Gealt-teach iargúlta lastiar den ré

Hideaway House. What a good idea. Take a place that is available, whether by chance, circumstance or charity, and put on gigs there. But don't make it into a "venue". No bar. No need. No anything. Just a room in a house with a PA. Get bands you think are good rather than bands you think will draw, because you don't have to cover any particular monetary figure, and the room is tiny anyway. Charge five euro. If you charge less, you won't be able to get those touring bands, or pay expenses for bands from elsewhere in the country. If you charge more, Ian MacKaye will murder a yuppie.

The Hideaway House is art in itself, in a way. It's just a guy's house. But open it up as a place to have gigs and the posters on the walls from festivals in Europe or movies in French, the cracks in the ceiling, the receding branchy darkness of the garden and the huge banner saying "This Area Is A Social Space" all seem to take on some kind of... significance?

It's a cool place. Better acoustics than a church hall. Better entertainment (and definitely better manners) than a house party. Better couches than... Whelans...

The gig itself wasn't actually that impressive. The Creeping Nobodies ( from Canada) are essentially avatars of form over content. They aren't quite as no-wave blanked-out as Cap Pas Cap while playing, and they did attempt to crack a couple of poor jokes to a cold-ish room, but their music is repetitive and amelodic. It's not that they come off like they write bad melodies. It just seems like melody doesn't figure in their songwriting process at all. They make a kind of arty murk, with enough danciness for the indie-rock shuffle, but not enough that anyone would have to challenge their own self-consciousness.

Music For Dead Birds (Galway), who were before the CNs, were a little better. They had some good anti-folk moments, and the guy's voice is interesting, but they veered back too often towards that regular sincere acousticism that I have a very low tolerance for (cf Heathers mini-review).

Cap Pas Cap were probably my favourites of the evening, and the first band that I saw. Last time I saw them was about a year ago and I was on the verge of falling for their shtick. This time, it was a little hard not to find the dead expressions and quarantined sound kind of affected, but they still played a good set. They didn't even play the hits (off the 12" that I bought when they supported Crystal Castles in Kennedys - the night I realised that even serious people can fall for bad music if it's energetic and it looks cool. Fuck anyone who hated on Nialler9 that time). But some of their newer stuff, particularly the last song they played (which featured a tom-heavy drum beat - a mini-departure for CPC) was interesting.

I was late for Ran, consensus was that they were deadly though. So well done Ran.

I'm going to leave this gig without the customary plus or a minus, because I didn't think that much of the headliners but I liked the whole idea. Check it out if you haven't been.

Swoop swoop (rock rock)

(This is what I wrote on my phone as a review of BATS, one of the best live bands to be seen in Dublin, after their support of Lovvers in the Boom Boom Room):

Science is the doctrine
Music is the medium
AND BATS WILL DESTROY YOU

The no-fi photograph from the same phone/mindset.

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Who needs an eye?

Two open proposals to Grand Pocket Orchestra:

1. Make a limited run of GPO action figures. Of all bands that have ever lived in Ireland, none would make a better set than you. And it's not even like people would just want the singer or anything. Everyone in Grand Pocket Orchestra has a distinct, fruit-flavoured air. There could even be two Paddys, one with a guitar and one with a mic lead wrapped around himself, eyes bulging, face looking blue from lack of oxygen, doing the Wii skiing action that he does. I would buy them. If Of Montreal can sell their album as a paper lantern, GPO's album could easily be action figures with secret USB ports where you can get 1/4 of the album.

2. How deadly would a Monkees-style mini-series about life in a fictionalised Grand Pocket Orchestra house be? They could all get into half an hour of mischief, before introducing guest stars or something, and they could open and close with a song. There could be puppets in the kitchen who only talk to Bronwyn or something. Imagine it though... *ding dong* "I wonder who's there?" (Noel Edmonds style), then the door opens to canned applause and Fight Like Apes appear. The fun is doubled.

