Time to grow up: Black Kids@ the Junction 28/10/08

Before anything else, apologies go to Ladyhawke. Due to other commitments, I ended up stumbling into the gig as Black Kids opened their set, and missed the entire support set. I gathered though from the general murmur of the crowd, that Ladyhawke were pretty good. Possibly better than Black Kids.

Not that Black Kids were especially bad, but just that in spite of all their polish and sheen on record, Black Kids are decidedly rough around the edges live, and not in a good way. The energy was there, right from early highlight Hit The Heartbreaks, but the execution was a little lacking. The biggest culprit was Reggie Youngblood, his tone-deaf yelping at times painful, and even threatening to derail I've Underestimated My Charm before its inspired coda came to the rescue.

The real issue though, is that a band which initially showed so much potential seem to already have hit a wall. Towards the end of last year, the band released the quite fabulous (not to mention free) 4-song EP The Wizard Of Ahhhs, which sounded like the Cure at their happy-clappiest mixed with boy-girl vocals and doo-wop melodies. One successful album later and there's no sense that the band have moved on: tellingly, all four songs were included on Partie Traumatic, as though the band were admitting they were playing their strongest hand right from the off. Over four songs, the formula works a treat, but over the course of an album, or indeed a live set, their glitzy, technicolour indie-pop runs pretty thin pretty quickly. They introduce one song as a ballad, but after about 8 bars, the song reverts to type, pinching the plinky-plonk keyboard from the Cure's Close To Me whilst it's at it. A new song and (supposedly) a Magnetic Fields cover whizz by without making any lasting impression.

The set wasn't without its highpoints: even a lowly one-song encore was sweetened considerably by the bitter-sweet drama of Hurricane Jane, and was probably the best performance of the night, and what the band deliver remains a cut above the exasperatingly dull and generic pap which seems to spawn from our shores. The crowd certainly got into parts of the set, with crowd-surfing aplenty from very early on, but when the band left the stage after Hurricane Jane, there was a general feeling of disillusionment. The band need to find more dimensions, and quickly, if they want to avoid being (an admittedly very colourful) flash in the pan.

I'll See You On The Dark Side Of The Moon

Cambridge will perhaps never be thought as being one of the great musical hubs like, say, Liverpool, London or Manchester, but it did spark one of the most striking and enduring unions between music and art to be found anywhere in the world. The artwork of Storm Thorgerson has become synonymous with the albums of Pink Floyd. Starting with 1968’s A Saucerful Of Secrets, Thorgerson has subsequently provided the artwork to pretty much every Pink Floyd release, creating some of the most iconic album covers of all time.

As part of The City Wakes, a week of events in homage to the life of Syd Barrett, Cambridge is holding an exhibition of Thorgerson’s Floyd-related artwork, entitled Mind Over Matter. Go see it on the second floor of the Grand Arcade shopping centre. Be inspired.

More on The City Wakes project, which is running from October 22nd until November 1st, can be found here, whilst Thorgerson’s work can be viewed here.

Something Old, Something New, Something To Look Forward To: October

October’s trio of recommendations:

Something Old: Built To Spill - Perfect From Now On (1997)

How Built To Spill aren’t more of a big deal is a mystery to me. Fairly popular in the U.S. but something of an anomaly on these shores, Doug Martsch and his pals have been crafting intricate and muscular, yet melodic and uplifting (Martsch uses the word “sun” more than any lyricist since Brian Wilson) guitar music for 15 years now. The high watermark is ‘97’s Perfect From Now On, a sprawling 8-song 54-minute epic, whose impeccable craft and attention to detail is second to none. Martsch is a true guitar hero and knows how his effects pedals to their fullest, but it’s his ability to arrange so many guitar parts so expertly and create mighty walls of guitar sound that make him so unique. The deployment of mellontrons and cellos are significant, lifting the climax of Made Up Dreams to impossible levels of loveliness, and giving album centrepiece Velvet Waltz real gravitas even before it moves into it’s phenomenal coda of layered guitar noise and crashing drums. Add to that Martsch’s endearing vocals and starry eyed lyrics contemplating the afterlife (Randy Describes Eternity) and, of course, the sun (Kicked It In The Sun), and you have one of the finest guitar albums of the 90’s. See it played in its entirety at the London Koko on November 4^th: I bought my ticket almost 6 months ago!

If you like this, try: Modest Mouse – The Moon & Antarctica (2000), The Halo Benders – The Rebel’s Not In (1998)

Something New: TV On The Radio – Dear Science

As wonderful as TV On The Radio’s last album, 2006’s Return To Cookie Mountain was, it was a pretty challenging listen that was never going to float everyone’s boat. Dear Science then, is the best response the avante-garde New Yorkers could have possibly made, an album that manages to be both their most ambitious and accessible to date. As pleasingly unclassifiable as ever, the hybrid of angular guitars, buzzsaw synths, looped effects, tribal drumming mixed with clattering drum machines, and the unique soulful vocal combination of Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone all remain in place but Dear Science adds even more layers to the TVOTR sound, with horns and plucked strings in clear evidence: just check out rousing first single Golden Age. That none of the songs collapse under their own weight is thanks to the production work of the band’s own David Sitek, who makes this a less harsh sounding album than previous works, and yet crisper sounding at the same time. There’s a looser, funkier approach to many of the songs here, most notably on Red Dress and the Prince-like Crying. Then there’s the grace of the ballad Family Tree, which could so easily have been a botch-job, but is handled with due care and attention. Lyrically too, this is less opaque than on previous outings. There’s the feeling of a state-of-the-nation address when Adebimpe raps the opening lines “he's a what?/he’s a what?/he’s a newspaper man/And he gets his best ideas from a newspaper stand”. It’s often an angry album, perversely put alongside the most uplifting music they’ve made. Not only is Dear Science one of the very finest releases of the year, but it might, just might, replicate Arcade Fire’s Funeral to become an instant classic.

If you like this, try: Talking Heads - Remain In Light (1980)

Something To Look Forward To: Deerhunter - Microcastle

If you’ve kept a close eye on internet music ‘zines such as Pitchfork, you will probably be all too familiar with the skeletal figure of Brandon Cox. Revered by some, reviled by others, the man behind Deerhunter and Atlas Sound knows how to make a name for himself, whether it’s slagging somebody off, revoking said slagging, or, perhaps more endearingly, posting music on a near-daily basis on his blog. After the intermittently great first Atlas Sound album Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel, my interest has shifted back to Deerhunter and their forthcoming follow-up to last year’s excellent LP Cryptograms and subsequent EP Flourescent Grey. Those two releases saw the band seemingly develop as they went along: playing them back-to-back saw the band seamlessy move from kraut-rock to ambient psychadelia to dreamy guitar pop. The first, rather tasty single, the loosely Pavement-esque Agoraphobia seems to maintain that momentum, and makes Microcastle’s release at the end of this month all the more highly anticipated.

If you like their earlier work, try: Liars – Liars (2007), {{{SUNSET}}} – Bright Blue Dream (2008)