The child in a grown man's beard

Sunset Rubdown for me is a freezing winter's morning, walking from Docklands to Trinity. It's about 8.40, I've missed the train I should've been on, and taken a gamble on going to Docklands. By the time I get to college I'm late for my class, I can't find it anyway, and I have nothing else until 3 or 4. I walk up Grafton St. and have a muffin in Stephen's Green near the James Joyce statue. The soundtrack to the whole thing is Random Spirit Lover.

It's hard for gigs to compete with that sort of subjective, impressionistic association. Random Spirit Lover will always remind me of that day, even though it's not particularly notable. Any live show is going to have to work really hard to replace it.

Spencer is a big ball of some weird energy in person. He sweats ridiculously. Sometimes, when the music is getting to a climax, he stands up with one leg on the stool behind him while he bangs out the keyboard line and yelps. He's not the best communicator between songs, but there's no point in real-life talk when you can say what you need to say through animal metaphors and overwhelming wordy brilliance in-song.

I was surprised that some people weren't crazily impressed by this gig. To me, every song was like a set-closer. The Shut Up I Am Dreaming Stadiums and Shrines was the second song they played. It could've been an encore. The Taming Of The Hands That Came Back To Life was a good example of a song that is great on the album, but really, fully comes alive when that weird Spencer Krug energy is imbued live.

The rest of the band are on the same frequency too. Camilla Wynn Ingr's keyboards and vocals are about 5% of what makes Sunset Rubdown 400 times better than Wolf Parade.

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OH SHIT!

Fuck, I said it. Fuck my 2005/6 self. Sunset Rubdown is a completely different level of band. They not only do what they do better, they just work on a different level altogether. The Mending Of The Gown is the best song of 2007 and possibly of the decade so far, despite what I said (or neglected to say) in December, and they ended the set with it. Then, solemn-faced, The Angry Threats Of Little Lord came out for the encore.

Why it wasn't the perfect gig
One or two songs were not very good.
Support band Speck Mountain said Dublin was in the UK.
Drunken Lout, shut up.

Apart from that, I can't fault it.

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A genie made me out of the earth's skin

Gig's off. Sitting underground in the library in college on a beautiful summer's day because there were no free seats anywhere else, I got four texts to tell me. Something to do with a missed ferry. Disaster.

Eight hours later, I'm standing outside Whelans in a queue that goes around the corner, eating free chips (thank you Foggy Notions) and getting jittery for a gig that seemed semi-destined to go down in the great tradition of Dublin gig folklore. It couldn't be anything but brilliant. That was just the energy around the place.

Seeing Animal Collective in Whelans is the kind of thing that can only happen by chance. They're way too big under normal circumstances. Oxegen 2006 was good, but it was Oxegen. Tripod was only alright, the sound was dodgy and the singer couldn't sing.

This time, Avey could sing. It absolutely made all the difference. It unlocks the (in my opinion) best of their back catalogue, though new stuff is Panda-heavy. But it also means that the two-vocal attack kicks in, like it should. And that's central. It happens in new stuff like Walking Around With You and in old stuff everywhere. Avey sings, and Panda chimes in, or Panda sings and Avey murmurs under it. The layering is a big part of the charm.

Adrenaline had me trying to jump around a bit like a spa at the start, but when I stopped fucking around, it really did start being profound. It's not a rock show, and it's taking me a while to beat that mindset, but I'm getting there. Peacebone appeared, and it was good, but the extended Fireworks-Essplode-Fireworks-Essplode-Slowed Down Fireworks spree was one of the greatest things I have seen, full stop.

Being close enough to actually pull out plugs if you wanted to makes the experience so much more personal. You feel in the mix. It swirls around, you can see where each sound is coming from and feel the chemistry of the whole experience. No-one else could've almost completely ignored their two best albums and still played the best gig New Whelans has seen. The new stuff, particularly Song For Ariel and the new new one, is up there with the best stuff they've got.

So at 1.45, I ran for the last Nitelink to get home in time to get up for an exam. But as my friend Coady kept reminding me when I moaned to everyone I saw about it, I would have regretted it more than anything in my life if I hadn't gone.

Picture stolen from Bobby, who also gets credit for sending the text that has already been subsumed into Temple-Bar-to-South-Circular lore: EVERYBODY TO WHELANS, I'M NOT BULLSHITTING.