So the in-store itself in Tower was fun. Grand Pocket Orchestra are getting better and better as time goes by and any initial reservations I had about a second guitarist drowning the tweeness are completely gone by now. The balance that seemed like it was slightly tipped when Flesh first joined is restored, and the songs are getting complex and nearly chin-strokingly thought-worthy while staying in the same Kinder Egg world. It was disappointing that there weren't more people there to get a copy of Make Happy War, which is the older, better brother to the young, fun first EP.

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music scene is crazy, bands start up each and every day

A summary is a shortened version of the original. The main purpose of such a simplification is to highlight the major points from the genuine (much longer) subject, e.g. a text, a film or an event. The aim is to help the audience get the gist in a short period of time.

Groom - Not impressed. A little bit OK Computer-y at times, but way less cool. And the song of theirs that kept coming on between bands is something I cannot imagine anyone who doesn't watch rom-coms without irony ever liking.

The Hot Sprockets - I was expecting "folky" and "a whole different buzz altogether", because the girl from Muzu said they'd be like that. But they weren't.

Holy Roman Army - This band needs to get some visuals going, and figure out a more exciting way of playing live. Granted, they were on way too early for the kind of music they play, but being soporific is never a good trait in a live band.

The Vinny Club - Man pressed play on iTunes, then arses around.

Foxface - Their blurb was about ten times as exciting as they were.

Noise Control - 90s rap rock? Seriously?

Heathers - Can't see why everyone is so impressed by these. They have a couple of lyrical turns that make you go "hmm", but if you do everything using terms of reference derived from female American singer-songwriters from the 1990s you're never going to be able to be new or impressive. I also couldn't stomach the fact that they literally did not stop harmonising once in the first four songs.

Carly Sings - Too quiet, venue too loud. Couldn't hear, had to leave.


So there you have it. Hard Working Class Heroes 2008.

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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Programmed To Destroy Us

So on to Sunday. The Judaeo-Christian God, who'd been letting the cistern fill up since mid-August, eventually opened the flood-gates and flushed his toilet once more onto the hapless Dublin. This had a fairly negative effect on Hard Working Class Heroes. Example 1: I got wet. Example 2: I had to wear an unfashionable anorak over my already unfashionable attire. Example 3: Fewer people showed up.

Robotnik though, was unmissable. If you were at Meeting House Square or Andrew's Lane at all during the festival, you've seen the video for Puddlestarter he did for Muzu, featuring an anthropomorphic horse with a rainbow umbrella getting super-soaked and making some of the greatest expressions ever recorded while battling Chris Morrin on the floor for supremacy during the instrumental section.

The horse was there again in the Academy 2. Robotnik is someone who does enough to be on the radar for a lot of people, but who doesn't necessarily fill them with childish joy and enthusiasm for his music. More than 50% of his appeal is in the drama and the visuals, in my opinion. Without the costumes, the supersoaker, the horse, he's just a guy. I'm sure people would still listen to a degree, but he wouldn't have the medium-sized status he has right now.

His set was good enough, for what it was. People Walk Away was a highlight. He has a tendency to sound a bit too influenced by the music of the 90s, and at other times he forgets melody. But with Robotnik, image is core. He sang a song about rain dressed in a raincoat. He did some other okay stuff. Then he played Puddlestarter and had an elaborate and slightly too violent fake fight with a horse, who tackled him after the fight was over and forced him to sing the last chorus from the floor. It was fun, not enough fun to make me want to run out and buy the album, but fun.

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This banana could be you! Or me!

Nowwwwwwwwwwww...

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.

That was this time last year. "Elephant 6 on punk rock tablets" I said. "Like a wall" I said. Various other universally positive things I said. It was definitely gig of the weekend. It was probably gig of the year, being honest. But obviously things have changed between my ears and Fight Like Apes in the interim. I'm one year less wide-eyed about the fact that an Irish band can actually be GOOD. And they put out a single I really didn't like.

