The Antlers – Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London – 26 April 2012

Written for The Music Fix.

Pete Silberman on stage in 2010. Photo by Kevin N. Murphy

It would abandon all gig review etiquette to focus too much on the resemblance between a band’s output and that of its slightly better known contemporaries, but it’s hard to miss how neatly The Antlers sit within the recent indie landscape. Their clearly defined soundworld shares territory with the night-time atmospherics of The xx and the raw orchestration of Sigur Rós. On top of that, their past year corresponded to Bon Iver’s: it saw them follow up an intimate and personal debut album with a more expansive follow-up. On the Empire stage, their performance established them as a band with the potential to make a greater impact.

Having arrived, backlit, to a stage bedecked with bunches of white flowers, their opening songs ‘No Widows’ and ‘Atrophy’ emerged out of tonal guitar ambience, a style which developed into some noisy yet harmonious periods later in the set. It’s not only their instrumental textures that call Sigur Rós to mind. Head Antler Pete Silberman’s pure, often falsetto and always in tune singing exhibited both surprising power and perfect restraint, whether alone or alongside keyboardist Darby Cicci’s equally precise vocals. Filling the whole room, Silberman’s impassioned cries at the start of ‘Rolled Together’ somehow evoked both whale song and the most beautiful high tones of Jeff Buckley’s register.

The hollowness of their death-riddled debut, 2009’s Hospice, still loomed large over proceedings – when gaps appeared in the wall of sound, more often than not they revealed a disconcerting starkness of arrangement. During the tense ‘Parentheses’, the vocals almost became whispers atop a driving rhythmic base, whilst the chorus’ bursts of aggressive clean guitar provided welcome relief from the more pristine parts of the evening.

At less cohesive moments, the thinness of texture was unsatisfying, the rest of the band not quite matching up to the singularity of individual elements (chiefly Silberman’s voice). These occasions were rare, though, and the set confirmed that whilst The Antlers lack a character as complete or unique as some of their peers, some elements of their music bring a magic of their own to the stage.

Allo Darlin’ – Heaven, London – 19 April 2012

Written for the Music Fix.

Allo Darlin’ is a band without airs and graces, from the simple humanity of their lyrics to the twee conventionality of their arrangements. What’s surprisingly refreshing about them is that despite the immediate familiarity of their output, the quartet, equal parts Australian and Kentish, produces music which pretty consistently avoids cliché. On stage at Heaven, it was difficult not to focus on the Aussie half, a pair of characters whose performances channelled two distinctive aspects of their work respectively.

Ukulele-toting Elizabeth Morris’s singing was pristine throughout; the wistful air she brought to the reverb-heavy arrangement of ‘Europe’ evoked the balladry of Camera Obscura. There wasn’t a hint of melancholy on the most memorable of the new songs, although a certain feeling of longing remained: shot through with hopeful sentiment, her barely accompanied, hushed delivery of ‘Some People Say’ brought a genuine sense of intimacy to a quickly silenced room.

The band’s easy affinity with the crowd was equally facilitated by Bill Botting, whose irrepressibly physical performance offset the more reflective moments with sheer enthusiasm, subverting the stereotype of the bassist as a nigh-on-imperceptible character who hugs the shadowy regions of the stage. From the beginning of ‘Neil Armstrong’, which also opens their new album, he ignored how young the night was, pogoing with abandon at Morris’ right hand. His voice made a secure impression too, both as a falsetto backing on recent single ‘Darren’ and as the luxurious baritone lead vocal of ‘Dreaming’.

In a setlist which drew more from forthcoming second album Europe than any other source, it was inevitable that familiar older songs would provide the highlights. ‘If Loneliness Was Art’ brought sixties girl pop to mind with its recognisable riff, tambourine and “sha-la-la”s, before the band’s two central facets – of pensiveness and partying – were most completely intertwined on lively ‘Silver Dollars’.

Working through albums

Taken before a long journey, June '07

At some point during the Easter holidays of my first year at university, I started to acquire the kind of amount of music only a much richer person could afford to get their hands on via the traditional channels. In next to no time my catalogue of albums and other recordings to “work through” expanded, along with a thirst to broaden my musical experience. The only way I’d have a hope of keeping up with such a rate of expansion seemed to be to take a systematic approach, and I quickly settled on a basic pattern for listening.

The following term, I started each week by picking what seemed like a diverse set of up to 10 releases, and made sure I listened to each of them at least six times during the week. Six looks like an arbitrary number, but that amount of exposure tended to be sufficient to develop an appropriate appreciation of most recordings: it meant that I would avoid too-hasty rejections of music in unfamiliar or uncomfortable styles (say, punk, metal, hip-hop, avant-garde classical music and music from distant cultures), and – the most rewarding part of the process – bring about a new awareness of what fans of different styles of music find to love in their preferred styles. During the term, this amounted to a lot of time listening to music and not a lot of time reading set texts. It was superficially fortunate that the two modules I took that term were primarily assessed by examination, and therefore not particularly difficult to do well in.