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Death-Week Review Preview

Here are my two schedules for this week:

Gigs:

• Monday, Animal Collective
• Tuesday, Sunset Rubdown
• Wednesday, Champion's League Final
• Thursday, Xiu Xiu

Exams:

• Monday 9.30am, History
• Tuesday 9.30am, English (in the fucking RDS! [I live in Blanchardstown] What the fuck!)
• Wednesday 2.00pm, English (same)
• Thursday, no exam
• Friday 9.30am, English
• Saturday 9.30am, History

It is a week of little free time, where the men are the separated from the boys. The men are the ones who suck it up and sell their tickets on so they do well in their exams. The boys (i.e. me) are the ones who have to run for the 2 o'clock Nitelink to be in bed for 3am to get up at 7.30am to do a exam in leafy Ballsbridge.

Animal Collective and Sunset Rubdown were great. Manchester United and Xiu Xiu have a lot to live up to. Proper walkthroughs when I don't have A MILLION FUCKING EXAMS! See you then.

No More Pocket Combs

Singing along to Why? is like reading along to a short story. Nobody told that to pockets of devout fans in Andrew's Lane last night though. While it's a little awkward to see people pumping fists and shouting "I'LL SUCK THE MARROW OUT AND RAPE YOUR HOLLOW BONES YONI!" in any situation, never mind at a gig, the rock show contingent made things a little exciting if nothign else. It took Yoni about six songs to break out of his ultra-serious face, but once he acknowledged the several hundred people working themselves into a frenzy in front of him, the whole thing took on a sort of a personal colour.

Apart from the energy of the room, the gig itself was surprisingly excellent. I was expecting something much more lo-fi and... white-boy hip hop. It wasn't like that at all, for better or for worse. They stuck mostly to Alopecia and played all the prominent songs from it. A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under was particularly impressive for Josiah's ability to play breakneck vibraphone and drums at the same time. The Vowels allowed a bit of bobbing and was probably a highlight, though I have to say that they're such a tight live band that the best songs on the night were just the best songs from the albums.

Which would mean Gemini obviously, being the aural proof that MOR can be good if it has great lyrics. Catching unconnected sentences of those great lyrics was the best part about seeing Why?. Even though the hair-cutted masses did their best to half-rap along, Why? is in essence the stream of consciousness of one guy from Cincinnati. It's immune to outside circumstances, because it's so self-absorbed. It's like a diary. That's why he's so good.

They promised to come back soon, like everyone does. I'll practice my words and my fist-pumping in the interim. I'll definitely be there though, because this was deadly.

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Lights Are Blinding My Eyes

Last night I saw someone I've been listening to since the year I did my Junior Cert for the first time. The Streets blew up too early for me I think. There was never a chance of me shelling out for tickets to a big outdoor gig, really, so I was so resigned to never seeing Mike Skinner in the flesh that it just never really entered my mind.

Then Budweiser stepped in. Say what you will about corporate sponsorships, any nice-ish beer that's willing to subsidise a gig in a tent on a fake island in a dock in April is well worthy of my thanks. I also enjoyed the six tubes of orange jelly beans Nokia gave me, so help me God.

I was surprised by how much fun it was, actually. Mike Skinner, complete with diamond-encrusted in-ear monitor, was exactly as charming as he seems, even when he was calling the crowd a pack of wankers. I pogoed at a gig for the first time since Radiohead in Marlay Park, and I wasn't madly put off by having two or three strangers on my lap at various points when Mike decided everyone had to hunker down.

Like LCD Soundsystem, The Streets manage to transpose non-rock music to a rock-show environment pretty well. The set was weighted towards older songs, from Original Pirate Material or A Grand Don't Come For Free. The opener, Turn The Page, as well as Let's Push Things Forward and Could Well Be In got me on a nostalgic Junior Cert-studying kick, and obviously Fit But You Know It was deadly. Everything was good actually, even Let It Be-sampling Never Went To Church which is a terrible song under normal circumstances. I had a lot of fun, fuck credibility.

Credit to my lovely girlfriend Katharine for the photograph.

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Jiminy Jillikers!

On Thursday, I went to see Holy Fuck in Whelans. I've been an unlikely fan of theirs ever since Analogue dropped their LP into my bag for review purposes in October some time. Thing is, I'm a little non-plussed with the current trend for beeps, bleeps and beats. So I reckon if I wasn't made to listen to it, I never would have. It was lucky I did. It landed in the top 20 of my overblown three-month attempt at an end of year list for 2007, and I reckon in retrospect it could have been higher. There's something really frantic and tense about them that I really like. So I went along, as I said.

I don't know whether it was the impending economic recession weighing on people's minds, or the fact that forty-year-olds somehow infiltrated the front row, but the buzz was not as great as could have been hoped. Nonetheless, they came out with two wooden boards decked with toy keyboards, effects pedals, melodicas, mini-microphones, curious red buttons which may have been kill switches and an even more curious device along the lines of an enigma-machine which seemed to be a tape loop instrument of some description. They ran through most if not all of their LP, and some interesting new songs too.