So how were they in Meeting House Square, the damp towel of venues?

Great, actually. Unlike SEBP and Bats, they were sufficiently loud to connect (possibly to do with the pseudo-scientific "synths=full wave walls of sound" theory I invented out of my arse last year) even though they kept giving out to the soundman, who was probably on a drawbridge over a pit of Dublin City Council alligators.

The high points were manifold. Either I'm starting to appreciate the lesser spotted (non-first EP or Do You Karate?) Fight Like Apes songs more, or I'm just listening harder because I don't know them as well, but some of them really shined. Knucklehead is an amazing song, and must be feeling very unfulfilled that it wasn't the A-side to its Photoshopped cousin Something Global. Accidental Wrong Hole is still one of the best premises for a song in existence. The new one that's a letter to a roadie called Samuel, dispensing with his services with a double-suplex followed by a backbreaker, is power pop in a good way.

The new one with the words "lovely noise" prominent was alright... suffered from a bit of lyrical Something Global-ism in that it was very "you do this, we hate you for it". But y'know... who am I to judge, that's pretty much what I do on this blog (except it's usually love). And I hope they weren't trying to imply that Yo La Tengo aren't deadly.

I need to stop rambling on so much in this blog, I used to have a kind of concise style and I avoided the word "I".

The middle-aged man who, last year, stood beside me and Bobby and laughed completely out of proportion to his increasingly piss-taking tennis jokes (they were wearing sweatbands) turned up again. Like, it started with "They must play tennis" "Ahahahaha!" but by the end it was just like "Racket!" "Ahahahahaha!"... "Andre Agassi!" "Ahahahaha!" He must be related to someone in the band, or work for HWCH. I hope he enjoyed it as much this year.

Did I? I suppose, in a different way. Some people I talked to didn't, but I thought it was really good. The way they play and act seems naturally more geared towards bigger stage and a bigger crowd now, and that helps in somewhere like Meeting House Square. They fought on the ground and threw a bass at each other. They played great noisy pop songs with intensity. Their album is streaming on entertainment.ie from tomorrow, and fickle as I am, I can't wait.

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Dance of the Sugar Rush Fairy

Okay, back to do this after an absence due to dog ear haematoma removal. Let's do this shit.

Grand Pocket Orchestra are back (i.e. I haven't seen them in a while), and they've evolved (like a Pokémon) into something essentially the same but intangibly better. Boat loads of songs I hadn't heard before were spilled out into Andrew's Lane Theatre on Saturday with maximum aplomb. It wasn't just that I hadn't seen them performed before... they were songs I hadn't heard before, a style that was new and different. Less finger-paint, more Jackson Pollock.

New single Ballet Shoes is an example of it, to an extent. Hearing that song makes me do the band-comparison stream in my head. Vampire Weekend? Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!? Built To Spill? Am I just going mad? Possible. But other songs, only experienced for their sub-two minute durations and then part-forgotten after they zoomed by, had even more of an impression. One of the songs, with no guitar in the intro, reminded me of something Sunset Rubdown might do. Another one didn't remind me of anyone from America, and I can't remember any details apart from thinking it was DEADLY.

In my last Fight Like Apes post, I finished saying something silly like "Grand Pocket Orchestra, step it up" or whatever. But I have to admit, as stupid a remark as that was, I was not fully expecting them to make a leap. I liked them, and I expected them to be as good as they were for a while yet. The kind of band I'd go to see at a festival, or at Whelans maybe if I had the money to spare. I'd buy what they put out, and use it in my CD alarm clock. But, to borrow Ian's expression... shit just got real, yo. Excitement is kicking in. Genuinely anticipating their next EP. Waiting on an album. Wanting to see the songs that they played so briefly again, and get to know them. I can't wait to watch this unfold.

