Teenage Fanclub, The Scala, London 29/3/05
It’s been a while since we’ve seen The Fannies round these parts. Their last tour was a couple of years ago, and that was a jaunt to promote a greatest hits compilation. Back then, I genuinely feared that it might be the last we saw of them, despite Norman's assurances that they would record a new album. This show is one of two low-key dates aimed at the loyal fanbase to test the water for new material, and it's wonderful to have them back. It’s therefore surprising how little new material they opt to perform this evening – I was basically expecting pretty much the whole of the new album (‘Man-Made’, out May 9th) to get an airing plus a few rarely aired fan favourites from the back catalogue. What we actually got was the first half of ‘Man-Made’ spread evenly throughout the set, along with a fair few now comfortingly familiar classics. Teenage Fanclub therefore remain the most steadfastly predictable of live acts. For some bands this might be considered pejorative, but it is this sturdy dependability that make this band a national treasure. With every Fanclub gig, you know basically what you’re going to get and they pretty much always deliver the goods, leaving the audience feeling warm and elated. This show was no different.
After a pleasant if slightly drifting set from support act Green Peppers (melancholy acoustic singer-songwriter stuff), TFC took the stage and launched into ‘It’s All In My Mind’, the opening track from ‘Man-Made’. This chugging and characteristically infectious tune sounded effortlessly bright and remarkably assured given it was actually the first time the band had played it live. The sound of the band was full, and the vocal harmonies in the chorus seemed a little more subtle and underplayed than usual. A wonderful guitar solo from Norman with what looked like an E-bow really brought the track to life. Perhaps unwisely, they followed it with ‘Time Stops’, thus opening the gig with the opening two tracks on the new album. This one was a little more tentative, and suffered from an overly prominent bass twang. Still, the chorus was lovely and Gerry’s voice sounded in fine form.
From the outset the band were in excellent spirits, Norman joking about his glasses falling off, and Raymond exchanging a few words with a heckler who denounced his endearingly messy new long hair with the words ‘where are the scissors, Raymond?’ In fact, Raymond McGinley is something of a revelation these days. His slightly uneasy stance still makes for a marked contrast with Norman Blake’s effusive and relaxed confidence – but as a songwriter and performer, he improves with every new release. He takes on most of the lead guitar duties these days, and plays with verve throughout tonight’s show. His songs provide some of the evening’s highlights – ‘Verisimilitude’ as the first universally recognised song, ‘Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From’ as a beautiful, emotionally direct lament complete with comedy glockenspiel, ‘About You’ as the song that at last gets the somewhat restrained audience jumping and singing along. He also provides one of the highlights of the encores, but more of that later…
The new songs all sounded confident and intelligently arranged, from the sugar rush of ‘Slow Fade’ (easily the paciest thing they’ve recorded since the days of ‘Thirteen’ ‘Don’t blink’, says Norman, ‘it’s so short you might miss it!’). Gerry contributes the marvellous ‘Save’, which whilst a little elusive on record, sounds absolutely lovely here – particularly thanks to some delightful pedal steel guitar work. Raymond’s ‘Nowhere’ is more jangly and less immediate, but it has some wonderful lead guitar work. I don't want to say too much more about them now, as a review of the album is on its way!
The band cover all bases by playing material from throughout their career, including second ever single ‘God Knows It’s True’ and ‘Did I Say’, the exquisite, rapturous gem of a new track on the best of primer. We get some favourites that weren’t performed as regularly as they might have been on the last tour (‘I Don’t Want Control Of You’ and ‘Near You’ were both excellent) and ending with a flurry of classics proves to be a wise move, and shows how well this band can judge the pacing and timing of a good set. Only ‘Thirteen’ is cruelly ignored – given a slightly longer set, we might have heard ‘Radio’, ‘Norman 3’ or ‘The Cabbage’ at least. As it stands, the set very much favours Grand Prix the albums subsequent to it.
Best of all are the encores, where they premier ‘Only With You’, one of the best of Raymond McGinley’s songs, with its inventive arrangement and slightly wistful melody. It was very touching indeed, and brought a sense of reverential hush to the venue, before much of the audience laughed over the solo piano at the end because they had started clapping well before the end. They always seem to end with ‘Everything Flows’ these days, which makes it all the more amazing that they can still play this early classic with such radical gusto. It sounds for all the world like they only wrote it yesterday. This, ‘Start Again’ and ‘Don’t Look Back’ sound colossal and at last the audience seem engaged.
