Live Review: Big Deal (Liverpool Echo)

BIG DEAL

White Cliffs

Sister

The Shipping Forecast

7^th November 2013

Throughout a short and relentlessly average career as what you could vaguely call a music journalist, my biggest fear has been turning up to a show, suggesting I was on the guest list and my name wouldn’t be down. Everyone in the queue would snigger and I would practically be boo’d out the venue. That was until tonight though. My biggest fear now is turning up to a show and proceeding to explain to a baffled looking door man that I’m on the guest list for what is, to my surprise, a completely free entry show. People didn’t boo me out or anything, but they were definitely sniggering. ‘Everyone’s on the guest list lad’. Yeah, thanks.

White Cliffs have received praise from some corners of the city, but it’s difficult to not feel self-conscious around songs this dated. I’m sure there was a place for this sort of whiney post grunge at some point, but I am thankfully not old enough to have been there for it. I don’t know, hopefully it’s ironic and I’m just missing the point.

It’s easy to see why London’s Sisters were included on the bill tonight, with guitars scuzzier than the black floor beneath us. They need some serious work on their sound set-up, but with tunes this good put through such a shoegaze filter, there is still plenty to get your ears around.

Big Deal are an entirely new proposition tonight. On their excellent debut Lights Out, the whole boy girl, shared microphone thing was enough to put many people off. For those actually listening though, you’d have noticed that they are a cynical bunch, offsetting anything you’d be tempted to refer to as twee with lyrics dark enough to make you wonder if anyone really likes each other and generally doubt the existence of love at all. I’m exaggerating, but on tracks like Chair, where Alice Costello sings “You just want me for my lungs / You just want me for the songs I write about you”, they transformed that lightweight accompaniment into a disarming fragility, allowing the album to get under your skin before you’ve even had a chance to consider why.

On their sophomore effort June Gloom, Costelloe and Kacey ‘Kc’ Underwood brought in a drummer and turned the guitars up to create a more aggressive and all-together more confident sounding record. Golden Light, with its lazy vocals and woozy chords is an impressive introduction, and certainly quashes any fears that the new line up might be having teething issues. New single Swapping Spit, despite that title, is very moving this evening, with its sepia tinged reflection of romance softened by Costello’s indifferent vocals. In Your Car turns the volume up, allowing Underwood a moment of indulgence with that piercing, power stance inducing lead guitar part. The show spikes with the blithely anthemic Dream Machines, as the band meet each other at those downbeats in scintillating unison. Talk is their only retreat to that debut album, although it is almost recognisable as they race through it in double time behind a 4/4 drum beat. The song still manages to stand up, but it is certainly an indication of a band keen to disassociate themselves from their earlier sound. It is a shame in many ways, as that vulnerability was what elevated much of these songs above their indie-pop frameworks and their many contemporaries. Progression is important though, and the only way forward after an album that self-conscious was bigger. It’s difficult to see what form Big Deal’s troubled tales of romance will take on next. Tonight suggest that however bad it gets, that space between sadness and acceptance will continue to look like the easiest place in the world.

Live Review: Deptford Goth (Liverpool Echo - October 13)

Deptford Goth

Leaf Teashop (Liverpool)

19th October

‘Somber’ and ‘haunting’ are terms that surround Deptford Goth and the kind of delicate synth pop that the Londoner brings to LEAF Tea shop tonight. Since James Blake crooned his way into mainstream consciousness with his Mercury nominated debut, melancholy has always sat awkwardly amongst critical and commercial perception, swinging like a pendulum between derision and acclaim as artists fall on the right, or indeed wrong side of ethereal or dreary.

Life After Defo, Daniel Woodhouse’s tentatively acclaimed debut album, for all its warmth and heart, stayed indirect and ambiguous lyrically, instead using indistinct emotions and sentiments as a way of creating an sweeping, and at times very moving sense of uncertainty. The danger of this form of songwriting of course, is that it very much relies on the listener’s own sense of empathy and imagination, translating into insincerity, even laziness for those not looking to put the work in. Now some of the best songs of all time are built around ambiguity and being open interpretation. I mean just look at Motown in the sixties, Pop Music in the eighties and even more recently; Matt Berninger’s The National. Creating music that provokes emotion on a more expressive level relies almost entirely on the delivery. This is where much of Life After Defo as a record succeeds, as alluring synths and frostbitten chords coax these songs into a state of emotiveness beyond what Woodhouse is capable of achieving lyrically. It is fitting then, that this is where this evening’s performance all falls down.

Accompanied only by a Cellist, Woodhouse stumbles into Defo’s title track like a center back at a penalty shootout. Those little modified instrumental nuances that brightened the album, whimper hesitantly as a vocal line is mumbled to the point of where it could just be a continuous hum and no one would notice the difference. I’m being unfair, but it shouldn’t detract from the baffling indifference just dripping from every song that is rattled through. Feel Real is the Londoner’s only track that even comes close to danceable, so it is no coincidence that it represents the closest associations with pop music. That punchy, deliberate beat that anchors the song is reduced to a muffled footstep, and with it the blood and soul that kept it alive. Woodhouse and his Cellist eventually wake up during a wilted rendition of Years, but only to complain about the excessive chatter going on among the more unsympathetic members of the audience. I mean, even in a venue as open as Leaf, a talkative crowd has more of a reflection of the performance than the manners of those witnessing it.