Apart from intelligent and engaging new songs, Grand Pocket Orchestra still have: an ADD-esque mentaller for a singer, a lady with an octopus-like capacity for playing multiple instruments simultaneously, a vaguely unsettling guitarist and an excellent drummer with a mohawk. The live show has never been less than excellent with this combination. But imagine: GPO action figures... how is that not a good idea?

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Winged/Wicked Things

Science in the lyrics, in the music and in the spare time. Dublin's most precise prog-hardcore band were unfortunately set-up in Meeting House Square on Saturday, thus negating one of their most prominent traits (the loudness) and leaving them a little disconnected. Bats are a band who generally successfully peddle a bag of metal, hardcore and prog tricks in a conscientious manner to people who would never dream of listening to some of the bands the members probably listen to at home. Not being loud enough makes this a little impotent.

Still good though. These Ones Lay Eggs (from 2007's Cruel Sea Scientist) is a bit of a magnum opus, flicking between rhythms and tempos like my mother with a remote control. You just get enough of each part to be interested, then it moves on. It's like this with most Bats songs, These Ones Lay Eggs is just particularly excellent.

Apart from that one, my highlight of the set was the singer (who is always recognisable in public because of the Anticon t-shirt that appears to have fused to his torso) dedicating a song to "the people at CERN who are doing an amazing job". To break the universal silence, I may have shouted "yeah!". And then looked up what it actually did when I woke up the next morning.

So there you have it. Bats. Pedagogical progcore.

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The Last Of The Famous International Playboys

David Turpin splits the ranks, I think. You either like it or you don't. I had no idea which camp I was in until I actually showed up at 4 Dame Lane on Friday. Some were convinced I wouldn't like it at all. Others were simply convinced that THEY didn't like it. Still others gave his music the fantastic description of being "suggestively electronic". And the resident Analogue pop-savant (who I still haven't met, though Indie Bar tells me he's AMAZING) wrung a great interview out of him. All of this made me more and more curious.

I admit I only saw the second half of the set because I was picking up gear, but I walked straight to the 'yea' side of the house. Being whispery and suggestive is not something that would ever put me off music after four years of Xiu Xiu, so I have to say I was enthralled. My head started to fill with names of other bands, which tends to happen when I get excited about something: Patrick Wolf, Jim O'Rourke, Antony & The Johnsons... but most of all...

I was that stereotypical teenage Morrissey obsessive, if you didn't already know. Turpin drips Morrisseyism. Not in his style of singing or his music, particularly. But just his manner. Complete self-assurance, and an eyebrow raised at all times, whether in reality or just in his head. So long live David Turpin.

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Duck Duck Goose

This was a lot of messy, messy fun.

AND WHEN IT'S TIME TO PARTY WE WILL ALWAYS PARTY HARD

I spent the winter (not on the verge of a total breakdown or in Norway) on the floor of my bedroom playing a second-hand copy of Madden 03 for PS2 to the strains of Mcluskyism, (awakeinwhitechapel) and a copy of the Super Extra Bonus Party LP I adopted from the Analogue post-bag.

Of the three, it was SEBP that I least expected to get into. But lo! through the magic of the extra effort an actual physical copy of an album elicits in me, I found myself throwing it on every other night. I jerked my head to Mushie Shake, imagined I knew the words to Spanik Sabotage and appreciated the excellent foray into traditionalism that was Everything Flows.

Friday in Meeting House Square was my first time seeing them live, apart from a few flashing lights behind a few hundred sweaty backs at the very end of their set last year. It was good, but I can't help but think that it could've been better in a few ways. Not that any of those ways are in any way Super Extra Bonus Party's fault.

First off - low volume? Come on sound man! Jesus! If they want the drums turned way up, turn them way up. If music is supposed to grab you and make you dance or jump or nod your head, play it at a volume that allows that to happen. Fuck city bye-laws.