The band seem genuinely surprised when the crowd refuse to stop cheering until a second encore is delivered. They return to play an endearingly ragged, unrehearsed version of ‘Alcoholiday’ – a former live favourite that seems to have fallen off the radar a little in more recent years. It was an inspired choice. Whilst it left regulars like ‘The Concept’ and ‘Starsign’ unplayed – it was crowd-pleasing enough to mean that this didn’t really matter.
The problem now is surely that this band simply have too many great songs. With ‘Man-Made’ added to the mix, they now have a vast plethora of material to draw from, and it would be impossible for them to deliver absolutely everything. I would have loved to hear some less frequently aired gems (‘Going Places’, ‘Winter’ or ‘Speed Of Light’ would have been great, and they don’t seem to play ‘Neil Jung’ enough these days either), but this was clearly not the kind of set they opted for this evening. Teenage Fanclub were reliably great tonight – but they were preaching to the converted. I have this little glimmer of hope that ‘Man-Made’ will at last bring them to a wider audience, but it’s depressingly unlikely. Through their rigid adherence to the old-fashioned virtues of beautiful harmonies, a good tune and some rollicking guitar solos, The Fannies remain our very best songwriters - a crucial but criminally ignored piece of Britain's pop legacy.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Radio Radio
Yes, for the first time since last year's Glastonbury Festival I will be hitting the radio airwaves once more! In League With Paton (the radio show which gave this blog its name) will be returning to Cambridge University's radio station, CUR1350, for one show only - as part of a special day of alumni programming - next Saturday at 1oam. Visit the website (http://www.cur1350.co.uk) for more information for how to tune in online. I shall publish a playlist on this site after the show.
The more observant among you may have noticed that I have now added numerous links to the sidebar (scroll down a bit and you'll see them). This should be a pretty useful resource to anyone interested in the music and film I write about here - if you're not familiar with any of these sites, be sure to check them out!
The more observant among you may have noticed that I have now added numerous links to the sidebar (scroll down a bit and you'll see them). This should be a pretty useful resource to anyone interested in the music and film I write about here - if you're not familiar with any of these sites, be sure to check them out!
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
The End Is The Beginning and The Beginning Is The End
5x2 (Dir: Francois Ozon)
This new film from Francois Ozon, the enfant terrible of French cinema, appears to have divided critics somewhat and I must admit that I was surprised by my own somewhat ambivalent feelings towards it. Ozon strikes me as one of the most promising among younger directors, and I would happily deploy him as armour to bolster my argument against those tedious ‘golden age theorists’ who think cinema is in a state of terminal decline. He has made films that veer from the wilfully perverse (‘Criminal Lovers’, ‘Sitcom’) to the lightweight and farcical (‘8 Women’, ‘Swimming Pool’ ‘Sitcom’) via a brilliantly intense examination of grief and loss (‘Under The Sand’) that remains his finest work to date. He has demonstrated both his prolificacy (a new film seems to emerge every year) and his deftness of touch arguably more successfully than the similarly lauded Michael Winterbottom, who may yet prove to be a jack of all trades but master of none.
‘5x2’ is without doubt his most mature and technically accomplished film yet. It is closest to ‘Under The Sand’ in atmosphere and impact. Like Mike Leigh’s recent ‘Vera Drake’, this film effectively utilises close-ups and claustrophobic theatrical situations to deconstruct its portrait of a disintegrating marriage. Like Gaspar Noe’s recent shocker ‘Irreversible’, it tells its story backwards, but with a much greater degree of subtlety. In fact, it may be the case that this film is too subtle – by leaving far more unstated than it includes, it proves somewhat elusive.