There was so much pleasure to be derived from playing new music that way, it naturally happened that I went on listening according to a similar framework. As this practice has continued, I have kept a record – Music diary.doc – a list of albums, EPs, singles and recordings of classical works, ordered according to the date I first listened to them (8 pt font, 1 album per line, since you ask; and the font itself changes with my tastes). The list is 5 years old today, and keeps growing.

In effect, an album is archived after its sixth listen, with numerous exceptions. The most extreme cases are those I loved most and still listen to (e.g. Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, first listen c. 26 Mar 2009, which instigated my slow-burning, as-yet-unconsummated love affair with the man) and those I detested and promptly deleted (e.g. Klaxons, Myths of the Near Future, first listen c. 28 Jan 2008, not long before its unfathomable Mercury Prize win, a little longer before the band’s subsequent, inevitable slide into obscurity).

As a way of getting to know music, this method can sound dryly formulaic, but, as with most compulsions (not that this is quite a compulsion), the process itself remains largely in the background while listening. The focus is on the music, as well as, afterwards, on the periods of time it sometimes becomes associated with.

…

Footnote: Contrary to what might be a popular opinion, there’s no perceptible reason to suppose that this way of doing things has contributed to the music industry’s woes. The frequency of both my gig attendance and album purchases has risen significantly since it began, and the knowledge derived from all the hours spent listening partially prompted the piles of reviews and interviews I’ve since had published for no money.

…

Week 1: 23.04.07
Neil Young: After the Gold Rush [1970]
Michael Jackson: Off the Wall [1979]
Talking Heads: Speaking in Tongues [1983]
Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works ‘85-’92 [1992]
J.S. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, BWV 1001-1006 [Lucy van Dael, 1996]
Elbow: The Noisebox EP [1998]
Midlake: The Trials of Van Occupanther [2006]
Patrick Wolf: The Magic Position [2007]
Grinderman: Grinderman [2007]
Björk: Volta [2007]

Now: 23.04.12
Scott Walker: Scott 3 [1969]
Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here [1975]
Zoltán Kodály: Missa Brevis [Choir of King’s College, Cambridge; Stephen Cleobury, 1988]
Sarah Vaughan: The Essential Sarah Vaughan [1990]
John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano [Yuji Takahashi, 1997]
Devendra Banhart: Black Babies EP [2003]
Deerhoof & Of Montreal: Split 7″ [2012]
Jack White: Blunderbuss [2012]
Rufus Wainwright: Out of the Game [2012]
St. Vincent: Krokodil [2012]

Shearwater – Animal Joy

Written for The Music Fix.

Billed, as if setting out to raise critical eyebrows, as their “thrilling artistic rebirth”, Shearwater’s Sub Pop debut (their eighth on all labels since emerging sideways out of Okkervil River) breaks from the insular and atmospheric stylings of their most recent efforts. On an album which uses most of the same forces as previous ones, the core features aren’t new – typically melodic songs still centre on Jonathan Meiburg’s powerful tenor – but are used to represent a slight shift of focus towards more direct songs whose sweeping pastoral arrangements build up gradually.

Opener ‘Animal Life’ is a straightforward archetype. Its skeletal guitar opening is fleshed out by a textural widening of strings and measured percussion parts, which take the song through steady steps towards euphoria. Frequently, the arrangements admit of genuine nuance, subtly incorporating unimposing celeste, woodwind and harp motifs around a core of guitars and keyboards.

The immediacy which Meiburg and co. have introduced is likely to catch the ears of a broader audience, particularly those casual listeners left cool by their relatively elusive early work. Whilst their transitional album isn’t all that likely to leave behind a more transcendent joy, these tunes have the potential to be hummed for weeks afterwards.

6/10

Field Music with Stealing Sheep – KCLSU, London – 24 February 2012

Written for The Music Fix.

With reverb guitar and close three-part female vocals, Stealing Sheep’s support slot at King’s College Union neatly evoked the psychedelic age. The most straightforward of their songs, which were often based on simple repeated strings of notes, relied for structural development on variations in Lucy Mercer’s drum patterns. Emily Lansley’s spaced out guitar came to the forefront for the set’s highlight: a menacing version of ‘Paper Moon’. With only synths to provide any bass, the apparently hypnotic aims of their songs would sometimes have been more completely accomplished by the addition of a deeper element to the mix.

Field Music have no such hypnotic intent. Mackem brothers Peter and David Brewis tend to employ purposefully thin textures, avoiding psychedelia in favour of succinct, deconstructionist guitar pop in the spirit of Spoon and Deerhoof. There was nothing cold or excessively intellectual about their performance, though: despite the shallow textures at the heart of many of their songs, their jovial demeanours personalised the mood and touring bassist Andrew Lowther’s riffs introduced richness and depth to their compositions.