Then, from second- and third-hand accounts, the lights and visuals are one of the best parts of the set. Outdoors, lights are ineffective unless you're putting Radiohead or Flaming Lips money into it. And the screen for the visuals required a full 90 degree turn to see. So it was a choice between the band or the visuals. Not a choice that should have to be made, especially for integrated visuals (as opposed to simply playing the Robotnik video in the background).

Still, they made the best of it. It was a party. Feet were tapped, heads nodded. The band jumped, I wished the music was loud enough and I was drunk enough to jump as well. It's actually ridiculous that I haven't seen them, now that I come to think of it. I was at Club NME when they played, but I was playing elsewhere and only made it there in time for Cadence Weapon. Friends have gone while I was saving money or going to something else. I even won a free guestlist off Nialler9 once, but I was either at another gig or I didn't check it in time.

I will see them again though. Indoors, preferably

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About as much use as a cuntless whore

Okay, the title is a little strong. Fight Like Apes releasing Something Global in Tower Records. It's pretty much a consensus opinion from people I've talked to that the single is bad and sounds like sickly polished pop-punk. It sounds like that live too. Even their good songs (including the one that contains the line this blog is named after) are losing edge and gaining polish. I really, really, really did not want to be sitting here saying "I liked their early stuff" before the album even came out. But it's hard not to.

Their best songs have been the same ones since way back when. Jake Summers and Lend Me Your Face. They're still good, but the bite's not there any more. It used to seem like May Kay was going to climb off the stage, grab your skull, put a foot on the wall for leverage and rip your face off whether or not you wanted her to. It's not like that any more.

Without the roughshod, grinning lunatic side, they're just another band. Just another Hooray For Humans. That minute change in mood makes the kitschness and the pop culture pillaging seem more contrived than inspired.

I assume the album's going to sound like Something Global, production-wise, and have the boring songs (i.e. anything not on the first EP or some of the second EP) on it. There's still a chance they could write 10 great songs in the next year or so and come out with a good second album, because all the things that made them so good are still hanging around somewhere underneath the Mr. Muscle approach. But as it stands, I don't know. I'm really sad about making this post. But whatever.

Grand Pocket Orchestra, you're up.

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Dot's Ugly Cadence

So last night's gig then, put on by new Analogue Magazine Promotions/etc guy Daniel Gray in conjunction with Hefty Horse. I resigned my part in the casual comedy at about nine o'clock (it went well I thought) and then went for a short walk to buy a quarter of fizzy cola bottles before returning for Disconnect The Dots.

Their deal is mostly instrumental, with effects on the vocals so that they sort of become part of the music rather than on top of it. There is a core of really intelligent songwriting in what they do, and at various points they sounded to me like Sunny Day Real Estate, certain of the louder Smiths songs and High Places, but always with the sampler beeping time in the background. Between the mix, the guitar sound and certain moments of uncertainty, they may not have acquitted themselves quite perfectly, but I, knowing the pair of them but not knowing what their music would sound like, was quite impressed by some of their songs, particularly the Dan-on-guitar, Cáit-singing, no sampler one (which was the Sunny Day one) and the last one.

Ugly Megan headlined, and I'm still a big fan. They had toys and thumped acoustic guitar beats, and twee melodies to the hilt. I described all that stuff in the last entry I did about them so I won't do it again. What came across to me the most this time was how much they're into rap and rap culture. I don't know how I missed it before, I thought the Snoop cover was just one of those twee jokes. But no.

They did a cover of American Boy which was in fact better than the Snoop one by a fair bit, and one of the highlights of their set was a song that goes "I'd give you all the love that a pimp can give a ho, because you're my favourite ho, my favourite ho, fo sho". Over the twee-est Moldy Peaches strummy backing ever. Their "encore" was probably my favourite though. Intricate guitar-thumping beat that reminded me of The Caterpillar by the Cure.

