half expect an exorcist style growl as Victoria Hamblett softly introduces her
band; consisting of two lads who look like they have been kicked out of their
high-school prom and a nervous looking teenager hunched over an electric drum
kit. Hardly the sort of mysterious and hedonistic ghouls you might have
expected three months ago. They have an album out now though, and whilst that
whole mysterious shit might work when you are trying to generate hype it probably
doesn’t when you are trying to sustain it.
On their excellent debut album, No Ceremony create music that relies
heavily on atmosphere, using timbres and textures to build walls around their
listeners. This is achieved largely at the mixing desk, with production that smothers
Hamblett’s vocals almost beyond
recognition. The result is a set of pop songs that are just out of reach,
delivering these very organic, human melodies in extraterrestrial packages with
the sort of juxtaposition that has you pressing repeat as you attempt
understand them.
With this in mind, it is interesting to see
how they will try and replicate this on a live level. I mean, with album number
one only just upon us, their live set up is hardly going to have any sound
technicians drooling. The inclusion of a live drummer for the tour certainly is
a wise one though, if only for the fact that it allows other members to focus
on the finer intricacies of their sound without worrying about keeping the beat.
The Loft at the EVAC feels vacuous, as the
twenty or so people in attendance follow that weird empty-gig science of
standing only at the back. FEELSOLOW
is arguably their most complete song to date, utilizing those sort of dramatic,
four to the floor synths that the likes of Tiesto
deploys at your least favourite European holiday resorts. The likes of HURTLOVE and HEARTBREAKER build on this, harnessing that synth lead aggression
that Crystal Castles formulated but
with added levels of, you guessed it, trance? Now I never went to Ibiza in the
90s, but I can say with some confidence that trance was never cool. What it did
do though is distill that fist-pumping euphoria; that huge sense of grandiosity
that was capable of making clubbers feel like just for that moment, life wasn’t
just a series of overdrafts and thirteen hour shifts and that it actually meant
something. Think of it like of like a Westlife
key change for the MDMA generation. Tonight though, No Ceremony turn that on its head, using that throbbing base and
visceral, pulsating synths to frame and heighten Hamblett’s mournful cry of ‘Is it wrong to make you love me’ in
something equally as grand, yet inherently more tragic.
No Ceremony’s appeal lies in their many
contradictions. Slower pieces, like the aching WARSONGS and the fragile AWAYFROMHERE
are, with their rustic acoustic guitar and twinkling piano, campfire folk
songs. What they manage to do though, with a hint of autotune or a downpour of
static, is make them just inaccessible enough to keep us engaged. The whole
thing really is a masterclass in restraint, not quite letting you feel
connected or not quite letting you dance to the point where you just have to
accept that this is a group of musicians in complete control of how they want
their listeners to feel. Now I know that could be construed as one-dimensional,
but when the modern day pop culture icon is Marcus Mumford sobbing in a fucking trilby hat then it is
comforting to see a band present their emotions with such conviction. It is a
risky move, and many will certainly find it detached, but tonight, even with a
sparse and largely disinterested crowd, their performance captures that
uncertainty and isolation that their album conveys in abundance. It is an
impressive effort for a band clearly still finding their feet, and is evidence
that despite their new found openness, No
Ceremony aren’t ready to let their guard down just yet.
http://www.peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk/2013/09/no-ceremony-east-village-arts.html
Mike Townsend
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