Catch-up: And you'd smile and say, "I like this song"

Went to London and spent a weekend in a penthouse apartment in Kensington with seven friends listening to Merriweather Post Pavillion. It's not like we didn't try to go out. We did. It just never worked. We nearly made it to a salsoul club, whatever that means. We did make it to an insane club that wasn't sure whether we were 'indie rock' enough to get in, despite the fact that the closest they came to indie rock all night inside was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' by the Stooges, a drop in the gushing river of indifferentiable electro.

I bought records on Portobello Road and in Rough Trade. I bought clothes in (predictably) American Apparel. Took black cabs, saw Westminster, went the wrong way around the Circle line to get to where I was going. But the weekend was about Animal Collective. Every gap, while we were cooking or waking up or just hanging out, was filled with Merriweather Post Pavillion.

And then the weekend passed, and it was Monday the nineteenth of January and we went to the Koko in Camden to see Animal Collective.

This guy stood in our way for a while, singing Orwellian songs in a John Lydon-on-I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of here persona. Few support acts have been worse.


Then came Avey, Panda and Geologist. The set-list was as follows:

In The Flowers
Daily Routine
Also Frightened
New Song
Slippi
Weird unrecognisable version of Winter's Love
Guys Eyes
Summertime Clothes
Lion In A Coma
Brothersport
Banshee Beat
Chores
My Girls


The rainbow strip lights were going and it was the first Animal Collective gig I've ever been to that hasn't had majority new stuff being passed down from the improvisational gods on high. It was mostly pretty cathartic.

Things that were off:

Winter's Love's only recognisable bit was ONE BAR of the drum loop from it, during a 5 minute long improvisation that was apparently supposed to BE Winter's Love

I think the bass was missing from My Girls, which robbed it of some of its finality at the end

I have a feeling they missed synching the beat in Banshee Beat, ironically, but it was still great as just an Avey strumathon.


Things that were on:

Everything. The guts of Merriweather Post Pavillion, which is probably the most perfect album I can think of, and I've been thinking for about two months.

Slippi, being off the cuff as it is, freewheeling along. Chores, starting in ultra-slowed down, lamenty Panda Bear mode, but eventually kicking in to its full-on frenetic brilliance.

Songs like Also Frightened and Lion In A Coma leaping off the page and being counted even more than they are on the album.

Brothersport, being an incomparable live experience.



Side notes:

met a man who was talking about government laws and saying "that's right yeah" every four mumbles on the tube, who seemed to know what he was talking about.

Read in 'The London Paper' (a free Tube-rag) that 'Josh Dibb and co.' were playing the Koko, Josh Dibb being Deakin who has been on hiatus since just before the release of Strawberry Jam.

It was a great gig. I'm sorry this review has no logic or structure, but it was quite a long time ago.

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Pretend it's whales keeping their voices down.

Best album of the decade so far is... what? Hissing Fauna? Kid A? Feels? Don't hold me to this in the future, but I'm going to throw out Apologies to the Queen Mary as a candidate. For an album that the band immediately regretted releasing, it's pretty near flawless. From the anthem of Krug-ist ambiguity that is You Are A Runner And I Am My Father's Son to the Americana sincerity of Boeckner's This Heart's On Fire, the album does not drop the ball once.

"You're being ridiculous", I hear you legitimately say. Okay, hold on. Musical awakening was a slow process for me. No-one is born at 13 listening to Eno. It took me until the middle of my teenage years to accept REM, and they were the first band I ever got into that used clean guitars as anything other than a build-up to distorted guitars. And even with that "revelation", it took me a long time to get beyond the Q Magazine canon.

The internet started making noise about Wolf Parade around 2004. An older friend included the six-song EP from that year on a data-DVD of music he thought I might not hate. While the likes of Clouddead or Tilly and the Wall took a few years to make an impact, Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts arrested me immediately. That song specifically. I listened to it over and over on the way to school. It became my most played song on the fledgling Audioscrobbler site. This feral man, speaking poetry over a darkened, muddy, organ-heavy backing. It all seemed to make sense.

When the album came out a few months later, I e-mailed their Yahoo address to gush. Arlen, the drummer, replied with a short note punctuated at the end with a smiley of some sort. "We are coming to play Dublin". The fact that this man, from the far side of Canada, and seeming so shrouded in mystery and genius to me at that time, could reply - it knocked me over. I ordered a fake ID. Two, actually, in case one wasn't enough (it wasn't). And I got into Whelans, first time ever in a club at the age of 17, to see the drunken gods of Wolf Parade perform. It was phenomenal.