After dumping my stuff in the apartment of someone I don't know (sorry!) I ended up at Cadence Weapon in Club NME, which was surprisingly empty. I hadn't heard much Cadence Weapon, but I was disappointed. The dancey beats and "jump!" parts do nothing for me. I was expecting a sort of MF Doom type thing for some reason (because people were calling him the saviour of rap occasionally + he's a nerd) but his actual lyrical skills are nowhere near as good. Nowhere near. I was also disappointed that he played mostly dancehall in his DJ set. So down with Cadence Weapon

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High White Deer

The ground's been covered by others already, and I've fallen into the bad habit of writing way too much about everything, so I'm going to do one sentence reviews of all the bands from the Future Days festival, which was a good night in general.

High Places - Their one good song was good, if just as muddy as everything else.
White Williams - Shite Williams
Deerhunter - I wanted to like them, but they did not grab me.
Dan Deacon - The best holiday entertainer ever, and my vote for world-wide funmaker.
Jape - Tried bit hard at the start, before busting out the perennially great Floating and sliding easily and brilliantly to the finishing line.

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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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Fuck dancing all night.

Went to see Jape again in Crawdaddy last night. No fruit was flung, many songs were sung, some weren't sung at all but merely banged out with all the unselfconscious aplomb of Scooter covering lo-fi indie rock. I like Jape. He pulled a strange crowd too. Definitely older than the average Crawdaddy gig crowd, but it was Friday and I suppose the short-lived NME Ireland thing probably helped him in those quarters.

One person was clearly on ecstasy. She was blowing in the wind and making shapes in the air and generally raving it up for the whole gig, but scarily she smashed a pint glass and then didn't notice that she was dancing barefoot on broken glass. She seemed happy enough though.

Jape-wise, Phil Lynott the song is still ridiculous to anyone who doesn't worship the name of Phil Lynott, but At The Heart Of All This Strangeness (I think that's the title - the only other soft one) was really good, and had the Friday night crowd shushing each other. Haunting stuff, and a really unusual chord in there somewhere.

Floating was banging. It's just instant gratification, alternative pop at its best. He has a couple of those, not so good but on the way. And he has a couple of ones where the lyrics render the song unlikeable. That's the trade-off when you're working on that kind of level of honesty, that sort of conversational thing.

It can go terribly wrong, like when it's about Phil Lynott (sorry! Comedy song!), but the first lines of Floating are poetry.

We took our first pill when the music was shit.
We said "Fuck dancing all night", but then we did it.

FIRST USE OF BLOCKQUOTE FUNCTION. Good gig.

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North Strand Klezmer Band

I've never seen a live klezmer band before. So on Tuesday when the Trinity Jewish Society put North Strand on in Cassidy's as some sort of e-mail getting event/opportunity for everybody to realise that Jewish culture sometimes comes in very intense, North Dublin-based, seven man packages. An appreciable effort, and a worthwhile one.

Downstairs in Cassidy's was empty. This was a clever deception, because upstairs was absolutely jammed and sweaty as fuck. I can't imagine how stubborn and dull someone would have to be to stay downstairs when they heard the klezmer vamp and and the manic dancing kick in. Absolute brilliance.

They played a variety of different Jewish songs with Yiddish names which I have no chance of being able to reproduce accurately, even if I remembered their sounds. They also played some songs with names in English, like Merchant's Arch. And some gypsy songs.

They played vamping, incredibly Eastern European sounding brilliance on incredibly Eastern European sounding instruments, with no hint of irony at all. The place was packed to capacity and pumping. It was the best gig in a while. If you haven't seen them, you have to. Really. Preferably in a very full upstairs bar.

Hit them up on MySpace. "Other/Ska/Other" doesn't even begin to describe it.

When he turned around and cried...

