Tickets to gigs in London tend to be sold out months in advance (even if attendance varies a lot for "sold out" shows) so typically when you go to a show I find myself quite disconnected to the reasons why I bought the ticket. Over the last couple of weeks I've ended up at Hackney's EartH three times, each time to see a solo singer songwriter perform.
So I ended up seeing in quick succession Nina Nastasia, Owen Pallet and Waxahatchee (aka Katie Crutchfield who was performing solo).
All three were lost in the huge space, something that Nastasia and Pallet both openly acknowledged but the sound was great for all three and the audience respectful of the soft, acoustic music. EartH is generally a pretty great venue in my experience.
Nastasia and Crutchfield had essentially the same setup of a guitar, a microphone and a couple of monitors. Pallet had a much more elaborate arrangement with a loopbank, violin and guitar. For many of his songs he accompanied himself via the looper and often finished songs with a decayed version of the main loop. He often used a plucked violin to create the basic parts of the songs which reminded me a lot of Andrew Bird.
The Big Moon's 2 Lines (a live version linked) has the dynamism that was downplayed for the second album Walking like we do. I particularly like the staccato vocal line in the pre-chorus and while the chorus lyrics are a bit trite they are delivered in a heartfelt way.
Daughter's To Rage is absolutely in the shoegaze/4AD arena which is absolutely my bag but the lyrics remain poetic and the guitar melodies are lovely. The anger of the lyrics is also an interesting counterpoint to the dream pop like delivery.
I know Art School Girlfriend as guitar-based indie singer-songwriter so I did not expect the dance driving sound of new release Close to Clouds although the vocals remain drifting and the lyrics regretful. I feel I can just listen to this one on repeat.
English Teacher's Song about Love starts with a motorik like post-punk coldness and ironic knowing lyrics but dissolves into a more psychedelic emotional crescendo in a mirror of its slippery topic. The song feels familiar but new in the way that popular music should.
A great start to Spring!
I've been exploring the dungeonsynth genre recently (more to come on that). Landsraad are a bit adjacent to that scene as their influence are the Dune novels rather than fantasy but I picked up their album The Golden Path on Bandcamp Friday and really enjoyed the sound of it. Initially I thought it was quite 80s, in the vein of Vangelis but it's actually quite modern in terms of the synth sound and the layers that make up the tracks.
I was listening to 6Music when I locked into a particular track that was playing. Psychedelic with a strong Hendrix influence, I immediately thought that it was a Britpop revival tune in that it clearly had one foot in the Sixties and the other in modern production. I was curious as to who was doing this and whether it was part of any wider movement.
The answer was much more simple as it was Hazy Lazy Hologram, a part of Britpop that passed me by. The gauzy shoegaze textures, the Primal Scream danceable rock and the Hendrix element all made sense.
Of course as a result I can't tell whether this is something I like or something that is timeless and bridges musical eras.
Marika Hackman is not:
Marika Hackman is:
This post might be updated as new details emerge.
I first saw the name The Japanese House on festival billings. I wasn't sure if they were a band or a concept name for an electronica artist. The EPs available on streaming indicated a synth-pop solo artist avoiding personalisation of her work.
The release performance for the album Good at falling held at Rough Trade East revealed a singer-songwriter with a more indie feel for this "acoustic" set. Acoustic here means there is one acoustic guitar but also a synth and electric guitar, presumably it means the music is performed live rather than sequenced by a laptop. At one point a request for the right pedal patch number goes out to a tech in the crowd and there are a few false starts; its neither slick nor amateur. Just something in the middle.
The recordings are filled with auto-tuned and lots of reverb but here the songs are delivered with no styling beyond a straight-forward harmony. Some of the better songs on the album (I saw you in a dream, You seemed so happy) work in both approaches but for most I have to admit to preferring the more highly-produced sound.
Some previous reviews have been negative about the vocals without all the effects but for me it seemed fine here. Maybe a bit weak but perfectly fine.
In a small venue Amber Bain's polite persona holds some charisma but the display is mostly technical, translating the recorded music into a different style on stage. Performance is probably a strong word.
I wouldn't go out of my way to see The Japanese House again but if they were on a mixed lineup I wouldn't avoid them either. I'm happy to stick to the EPs.
Deep Space Station is a classic moody shoegaze with a delightful melody running through it. Despite the title the lyrics are about nature and the sea and remind me a lot of Falloch.
The LUMP LP ends with a monotone set of spoken credits. It starts "LUMP is a product". A collaboration between Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, of whom I have seen Laura Marling live and like a lot of her stuff and I had not heard of Lindsay before this album.
The first I heard of LUMP was the intriguing video for the extraordinary single Curse of the Contemporary I then had the chance to attend the album launch at Rough Trade East which was an interesting moment, hearing a new set of songs for the first time with little context as to what the nature of the collaboration or the project was.
Marling does the singing and the lyrics but intriguingly mostly played bass live. Lindsay bounced around stage playing guitar and handling the samples and treated sound. Compared to Marling's solo performances this was a much livelier and engaging performance.
Apart from the appeal of people on stage who were clearly having fun, the thing that remained with me was mostly Marling's distinctive phrases in the song lyrics. There are lots of little lyrical hooks, one of my favourites is "To be born a crab, lonely and sad".
The poetic imagery is contained within relatively straight-forward structures that tend to repeat the entire song so you can catch onto the words the second time round.
I was disappointed to miss their other shows at the Garage and Oslo Hackney.
The album is enjoyable but not compulsive, its a small collection of well-crafted songs but I find myself having to be in the mood rather than putting it on and it putting me in a frame of mind. Its still one of the gems of 2018 though.
Grouper makes this beautiful ambient sound that mixes guitar drones with found sound and layered vocals.
The first time I saw her live I could not figure out how one woman could create such a dense weave of sound.
However at a gig in the Tin Tabernacle overcrowding forced the audience to practically sit in her lap and the answer became clear. Walkmans. Many Walkmans wired up to a sound mixer.