Bloody Lip is one of the finest album closers this year, offering a startling and very poignant moment of self-reflection, leaving the listener with the sense that despite all the uncertainty, despite all the doubt, this is a man who has found some peace in all the darkness. That gorgeous refrain of ‘There has never been / And there will never be” is disarmingly vulnerable, almost like Woodhouse is on the verge of disclosing a secret but keeps changing his mind. Sung with such an alarming detachment this evening though, it’s almost as if he just can’t be bothered to tell us. A great show is meant to make you reassess an album, keeping it on repeat for the days that follow as the songs take on new forms and sizes. Throughout every song this evening though, I strain to try and mold the sounds emerging from the stage into the shapes I’m used to hearing on the record.

I love the album, so I take absolutely no pleasure in writing any of this. And of course, a record so rich sonically is always going to be difficult to perform live, especially without any sort of substantial tour budget. But with a sound built around such indirect, even apathetic lyrics, it’s the textures, the instrumental flourishes, the shifts in tone and dynamics that are relied upon to engage the listener. This evening is evidence that Woodhouse is the only one who doesn’t understand this. More worryingly though, it suggests that he isn’t being enigmatic or aloof, he just might not have anything to say.

Live Review: Bonobo (GetIntoThis)

Bonobo

Dauwd

02 Academy – October 3rd

Electronic music has always been guilty of creating icons too quickly. It’s relentless forward momentum and close association with youth culture makes the trajectory of producers unnaturally steep and inexplicably tenuous, creating an endless cycle of power rises and power vacuums until we don’t even know what the fuck we like ourselves. In a scene where 19 and 22 year old duo Disclosure can be considered experienced heads, 37 year old veteran Bonobo has traversed his way through contemporary UK Electronic music with a remarkable amount of staying power. And this year, with the release of his excellent fifth album The North Borders, Simon Green paints an unlikely figure at the summit of a long list of thriving, crossover producers.   

Kicking things off with a mercilessly high energy set is Liverpool University alumni Dauwd. The North Wales producer is part of a growing number of artists fudging the lines between house and techno, dressing abrasion in something a bit more approachable by bringing melody into the mix. Drawing largely on the excellent Ghostly EP Heat Division, al-Hilali incorporates that immaculate synth work and those tuneful basslines to create a set rich in aesthetics and diverse in textures.

Live electronic music is difficult. Artists and producers spend careers in the studio trying to make music that pushes sonic boundaries to their limits, utilizing extreme and complex recording techniques to create a sound that ultimately reaches beyond what can be reproduced live. Tonight Bonobo draws on a full band of multi-instrumentalists and rhythm section in an attempt to present one of the most intimate albums of the year to a buoyant and diverse O2 Academy crowd.

Bonobo’s unweaning popularity can be credited, largely, to his ability to synthesize classic electronic music with modern recording techniques, culminating in a sound that is memorable whilst remaining distinct. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he refrains from that kind of show stopping, widescreen production, in favour of keeping things tight and purposeful, like on the twitching, rhythmic Know You and the lo-fi, woozy Pieces. There are dense and intricate layers of textures at play here this evening, yet Green manages to retain that sense of space that makes his recorded output so rewarding. These are subtly challenging songs, made accessible to a wider, crossover audience by their infrequent nods to commercial dance music. First Fires could sit on an Oneohtrix Point Never album if it weren’t for that graceful melodic, verse-chorus vocal line. Emkay paints this ambient, sparse soundscape, but on top of a two-step garage beat making it dance floor ready as the feet begin to move. Despite the technical prowess demonstrated in the studio, tonight’s performance finds beauty in more natural, more humble places. The faint sound of woodwind teased at the end of Sapphire brings the song gorgeously into focus, and the strings that bloom in the closing moments of Ten Tigers offer this timid piece some vitality in a wonderfully moving display of human expression. It is these occasional instrumental flourishes throughout the set that allow these songs to be played live as their own entity, reinventing them as these dazzling arrangements and elevating them above the sum of all their parts.

Live electronic music often feels like an artist desperately trying to shoe-horn a live show into studio productions, playing one beat per bar on an electric drum kit as the rest of the track plays through their Macbook. It isn’t the artist’s fault; the growing popularity of UK electronic music and the decreasing value in recorded music has meant that electronic acts have to tour, have to play at festivals, have to play blog sessions and all the rest. I mean, there is no reason why a producer should be able to even mix live, let alone perform with instruments when an entire back catalogue can be produced using one piece of computer software. Werk Disk’s Lukid recently confessed to Fact Mag that despite being booked for numerous ‘live’ sets, all he does is play tunes through his laptop. There is no clarification on the boundaries and definition on what constitutes as live because largely, you don’t know the extent of this ‘live’ show until you are in venue. The natural habitat of electronic music will always be club nights, with packed sweaty dance floors, 4am curfews and crippling comedowns. Tonight though, Bonobo has embraced the finer, but essential live elements of his album by making it a performance rich in texture and instrumentation, almost as if his collective are a live act trying to incorporate electronic elements into their set. This is an artist who harbours a deep respect for the soul of each sound he uses, whether it is synthetic or from a live instrument, allowing the songs to become physical in a literal sense and creating a show that is undeniably human.    

Mike Townsend

http://www.peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk/2013/10/bonobo-dauwd-o2-academy-liverp-1.html

Live Review: No Ceremony (BidoLito)

East Village Arts Club

Friday, 13^th 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