It begins superbly, with the divorce of its two protagonists – an uncomfortable office scene demonstrating cannily how a once emotional intimacy has been reduced to legalistic terminology, the rubble of a collapsed love. Ozon’s greatest success in this movie is to have the couple go to a hotel for one final act of love, rather than merely going their separate ways. What follows is the most torrid and uncomfortable sex scene I have ever witnessed in the cinema, and one that merits far more column inches than any of the ‘real sex’ in Winterbottom’s apparently simplistic ‘9 Songs’. It begins uneasily enough, but when she appears to change her mind, it appears to become rape. By virtue of the backward arc of the narrative, these moral complications are left unexamined, and we are left with a somewhat complicated view of Gilles, the husband, as the film progresses, and one, which I must admit left me viewing him in a somewhat unsympathetic light for the entire duration of the film.
The middle sections of the film are equally complex and problematic. Ozon depicts a party where Gilles’ homosexual brother and his new boyfriend, a blandly handsome and unashamedly promiscuous Mediterranean type come round for dinner, alcohol and soft drugs, and a rather stilted examination of conventional and unconventional relationships ensues. The results are appropriately uneasy – but I do wonder if this is the kind of conversation real people have at dinner parties. It’s essential for Ozon’s narrative structure that it appears – but does it really shed any light on the mystery of human relationships beyond the merely prosaic? Although this is the least camp of Ozon’s films, he seems unable to resist the introduction of a gay element here, and it just feels a little incongruous given the closed, introverted nature of its central couple. Also, using homosexuality as a means of elucidating differences between ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ relationships strikes me as an entirely unnecessary and unhelpful dichotomy (this film will only reinforce the opinion held by evangelicals and right-wingers that homosexuality threatens to destroy the institution of marriage) – but that’s for an entirely different discussion.
Ozon then moves to depict the birth of their child, in complicated medical circumstances, with real technical mastery. This is the one section of the film where I felt an emotional connection with the characters, and it was a careful, controlled examination of how one central event can undermine intimacy and trust between two people. When Gilles fails to appear at the birth to support his wife, there is a sense of palpable inevitability (especially given the reverse structure of the film) – a line has been crossed and the consequences will not be reversed. The earlier scenes, where we see Gilles bonding intimately with his son far more than with his wife, are now thrown into much sharper focus by this section of the film, and his unsympathetic character more carefully illuminated.
The marriage sequence shows us the untainted abandon and excitement of romance effectively, but it is also where Ozon makes his most significant misstep. By introducing a nameless hunk to tempt Marion into adultery on their wedding night, Ozon indulges his taste for the palpably absurd. It’s almost as if, to provide some balance for his resolutely unsympathetic portrait of Gilles, he has to give Marion a flaw of her own. Unfortunately, this scene is just so clunky and mishandled that the tactic misfires spectacularly, leaving the audience confused and frustrated. It also seems to imply that the marriage was doomed from the very outset – which gives the film an even greater sense of overbearing inevitability.
The final holiday resort scenes, which finally show us where Marion and Gilles first meet, are quietly charming, but the character of Gilles’ former girlfriend of four years seems tokenistic and underwritten, and her outpourings of jealousy and frustration seem like stereotyped and conventional female responses to the encroaching threat of ‘the other woman’, whether real or imagined. Again, Ozon’s direction is more subtle than his writing, and we are left with the sense that these early flourishings of intimacy are left underplayed and are something of a missed opportunity.
Some people may feel moved by this film’s conclusion, and may feel that the reverse narrative adds dramatic and emotional weight. Others may feel that it adds only cynicism and inevitability to an already slight portrayal of a disintegrating marriage. I felt sandwiched uncomfortably between these opposing viewpoints. I desparately wanted to react without cynicism to this accomplished piece of film-making – but it would be giving Ozon too much dramatic license to ignore this film’s significant flaws. Given his love of theatre, and his comfortable handling of comedy and farce in earlier pictures, it is a surprise that its Ozon’s writing here that lets him down somewhat. I felt we needed to know more about this film’s central characters – not even the most intense of marriages can possibly exist in complete isolation. The film is excellent and effective in portraying honestly the profoundly irrational actions of human beings (Gilles does not seem to know why he cannot bring himself to support Marion during childbirth). A lesser director would have made a film where the characters’ actions were more calculated and less convincing (and this makes the film’s two major slips – the dinner party conversation and Marion’s wedding-night temptation) seem even more superfluous. ‘5x2’ is as engrossing a film as one might expect from Ozon – but it doesn’t achieve the poignancy and profundity of Bergman, arguably the best director of these claustrophobic pieces (‘5x2’ will inevitably be compared unfavourably with ‘Scenes From A Marriage’, or perhaps more appropriately with its imminent sequel ‘Saraband’). Still, perhaps at this stage that kind of creative brilliance is an unrealistic expectation – and Ozon is a less weighty and more playful director than Bergman anyway. It may be satisfying enough that he is continuing to develop his control and technique, expanding his range along the way.