Things are different now. I don't get as blindly impressed by music as I used to, which is a universal symptom of voracious consumption. I go to enough gigs that I have developed a dislike for large-venue shows because of the disconnect, but also because of the type of people who attend. I am, in short, a curmudgeonly and cantankerous grump. But Wolf Parade are back. And they're Vicar Street sized now, apparently. So I get myself to a Ticketmaster.

Giveamanakick support. They are not acoustic metal, they tell us. Right. Let's call them... stripped-down hardcore. They acquit themselves well, but it's just a distraction. People are talking, or shouting conversation more accurately, and much as I try to pay attention, it's tough.

Then Wolf Parade appear. Not like the men-apart that I saw in Whelans in 2005, but the Spencer Krug I saw stage-frighted and desperate for alcohol with Sunset Rubdown in Crawdaddy during exams, and the Dan Boeckner I saw, cocksure with sneaky-naggin vodka and orange in hand with Handsome Furs at Whelans. Sure, Arlen and Dante don't have any new associations for me, but the absence of Hadji Bakara, Wolf Parade's hyperliterate version of Bez, definitely helped make the experience seem slightly alien.

Until they started.

You Are A Runner. I don't want to lapse into just recapping the set-list here, even though if you're still reading you're probably not a neutral. Spencer put one knee on his stool and adjusted his mic stand (he did this every time he began to sing for the entire gig, Asperger's-style), and got to it. Maybe four songs in, he did the same again, but with the one-handed organ intro to Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts.

Spencer looked like he was about to get sick the whole time. Dan looked like he was about to fall over and have a fit. But they both look like that all the time, so it's okay.

Songs off the new album came to life. It seemed to be especially Dan's songs that got a lift from the live environment. Soldier's Grin, the opener from At Mount Zoomer, was infused with energy. Language City was forgiven its awful lyrics ("Language city is a bad ol' place.../Eyeballs float in space") and made up for them with live brio.

The band seemed delighted with the size of the room and the traditionally over-enthusiastic Irish crowd. Dan in particular grinned at the end of every song, and even the fearful and moody Spencer managed a few "you guys are sweethearts". But of course the true critic does not factor that sort of thing into the equation, especially the critic who sees Bruce Springsteen for the dull dad-rock man he is (me).

What made this gig the best since Animal Collective in secret at Whelans came after the epic set-closer Kissing The Beehive. If the longer songs off At Mount Zoomer began to lag a little, the encore was the perfect riposte. The Grey Estates was The Grey Estates, quintessentially Boeckner. But it was the final pair that blew the thing up.

Spencer Krug, whom I later drunkenly declared to be "my second favourite man" to whoever would listen, put his shoulder to the yoke. He put a knee on the stool. He adjusted the mic stand. He held down a C chord for a few seconds. I didn't recognise it. Nobody did. It didn't seem like the band recognised it either until Arlen began the individual snare hits that mark the beginning of I'll Believe In Anything. Whether on Apologies To The Queen Mary or the first Sunset Rubdown album, it's one of my favourite songs, and it took me into the moment like nothing in at least the past year. It was cathartic, ecstatic, chaotic and all other Greek words that describe unbridled brilliance.

This was followed, with what seemed like Sisyphean effort on the part of Spencer, by Fancy Claps. Guess what it was like. Okay, I'll tell you. It was cathartic, ecstatic, chaotic and brilliant. "When I die, I'm leaving you my feet/When you die, you can stand up for me." Sung, or yodelled or bellowed or howled or whatever Spencer does, with the conflicted conviction of one of the indie world's few true geniuses.

It's gigs like this that make me regret how positively I review other things, because it was on another level. It's gigs like this that remind me what it was like when I heard things for the first time, or when I would commit myself blindly to bands. When they were mine, and I didn't just listen to them but I owned them as well. I don't know why I'm reminded of this, but I am:

Feed the gaping need of my sense, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honored with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven

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In keeping with the teetering tight-rope of legitimacy that this blog tip-toes constantly, I have taken this picture from the Flickr of HouseParade without asking. I hope the fact that we seem to have been near each other at the gig, and that it was a fantastic and communal experience, will stop him/her from pressing charges. Excellent picture, HouseParade!

Lethal poison for the system

Full disclosure: before seeing Built To Spill perform it in its sprawling, magnificent entirety, I'd never head Perfect From Now On. I don't mean that I wasn't familiar enough with it, I mean I literally had never heard a note of the album, physical, digital or otherwise. How I could be so lax as to fail to prepare myself for the PFNO tour, I have no idea. But it happened.