Fight Like Apes last Friday in Whelans, then. Suppose I better talk about that. I was hoping to get a photo from the man who spent THE ENTIRE GIG bumping his camera into me or standing completely rigid when everyone else in the place was dancing. I expect that they'd be pretty good, seeing as he took pictures of the same people from the same angle for nearly an hour. I kept planning to ask him to stop, but of course I never plucked up the courage. In my head, it went like this.

Me: "Hey, how much did you pay in to this?"
Him: Either "13 euro" or "I was on the guestlist"
Me: Either "Me too, please stop bumping your camera into me" or "I paid 13 euro, please stop bumping your camera into me."

Anyway, this is the kind of aside that used to annoy me about other blogs. But I had to say it, in case any prospective photographers are planning on getting all elbows around me in venues without photographer pits in future. Please somebody think of the punters.

Grand Pocket Orchestra were the support. They were pretty good on the whole. It was my first time seeing them with their new guitarist (and my second time seeing them ever) and they're pretty different. I mean, their songs are the same, but a lot of their tweeness gets lost under Mr. Second Guitarist's Marshall stack guitaring. They're still great though. Their "slow" song, Little Messy, is not actually slow. The whole thing is just breakneck twee rock (the rock bit is newish), and if the sound was A LITTLE better they would have killed it.

Then Fight Like Apes. This was the longest I've seen them play for, and most of the length consisted of SP-303 atmospherics and movie dialogue, and general messing around. I love messing around though. Fight Like Apes are in their groove at the moment. I remember reading some terrible music magazine like Q once, talking about the Rolling Stones going from strength to strength. I don't remember the context. But that's what it seems like for Fight Like Apes.

Phantom is all over them, even Herald AM are calling them gig of the week, anyone who cares about what's going on in Dublin knows that Fight Like Apes are what's going on in Dublin. They don't fuck around either. It doesn't matter where they are or who's there, they whack saucepans (which I assume Pockets now possibly known as Jamie also uses to cook his food, given the reasonable price of their gigs and CDs) and fall over and scream and pretend to be karate people and all kinds of things.

Do You Karate? has grown to rival Jake Summers as my favourite Fight Like Apes song, and though the new EP is marginally less good than the old EP, it's good to have more recorded stuff. The Mclusky cover fits so incredibly well into the rest of their stuff. It's good to be at a gig where a lot of other people are into it. I keep having premonitions that in twenty years saying"I saw Fight Like Apes in Dublin before their first album came out... three times and maybe more" will be like saying "I saw Joy Division in the Hacienda" or "I bought crack off Jay Z before he was a rapper".

Hopefully. It was a very good gig. I do hope they can write more great songs, and put out a fantastic album. Which I will buy, even though I have the first EP, the second EP, the first and second EP and the 7", because maybe if Jamie gets enough money to buy an SP404 he'll put his SP303 on eBay and I can buy it and pretend to be Panda Bear.

This review has been pretty flitty. There's another one from HWCH around as well though, so check out my more organised thoughts there. This one wasn't quite as good. Sorry. I hate being a cunt. But it wasn't. It was still very good though.

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Jape

Jape was pretty bangin' as Sunday's headliner. I can say bangin' just this once, because Richie Egan spent the best part of his set pointing in the air or raising his fist in a way that would lead one to believe he wanted to be called bangin'. It was my first time hearing Jape, strangely enough, and I was seconds away from the last bus home before deciding to actually wait and see. I'll explain to you what I was expecting, and what I got. Jape has always been described to me as an "electronic" artist, and the closest I came to encountering him/them was at Whelans when I was in the bar and there was pounding bass coming from the venue. So I was expecting some techno, basically. I didn't get it. Jape is as much rock as it is electro. Not that that's a problem. The best thing about Jape anyway, all things and genres considered, is the lyrics. He has a rare frankness and an ability to make you go "haha" or "fuck" or "..." with every second line he sings. I'm not sure I'd pay 20 euro to see him alone because of the sort of vestiges of 90s-ness about it all, but I think he was worth the extra 2.20 the Nightlink cost me at least.

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