This new film from Francois Ozon, the enfant terrible of French cinema, appears to have divided critics somewhat and I must admit that I was surprised by my own somewhat ambivalent feelings towards it. Ozon strikes me as one of the most promising among younger directors, and I would happily deploy him as armour to bolster my argument against those tedious ‘golden age theorists’ who think cinema is in a state of terminal decline. He has made films that veer from the wilfully perverse (‘Criminal Lovers’, ‘Sitcom’) to the lightweight and farcical (‘8 Women’, ‘Swimming Pool’ ‘Sitcom’) via a brilliantly intense examination of grief and loss (‘Under The Sand’) that remains his finest work to date. He has demonstrated both his prolificacy (a new film seems to emerge every year) and his deftness of touch arguably more successfully than the similarly lauded Michael Winterbottom, who may yet prove to be a jack of all trades but master of none.
‘5x2’ is without doubt his most mature and technically accomplished film yet. It is closest to ‘Under The Sand’ in atmosphere and impact. Like Mike Leigh’s recent ‘Vera Drake’, this film effectively utilises close-ups and claustrophobic theatrical situations to deconstruct its portrait of a disintegrating marriage. Like Gaspar Noe’s recent shocker ‘Irreversible’, it tells its story backwards, but with a much greater degree of subtlety. In fact, it may be the case that this film is too subtle – by leaving far more unstated than it includes, it proves somewhat elusive.
It begins superbly, with the divorce of its two protagonists – an uncomfortable office scene demonstrating cannily how a once emotional intimacy has been reduced to legalistic terminology, the rubble of a collapsed love. Ozon’s greatest success in this movie is to have the couple go to a hotel for one final act of love, rather than merely going their separate ways. What follows is the most torrid and uncomfortable sex scene I have ever witnessed in the cinema, and one that merits far more column inches than any of the ‘real sex’ in Winterbottom’s apparently simplistic ‘9 Songs’. It begins uneasily enough, but when she appears to change her mind, it appears to become rape. By virtue of the backward arc of the narrative, these moral complications are left unexamined, and we are left with a somewhat complicated view of Gilles, the husband, as the film progresses, and one, which I must admit left me viewing him in a somewhat unsympathetic light for the entire duration of the film.
The middle sections of the film are equally complex and problematic. Ozon depicts a party where Gilles’ homosexual brother and his new boyfriend, a blandly handsome and unashamedly promiscuous Mediterranean type come round for dinner, alcohol and soft drugs, and a rather stilted examination of conventional and unconventional relationships ensues. The results are appropriately uneasy – but I do wonder if this is the kind of conversation real people have at dinner parties. It’s essential for Ozon’s narrative structure that it appears – but does it really shed any light on the mystery of human relationships beyond the merely prosaic? Although this is the least camp of Ozon’s films, he seems unable to resist the introduction of a gay element here, and it just feels a little incongruous given the closed, introverted nature of its central couple. Also, using homosexuality as a means of elucidating differences between ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ relationships strikes me as an entirely unnecessary and unhelpful dichotomy (this film will only reinforce the opinion held by evangelicals and right-wingers that homosexuality threatens to destroy the institution of marriage) – but that’s for an entirely different discussion.
Ozon then moves to depict the birth of their child, in complicated medical circumstances, with real technical mastery. This is the one section of the film where I felt an emotional connection with the characters, and it was a careful, controlled examination of how one central event can undermine intimacy and trust between two people. When Gilles fails to appear at the birth to support his wife, there is a sense of palpable inevitability (especially given the reverse structure of the film) – a line has been crossed and the consequences will not be reversed. The earlier scenes, where we see Gilles bonding intimately with his son far more than with his wife, are now thrown into much sharper focus by this section of the film, and his unsympathetic character more carefully illuminated.