The skeletal forces they employ – spindly guitars and tight drums – mean that, by necessity, Field Music offer a particularly rhythmic experience. Immediately, with opener ‘Start the Day Right’, their irregular time signatures and the frequent left-turns of their riffs compounded that fact, before ‘A New Town’ fizzed along with the momentum of repeated semiquaver rhythms in drums and guitars.

The nuances of their arrangements require a unified ensemble, which the band provided with an almost classical precision; it was as if each guitar line was a study. The accuracy of the performance fully realised the spirit of each song, whilst the unity of the group added extra special touches to the show: the a cappella vocal miniature ‘How Many More Times?’ saw the four voices moving effortlessly through block chords, whilst – when a verse of ‘Something Familiar’ was held back for some practical reason – the band seamlessly took off again as a single unit.

It’s the little elements like these that can turn a good gig into a great one.

***

The sound here is a bit distant, but quite precise, including ‘How Many More Times?’, mentioned above:

Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It

Written for The Music Fix.

Seattle’s Mike Hadreas made his debut as Perfume Genius in 2010, on a lauded album – Learning – which seemed to function primarily as a channel for his earlier life’s despair. This follow-up mostly continues in the same stratum; the twelve confessional songs are leanly structured around demure guitar and piano parts. Its alphanumeric title might have implied some unexpected shift towards the stylings of Prince, but of the Purple One’s back catalogue, only ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ combines such quietly earnest composition with a text-speak title.

So many ostensibly troubled singer-songwriters produce music which slides lazily into over-indulgent schmaltz or affected emo, but Put Your Back N 2 It sidesteps both traps. To its credit, Hadreas’ lo-fi recordings are understated and unpretentious, the best of them evoking the refined textures of Peter Broderick’s folksongs. This time around, the personal lyrics still refer to suicide and drug abuse, but there are glimmers of hope amid the misery – the title track is shot through with the optimism of a relationship’s early stages. Even when his outlook tilts upwards, though, the arrangements have a tendency to feel oddly insubstantial. It’s as if Hadreas’ music can’t quite escape the mental exhaustion which has overwhelmed him in private. It’s a shame, because the result is an a bum slighter and less distinctive than his story might warrant.

6/10

tUnE-yArDs – Shepherd’s Bush Empire – 15 February 2012

I’ve been an appalling blogger, which is to say that I haven’t updated in a couple of months. Here’s the first of a few recent review articles. Like most [EDIT: all] of them, it was written for The Music Fix.

tUnE-yArDs live. Photo by Ludovic Etienne.

Last year’s album, w h o k i l l, brought with it the explosive noise of Merrill Garbus finding her feet as one of the singular and powerful forces of leftfield indie music. With well-developed looping techniques and a devastating voice, the brash left turns peppering her compositions marked an audacious step forward from her debut as tUnE-yArDs.

As if to test her potential impact and the crowd’s receptivity, her first action at the Empire was to sing a single sustained note, which, in its unforeseen simplicity, silenced the noisy crowd at once. It was a wise opening gambit, whose success was demonstrated by the immediate crowd response. The playful, tantalising ebb and flow of the few improvised a cappella phrases which followed that note turned silence to appreciative laughter. Only a few looping seconds of opener ‘Party Can’ later, laughter was replaced by yelling, as each of Garbus’ calls of “do you want to live?” prompted a euphoric “yeah” from most of the standing audience.

The rapid union of artist and audience – and with it the sense that she was preaching to the converted – seemed to increase the frenetic confidence of the show. In a free-spirited but thoroughly musical performance, her precise rhythmic loops contributed to the overriding sense of organised chaos; they were a steadying influence beneath moments of atonal thrash ukulele on ‘Es-so’, and the dense, psychedelic textures adorning the end of ‘Killa’. Despite her feral exclamations and face paint, the temptation to call her pretentious never surfaced – the natural warmth of the set’s eccentricity excused it.

Garbus was augmented by regular bass player Nate Brenner and a pair of dynamic saxophonists, neither of whom was averse to pogoing around the stage while playing, trading a sax for some drumsticks or leaping between styles, from volatile free jazz to precise two part counterpoint. When Brenner interjected with a few lines of lead vocal in the closing ‘My Country’, his own element of surprise – they were the first non-Garbus vocals of the evening – provoked euphoria.

The backing band’s antics were always secondary to the togetherness of the ensemble, which cut an extraordinarily close-knit figure. It was a unity most obvious during the well-rehearsed breakdown of ‘Gangsta’, where the instrumental beats, though irregular and far between, were consistently fired out in perfect time. The one time a complex construction came crashing down was on b-side ‘Youth’, where Garbus shrugged off an early hiccup with an assured recovery and a smile.

What was most thrilling here was that her creativity seemed unbounded. The one new song was built around the night’s most rhythmically irregular loop, with a sliding a cappella midsection which implied a Björkish fascination with testing the limits of the human voice. Garbus noted that this might have been her biggest headline show yet, and with exciting mutations like these coming to the fore, her next steps may well deserve to expand the cult.

***

This video was recorded a couple of nights earlier, but it’s one of the best from the tour.