Last time I saw Built To Spill was in McCarren Pool in Brooklyn, supported by Cat Power and Bob Mould from Hüsker Dü. The place, located in "romantic downtown Brooklyn" according to its website (it was a bit grimy), was roughly the equivalent of Marlay Park as a venue. And it was full, full of the kind of fist-pumping, soul-pouring fans that you get at Radiohead or Coldplay gigs there. The band played exactly that kind of set too, with such vastness and profundity that it seemed impossible that they'd ever have to play any lesser stage.

Two years later, Doug Martsch is literally within groping distance if I leaned, on the stage of Whelans. Whelans, the safety net for Saturday nights, the gig venue, the post-gig venue... It was almost like a culture shock, because of the magnitude of the associations I'd made for BtS in my head. Sort of profane.

Until the floating strains of Randy Described Eternity. The defiant resolution of I Would Hurt A Fly. It just snowballed, too. The band fed off the crowd, which led to the crowd feeding off the band, and the whole thing spiralled into one very loud, guitar-driven catharsis.

I suppose it might have been better if I'd been anticipating the next song like other people had, but for me it just seemed like a perfectly-measured set. I had some fun imagining that I was seeing this band for the first time, as a support act or at a festival or something. This "middle-aged farmer from Idaho" (thx Darragh, constant poet of the everyday), his middle-aged cronies playing essentially wanky guitar, with a cello in the background. The most unlikely thing ever, but it was great. Awe-inspiring at times.

Then the "encore", straight from the end of Perfect From Now On into Goin' Against Your Mind. That song is a gutfuck monster epic, and it had to be. Curfew at Whelans bumbling in to wreck things once more. It ended, and people shouted. "Carry The Zero", "Center of the Universe", "Big Dipper", etc. Not to be. Time's up, one more song.

Paper Planes.

Trippy.

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Video taken by Loreana Rushe about two places behind where I was standing at this, one of the best gigs of the year.

One Big Stormcloud In A Duffelcoat

Apologies to MC Aoife Mc for shamelessly pilfering this image, but it's the best one on the first page of Google Image search and my camera was stolen in Munich so that's where I have to go for pictures.

It came from the West, with a "strange American accent that I really didn't see coming". So Cow has been to Dublin before, at Dame Lane for Loreana, in Anseo for Hefty Horse and at somewhere else for some Korean thing during Electric Picnic. But So Cow has never been this deadly, at least while I was there.

Seriously, when did this happen? So Cow has made two excellent albums in These Truly Are End Times and I'm Siding With My Captors, and played fairly good live shows. But the live shows have always been approximations of the recorded material to some extent, because they've been to backing tracks or with under-rehearsed bands. This time, with a drummer capable of bombing a Middle-Eastern city with only his sticks and two tins of biscuits, and a bassist with a beard, So Cow turned into some kind of breakneck proto-punk garage trio. It doesn't sound like an effort to be like what's in Brian's head or on his CDs any more. It sounds outside that, better.

It was breakneck. It was slightly out of tune at points. Songs like Moon Geun Young and Casablanca from the first album got garaged up and spat out so they'd sit with the stuff from the second album. And the second album stuff, like Greetings and Normalcy, got a serious shot in the arm, infused with all kinds of aggression and energy. Most solos were substituted with simple rocking out. Some chunks were added, like the metal intro, or various outro messes. The whole thing, being "SO COW 2008! PLAYING THE HITS!" went by way too quickly and left me feeling like I'd been hit by a fish or something equally unexpected.

The best part for me, though, was To Do List. Like an oasis in a storm of ultra-tight garage mess, original So Cow and new So Cow drummer harmonised over a strummed ditty for a minute of so. Until... breaking into full band awesomeness and carrying the thing to a complete new level. One of those "Woah!" moments. Gig of the weekend this time, without a doubt.

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Put the shadows in their boxes

01 15 Step
02 Bodysnatchers
03 Airbag
04 Bangers & Mash
05 Nude
06 Pyramid Song
07 Arpeggi
08 The Gloaming
09 The National Anthem
10 Faust Arp
11 Videotape
12 Optimistic
13 Where I End And You Begin
14 Reckoner
15 Everything In Its Right Place
16 All I Need
17 There There

Encore 1:
18 Exit Music
19 Jigsaw Falling Into Place
20 Climbing Up The Walls
21 Planet Telex
22 How To Disappear Completely

Encore 2:
23 Super Collider
24 You And Whose Army?
25 Idioteque

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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.