The marriage sequence shows us the untainted abandon and excitement of romance effectively, but it is also where Ozon makes his most significant misstep. By introducing a nameless hunk to tempt Marion into adultery on their wedding night, Ozon indulges his taste for the palpably absurd. It’s almost as if, to provide some balance for his resolutely unsympathetic portrait of Gilles, he has to give Marion a flaw of her own. Unfortunately, this scene is just so clunky and mishandled that the tactic misfires spectacularly, leaving the audience confused and frustrated. It also seems to imply that the marriage was doomed from the very outset – which gives the film an even greater sense of overbearing inevitability.
The final holiday resort scenes, which finally show us where Marion and Gilles first meet, are quietly charming, but the character of Gilles’ former girlfriend of four years seems tokenistic and underwritten, and her outpourings of jealousy and frustration seem like stereotyped and conventional female responses to the encroaching threat of ‘the other woman’, whether real or imagined. Again, Ozon’s direction is more subtle than his writing, and we are left with the sense that these early flourishings of intimacy are left underplayed and are something of a missed opportunity.
Some people may feel moved by this film’s conclusion, and may feel that the reverse narrative adds dramatic and emotional weight. Others may feel that it adds only cynicism and inevitability to an already slight portrayal of a disintegrating marriage. I felt sandwiched uncomfortably between these opposing viewpoints. I desparately wanted to react without cynicism to this accomplished piece of film-making – but it would be giving Ozon too much dramatic license to ignore this film’s significant flaws. Given his love of theatre, and his comfortable handling of comedy and farce in earlier pictures, it is a surprise that its Ozon’s writing here that lets him down somewhat. I felt we needed to know more about this film’s central characters – not even the most intense of marriages can possibly exist in complete isolation. The film is excellent and effective in portraying honestly the profoundly irrational actions of human beings (Gilles does not seem to know why he cannot bring himself to support Marion during childbirth). A lesser director would have made a film where the characters’ actions were more calculated and less convincing (and this makes the film’s two major slips – the dinner party conversation and Marion’s wedding-night temptation) seem even more superfluous. ‘5x2’ is as engrossing a film as one might expect from Ozon – but it doesn’t achieve the poignancy and profundity of Bergman, arguably the best director of these claustrophobic pieces (‘5x2’ will inevitably be compared unfavourably with ‘Scenes From A Marriage’, or perhaps more appropriately with its imminent sequel ‘Saraband’). Still, perhaps at this stage that kind of creative brilliance is an unrealistic expectation – and Ozon is a less weighty and more playful director than Bergman anyway. It may be satisfying enough that he is continuing to develop his control and technique, expanding his range along the way.
Good Things Come To Those Who Wait
Rilo Kiley at the Marquee 16/3/05
I normally hate all seated gigs, but a chair would have been a great relief at this one. I haven’t been kept waiting for a band this long since the days of the Cambridge Boat Race, where, lovely venue thought it was, they frequently spent three times as much time setting up as the band spent on stage. It was 10pm by the time they finally appeared, and thoughts of missing the last train home did begin to enter my mind around this time.
This was all made much worse by the cloyingly earnest performance from support act Marc Carroll. He is the kind of ‘artist’ that makes the term ‘singer-songwriter’ sound horribly offensive. Every line was hammed-up and overwrought, every chord strummed with an unpleasant and grating faux intensity. This quite literally heavy-handed strumming style was so relentless and uniform that it made the numerous guitar changes seem like mere window dressing. Unfortunately, you can't polish a turd. That being said, ‘Crash Pad Number’ was at least a pleasant slice of Byrdsian jangle pop, even if it did bear more than a passing resemblance to ‘Manic Monday’ (Prince wrote that y’know, a piece of pop trivia considerably more interesting than anything Carroll’s career will ever result in).