Lovely Allen was the best song on the night, probably because it is their best song full stop. Everything else was good enough too. There was something a touch lacking though. If you go to see Holy Fuck, you want it loud and dirty. Not Holy F*ck, as the posters compromisingly rendered it, but the full-blown, psychotic, scuzzy, thumpy, breakneck, dirt-encrusted semi-electronica band. There was a sense that some of their noise-play was just washing over the audience rather than properly getting in under their nails. I can't think of a good metaphor, but there was something they forgot to bring.

No complaints here, for €13.50, but the energy their music carries never quite transferred to the room, to the chagrin of myself, my friend Kearnsey, Nialler9 and Aoife Mc and Ian. Could have been worse, but also could have been better.

Credit to Cáit for the photo, she has more too.

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Du Ug Meg

Last night, as a result of Sunday lethargy and a vague inclination, I rolled up to Whelans for Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. It's only the third gig I've been to in 2007, and the first that I'm blogging about (So Cow in Galway went on the Analogue blog, and I just wasn't arsed doing Grand Pocket Orchestra). Are you as excited as I am?


Storkboy Choons - Do The Octopus

The first support was Storkboy Choons, a Kells man with the uncanny ability to look exactly like Asleep On The Compost Heap. It's fairly ambient stuff, and a weird thing to have on early in the night at an indie gig, but it makes sense that Storkboy would be pitching to that crowd rather than the clubbing crowd. It was actually really enjoyable, sort of cathartic. Things went in unusual directions and then sort of reeled in. The volume also seemed to increase steadily for the whole set. The general buzz was probably assisted by the fact that every Kells citizen of child-bearing age seemed to be there to support.

There are negative sides to playing such ambient stuff live obviously - not having any gaps in the whole set meant that concentration tended to wander, even though it totally made sense from a musical point of view. Also, a seated audience from the broad rock tradition (as opposed to the dance tradition) is going to be staring at the two guys sitting at their laptops tweaking Ableton, and it's not the most visually stimulating experience. But it was the first Storkboy Choons gig. Between the fact that the music was actually quite decent, and the way that the dynamics of the set worked with tunes working into each other in ebbs and swells, there were the guts of a really good act. Definitely interesting enough to keep watching in the future.


Ugly Megan - Bobby Orlandisco (live, but not from last night and without the sampled loops and things)

Second on was Ugly Megan. I actually (cryptically) named this entry after Ugly Megan and used a picture of them instead of Owen Ashworth because of how much I liked them. They are from Waterford. And they are the lo-est of fi. The mouldiest of peaches, if you will. The Moldy Peaches is the best gateway into describing them, I'd say. It's a boy and a girl, and they fluctuate from hyper-twee music with intentionally naive lyrics to hyper-twee music with knowingly referential lyrics. Their voices even sound a little bit like Kimya and Adam's. But it's not a wholesale thing.

The mechanics of how they make music are pretty interesting. More than one song started with the gentleman (Orlando, according to the title of one of their songs) pounding his fist off the soundboard of his acoustic guitar for a bass-drum and clacking muted strings for a snare. And then looping it. A salutably lo-fi way of laying down a sick beat, if you ask me. The lady (Kathi according to the title of the above song) loops on what could have either been a xylophone or a keyboard on xylophone setting or maybe both. They both sing, in a really unpretentious and effortless way. They have quite catchy songs. Orlando is also so awkward on-stage that he seems to find it incredibly difficult to do anything. But that actually comes off as endearing in context. They exchange looks and nods when they change bits. They just generally defrost my frosty blogger cynicism. I liked them a lot.


Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Bobby Malone Moves Home (a home video by someone about their small town hometown)

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone came on at about 9.50. I have listened to Etiquette quite a lot since it came out, on last-bus trips home alone and in my room depressedly studying. But I think that's probably the optimum place to listen to Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, unfortunately. Owen Ashworth is a bearish man, and if I were to summarise his live show in one sentence it would be thus: "A man played tracks and mumbled his songs into a microphone, then got his friend to sing for a while, then mumbled Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Parenthetical Girls into a microphone".

That seems a little unfair, because it is. He's good enough to listen to. But I think if I didn't already know the songs I would've had trouble following what he was saying, and the whole point of Casiotone is (ironically not the Casiotone backing but) the short-storyesque lyrics. He played all the hits, and for me the cover of Love Connection was probably the highlight. New Year's Kiss and Bobby Malone Moves Home were both also quite good. Holly Hobby was sung as Bobby Hobby, weirdly. Overall, something was just lacking for me though. Unfortunately.

I'd probably plus the gig on CFTPA's merits anyway, but Ugly Megan and Storkboy secure it. Sorry for the incoherence. I have no excuse, really.

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