...

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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Liars.

I've spent a lot of the last 10 days or so finding out from WK Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks about what exactly a successful criticism consists of. And I genuinely do feel more educated now. Unfortunately though, the whole point of blogging is to give personal accounts of stuff, so I will have to betray my new-found New Critical outlook and do this old-school.

Liars was one of my least cool gig experiences, which is ironic (but not very ironic) because they're on of the coolest bands I've been to see. Angus Andrew was wearing the lovely white suit you see above (even though I stole that picture from a New York online newspaper of some description), and they looked overall like a Brooklyn post-punk band. Which is apt, because they were. Are they still? Probably not. Doesn't matter, because they've added being accepted in haute music circles to looking cool. Which is good news.

Reasons it wasn't cool: I turned up at 8 because it said 8 on the tickets, none of my friends were at it so I was by myself for the first time in a while, gigs I'm not at should have no effect on the fucking gig I pay for, the third support missed a flight, the doors opened at around 9 and nothing happened for hours, I drank four pints of Paulaner by myself, I jerked and rocked out beside some Northern Irish guys for the entire Liars set.

Saving graces:

Bats are very good. They're like indie playing metalcore. Or metalcore playing indie. Or genre-ignoring playing genre-ignoring.

Liars were really cathartic, and generally great. The two guitarists (labelled thus for convenience) basically made noise for the entire night, the drummer went "bom bom bom" fairly insistently and Angus gave the thumbs down while Australianising some cavernous sounds from the microphone.

They played plenty off Drum's Not Dead, which surprised me. I assumed that because they shifted sound between Drum and the self-titled, that they would have sort of shifted ethos or something. But they didn't. I used to be really into Drum's Not Dead, so that was good news.

But even better news: they played lots off Liars too. And Liars is so much better than Drum's Not Dead. I didn't think so when I got it first, but in terms of scope, the breadth of sounds they get together on one album without losing their intensity, it's just a much better record. There are some TUNES on it too, in the sense that Noel Gallagher or someone would refer to FOOKIN' TUNES. Songs that make sense, that have hooks. But there's noise too.

Everything was fed through the live catharsis-machine though. And Plaster Casts fucking destroyed the place. I was waiting for it for the whole gig, and last song comes around. It tears holes in everything. I can't explain it better, or I don't want to. It's primal shit.

This was up there, for me. The "Of The Year" lists are on their way, don't worry. And this'll be there, high.

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Now, Fight Like Apes

As Crawdaddy filled up for Fight Like Apes, there was a definite sense of anticipation. It felt weird, like on of the landmark shows people talk about - The Smiths in the Hacienda or Radiohead at Glastonbury 97 or whatever. The room was heaving. They played at the same time as the Concretes, but I can't imagine even having given half a thought to seeing that. It was like a big fight or something. Like when Bernard Dunne fought Kiko. It wasn't the title fight, but if he fucked it up (which he did) it was back to square one. Luckily, Fight Like Apes were not knocked out by a Spaniard in the first round. The opposite, really. Gig of the weekend.

There are three main things that I would note if I was seeing Fight Like Apes for the first time (rather than the second time). The first: they don't use guitars. Without hearing them, you'd immediately start to think of shit new rave bands or boring atmospherics. But it's not like that. It's definitely indie rock, it's Elephant 6 on punk rock tablets. The second thing: they're really loud. They use synths. Tech bit: synth synthesise sound. So they use the full wave instead of just whatever comes out, like in a guitar. So when you play a synth loud, it's like a wall. Which is the great thing about Fight Like Apes. They sound like a wall. The third thing about them is just that they look mad, which again is partly a result of not using guitars and being able to dance around in a visually different way.

All of that is pointless talk though, so ignore it. The reason Fight Like Apes blew away Hard Working Class Heroes is because they have really catchy songs which they play really loud. They have flippant songs like Canhead (which I nearly lost my voice screaming) and they have serious songs like Battlestations. They have Lend Me Your Face, "114 of Irish contemporary music's most celebrated seconds", universally recognised and easy to appreciate. But Jake Summers is the best. It just is. The way it's put together. The words. It's one of those golden apples of pop music. I hope Fight Like Apes become the next U2 and I can tell people I was in the front row for them twice and saw May Kay burp while introducing a song, and fall over while rocking out in heels. They were definitely better than most of the touring bands I've seen in the past year. They're probably better than we deserve.

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