Rilo Kiley’s performance has drawn some harsh criticism from some quarters, not least from John Kell, who has declared Rilo Kiley to be MOR. I sort of see where he is coming from – they are more glossy and less lyrically substantial than many of the glowing reviews of their albums have accounted for, and there was an unexpected emphasis on fuzzy dual guitar solos in a vaguely 70s FM radio rock style. Yet, ‘MOR’ has always struck me as an overused and somewhat unhelpful term and, to these ears at least, there was little that was Middle of the Road about this performance. It was technically impressive, with some striking slide guitar flourishes, and surprising levels of rhythmic inventiveness where so many alt. Country combos are merely functional. At times, the dazzling musicianship was thrilling and the intricate arrangements always fascinating. I'm slightly wary of simply dismissing quality musicianship as MOR, and Rilo Kiley are most certainly not Keane. If we’re going to use one of those annoying critical terms (and be frustratingly pedantic at the same time), we might better dub Rilo Kiley AOR. They are perfectly pitched at the Word Magazine readership (Word promoted tonight’s show) and are most likely to appeal to mature, middle-aged, reasonably conservative listeners, rather than some of the surprising number of indie kids in the audience. Not only this, but they also bolster their sound a little for live performance, frequently emphasising the rock element to their sound as much as the country. Occasionally this spills into self-indulgence, as the biting ‘Does He Love You?’ disintegrates into a rather aimless jam session.
Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett make for a slightly unusual pairing at the front – he looks like your typical indie fop, and she could easily be the queen of a beauty pageant. Her voice lacks rough edges, but is engaging, and her phrasing is crisp. She is let down tonight by a slightly problematic sound mix, which swamps her understated delivery beneath the wall of guitars. Still, ‘Portions For Foxes’ is more energetic than on record, and ‘I Never’ sounds suitably sultry. Best of all was a brand new song, which had a slightly unconventional melody, and demonstrated that this band are still expanding their reach.
The Arcade Fire gig earlier this month ended with a spectacular set-piece bringing band and audience closer together, and Rilo Kiley conclude proceedings with a similarly good natured flourish. They invite Word’s Andrew Harrison and members of the audience to invade the stage for a singalong finale of ‘With Arms Outstretched’ (from ‘The Execution of All Things’), one of their sweetest songs and, as it turns out, clearly a fan favourite. It left me feeling somewhat warm and sentimental.
Whilst this music will certainly not change the world, I very much enjoyed this set, and it marked Rilo Kiley out as genuinely worthy songwriters, rather than the mere pretentions at worthiness that characterise the likes of Damien Dempsey or indeed Marc Carroll. I concede that they will need to be braver with future releases (I suspect that, despite the assumptions of its title, 'More Adventurous' is probably neither more nor less adventurous than its immediate predecessor). The one new song here hinted that this might be a realistic possibility - let's hope so.
I normally hate all seated gigs, but a chair would have been a great relief at this one. I haven’t been kept waiting for a band this long since the days of the Cambridge Boat Race, where, lovely venue thought it was, they frequently spent three times as much time setting up as the band spent on stage. It was 10pm by the time they finally appeared, and thoughts of missing the last train home did begin to enter my mind around this time.
This was all made much worse by the cloyingly earnest performance from support act Marc Carroll. He is the kind of ‘artist’ that makes the term ‘singer-songwriter’ sound horribly offensive. Every line was hammed-up and overwrought, every chord strummed with an unpleasant and grating faux intensity. This quite literally heavy-handed strumming style was so relentless and uniform that it made the numerous guitar changes seem like mere window dressing. Unfortunately, you can't polish a turd. That being said, ‘Crash Pad Number’ was at least a pleasant slice of Byrdsian jangle pop, even if it did bear more than a passing resemblance to ‘Manic Monday’ (Prince wrote that y’know, a piece of pop trivia considerably more interesting than anything Carroll’s career will ever result in).
Rilo Kiley’s performance has drawn some harsh criticism from some quarters, not least from John Kell, who has declared Rilo Kiley to be MOR. I sort of see where he is coming from – they are more glossy and less lyrically substantial than many of the glowing reviews of their albums have accounted for, and there was an unexpected emphasis on fuzzy dual guitar solos in a vaguely 70s FM radio rock style. Yet, ‘MOR’ has always struck me as an overused and somewhat unhelpful term and, to these ears at least, there was little that was Middle of the Road about this performance. It was technically impressive, with some striking slide guitar flourishes, and surprising levels of rhythmic inventiveness where so many alt. Country combos are merely functional. At times, the dazzling musicianship was thrilling and the intricate arrangements always fascinating. I'm slightly wary of simply dismissing quality musicianship as MOR, and Rilo Kiley are most certainly not Keane. If we’re going to use one of those annoying critical terms (and be frustratingly pedantic at the same time), we might better dub Rilo Kiley AOR. They are perfectly pitched at the Word Magazine readership (Word promoted tonight’s show) and are most likely to appeal to mature, middle-aged, reasonably conservative listeners, rather than some of the surprising number of indie kids in the audience. Not only this, but they also bolster their sound a little for live performance, frequently emphasising the rock element to their sound as much as the country. Occasionally this spills into self-indulgence, as the biting ‘Does He Love You?’ disintegrates into a rather aimless jam session.
Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett make for a slightly unusual pairing at the front – he looks like your typical indie fop, and she could easily be the queen of a beauty pageant. Her voice lacks rough edges, but is engaging, and her phrasing is crisp. She is let down tonight by a slightly problematic sound mix, which swamps her understated delivery beneath the wall of guitars. Still, ‘Portions For Foxes’ is more energetic than on record, and ‘I Never’ sounds suitably sultry. Best of all was a brand new song, which had a slightly unconventional melody, and demonstrated that this band are still expanding their reach.
The Arcade Fire gig earlier this month ended with a spectacular set-piece bringing band and audience closer together, and Rilo Kiley conclude proceedings with a similarly good natured flourish. They invite Word’s Andrew Harrison and members of the audience to invade the stage for a singalong finale of ‘With Arms Outstretched’ (from ‘The Execution of All Things’), one of their sweetest songs and, as it turns out, clearly a fan favourite. It left me feeling somewhat warm and sentimental.
Whilst this music will certainly not change the world, I very much enjoyed this set, and it marked Rilo Kiley out as genuinely worthy songwriters, rather than the mere pretentions at worthiness that characterise the likes of Damien Dempsey or indeed Marc Carroll. I concede that they will need to be braver with future releases (I suspect that, despite the assumptions of its title, 'More Adventurous' is probably neither more nor less adventurous than its immediate predecessor). The one new song here hinted that this might be a realistic possibility - let's hope so.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Death Becomes Them
The Arcade Fire, King's College Student Union, 8th March 2005
I don’t normally go in for hyperbole, but this really was something quite special. Besides, I got there before the NME anyway. The anticipation for The Arcade Fire’s first gig outside North America had reached feverish levels seemingly entirely by word of mouth (and the web), the gig having comfortably sold out before the NME fell into rapture over the wonderful ‘Funeral’ album. There were several important people in the audience, including Steve Lamacq and XFM’s John Kennedy and also, so I’m reliably informed, Bjork. These people are not the nation’s tastemakers for nothing – and in this case, they should be lauded for lending their support to this remarkable band.
If anything, The Arcade Fire are a more invigorating and distinctive prospect live than on record. From the word go, they are a band that manage to appear intensely serious (or maybe seriously intense?) about their work, but also thrillingly entertaining. Whilst much of this is down to how they look on stage (they all look slightly odd and are dressed in dark suits), the music and the performance are even more captivating. They open with ‘Wake Up’, one of the more immediate songs on ‘Funeral’, its insistent one chord attack giving way to an entirely unpredictable change of pace and feel. With all six members of the band singing loudly in unison, it delivers a palpable sense of drama and occasion that immediately marks this band out for larger territories than student union bars.
From the outset, this is a set that, while necessarily mostly drawing on the immediately familiar material from ‘Funeral’, remains engaging and unpredictable, full of unexpected twists and turns. These twists take various guises, from the carefully plotted merging of two of their most rhythmically insistent tracks (‘The Power Out’ and ‘Rebellion (Lies)’), to the fearless instrument swapping, sometimes mid-song. There is a vast plethora of instruments on stage, from the conventional guitars-bass-keyboards-drums set up to the more unusual varieties of percussion (glockenspiel and steel drum) and accordion. They utilise these instruments ingeniously, so that the gig is as much a visual spectacle as an astonishing display of musical invention (witness one member wearing a motorcycle helmet and then proceeding to hit it repeatedly, before moving to the side of the stage to give the PA stack a good beating). The sound has remarkable clarity for a basic bar venue, and every detail is clearly audible. Whilst ‘Funeral’ may have resulted from the deaths of several family members during writing and recording, its songs are also unfashionably romantic, and are essentially thrilling escapist dreams that translate brilliantly to live performance.
The band seem genuinely overwhelmed by the warm reception – and the banter does not extend much beyond slightly uncomfortable thank yous. No big problem, however, as they save the best for last. After their elegant, mysterious rendition of Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be The Place’ (David Byrne joined them onstage in New York earlier this year) and a final, elaborate and highly theatrical delivery of album closer ‘In The Backseat’ (where the lead vocals are delivered with dramatic precision by Regine Chassagne), the band appear to disappear from the stage, but beating drums and ghostly voices are still clearly audible. The realisation suddenly dawns that the band themselves are snaking through the crowd – a quite brilliant ending to a wonderful performance. No matter how seriously they may take themselves, or indeed how intensely worshipped they may be by the music press, this is clearly not a band that intends to neglect its audience. Whether they will be able to repeat this trick when they play the larger Astoria Theatre in June remains to be seen – but either way, that is a gig which those not lucky enough to grab a ticket for this show simply must attend.
A whole batch of album reviews to follow soon....
I don’t normally go in for hyperbole, but this really was something quite special. Besides, I got there before the NME anyway. The anticipation for The Arcade Fire’s first gig outside North America had reached feverish levels seemingly entirely by word of mouth (and the web), the gig having comfortably sold out before the NME fell into rapture over the wonderful ‘Funeral’ album. There were several important people in the audience, including Steve Lamacq and XFM’s John Kennedy and also, so I’m reliably informed, Bjork. These people are not the nation’s tastemakers for nothing – and in this case, they should be lauded for lending their support to this remarkable band.
If anything, The Arcade Fire are a more invigorating and distinctive prospect live than on record. From the word go, they are a band that manage to appear intensely serious (or maybe seriously intense?) about their work, but also thrillingly entertaining. Whilst much of this is down to how they look on stage (they all look slightly odd and are dressed in dark suits), the music and the performance are even more captivating. They open with ‘Wake Up’, one of the more immediate songs on ‘Funeral’, its insistent one chord attack giving way to an entirely unpredictable change of pace and feel. With all six members of the band singing loudly in unison, it delivers a palpable sense of drama and occasion that immediately marks this band out for larger territories than student union bars.
From the outset, this is a set that, while necessarily mostly drawing on the immediately familiar material from ‘Funeral’, remains engaging and unpredictable, full of unexpected twists and turns. These twists take various guises, from the carefully plotted merging of two of their most rhythmically insistent tracks (‘The Power Out’ and ‘Rebellion (Lies)’), to the fearless instrument swapping, sometimes mid-song. There is a vast plethora of instruments on stage, from the conventional guitars-bass-keyboards-drums set up to the more unusual varieties of percussion (glockenspiel and steel drum) and accordion. They utilise these instruments ingeniously, so that the gig is as much a visual spectacle as an astonishing display of musical invention (witness one member wearing a motorcycle helmet and then proceeding to hit it repeatedly, before moving to the side of the stage to give the PA stack a good beating). The sound has remarkable clarity for a basic bar venue, and every detail is clearly audible. Whilst ‘Funeral’ may have resulted from the deaths of several family members during writing and recording, its songs are also unfashionably romantic, and are essentially thrilling escapist dreams that translate brilliantly to live performance.
The band seem genuinely overwhelmed by the warm reception – and the banter does not extend much beyond slightly uncomfortable thank yous. No big problem, however, as they save the best for last. After their elegant, mysterious rendition of Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be The Place’ (David Byrne joined them onstage in New York earlier this year) and a final, elaborate and highly theatrical delivery of album closer ‘In The Backseat’ (where the lead vocals are delivered with dramatic precision by Regine Chassagne), the band appear to disappear from the stage, but beating drums and ghostly voices are still clearly audible. The realisation suddenly dawns that the band themselves are snaking through the crowd – a quite brilliant ending to a wonderful performance. No matter how seriously they may take themselves, or indeed how intensely worshipped they may be by the music press, this is clearly not a band that intends to neglect its audience. Whether they will be able to repeat this trick when they play the larger Astoria Theatre in June remains to be seen – but either way, that is a gig which those not lucky enough to grab a ticket for this show simply must attend.
A whole batch of album reviews to follow soon....
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