Just as I was about to give up on the young people and their "beat"
music, what with the Magic Markers and their obsessionist tuning up,
the Bats and their good times, poor man's REM and Girls' ok but dull
Pulp w/o the Jarvisisms, yay to Lightning Bolt for being so immediate
with their nasty gimp mask, microphone and twisted guitar musings and
for showing me that music can indeed still be engaging, annoying and
surprising. Photos soon come.
This time next week I will be drifting around an outdoor exhibition centre on the fringes of Barcelona trying to exceed my record of seeing 35 bands in three nights at Primavera Sound 2009.
This year I'm having trouble coming up with the same level of excitement about the bill as I did in 2008. However, I'm very excited about seeing Patrick Watson at the Union Chapel on 3rd June a) because his show at the Scala was a highlight of 2008 and b) because I'll be finally getting to see a band I love at the Union Chapel (slightly more convenient than Barca) after Gnarls Barkley switched inexplicably last summer.
Patrick's got a new album out which I need to get around to getting into properly, but in the meantime, thanks to Monkton Versus Plankton for pointing me towards this and steering me away from the haters at Pitchfork.
#97 Patrick Watson / Part 2 - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.
I had a bit of Steely Dan blow-out today, there's only so much cutting edge blogospheric action that a man of my age can take. This led to the inevitable YouTube stream of consciousness which took me to the Glendale High School Marching Band.
I just love it when some musically obsessed school teacher imposes his or her esoteric tastes on a bunch of adolescents who just want to be in the band. The director of the Glendale shares my Steely Dan obsession and guides them through some very loose interpretations of three Fagen/Becker classics. Check out the Airtoesque percussion breaks at the start and try to guess the actual songs buried amongst the free-jazz howling. Note how the crowd appear totally oblivious to the spectacle chatting throughout - they're probably still getting over last year's Factory Records gone Bollywood medley.
Hmmm! Looks & sounds like FIVE is the magic number as we head into the third month of 2009. This man has gone the whole hog and done a 51 minute podcast of songs in five which feature "Take 5", "15 Step" and other time-signatured tunes including "Mission Impossible". First time anyone's managed to give me a music lesson in about 30 years too.
If Gilbert and George had spent the 1970s and 80s immersing themselves in da funk, Steely Dan and yacht rock instead of human sculpture and large scale pictures, they might just have evolved into TALC. The band are two pin-striped, bowler hatted gents slightly let down by choosing to wear trainers. The rest of the band are probably session musicians who clearly know how to play a bit despite being forced to wear corporate "staff" t-shirts of the fictional "Wonderbar" pub which forms the concept of second album Licensed Premises Lifestyles.
The aim of the night seems to be to convince us that the band is just a big joke with Blockheadesque banter between songs, hallucinations that various jazz legends are in the house causing a sudden switch into serious jazz jamming, heckling via a vocoder and so on. All this, mixed with the fact that TALC have an astonishing talent for the catchy song as well as the good groove meant that I spent much of the set grinning like a goon. A couple of workaday cover versions (Abracadabra and Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick) could have been resisted in favour of more of the impeccable material from last year's album but all in all I could and go see this lot play once a week (although they only seem to manage an outing once a year).
Finally, a heads up for the vocoder. In my school days, I recall the impact that Herbie Hancock's I Thought It Was You had in the playground. Although we all were desperate to assert our punk credibility, impersonating the warped funky vocals of Hancock's jazz-funk anthem was an essential skill. A Certain Ratio then added it to their punk-funk box of tricks before Cher took it to a place where I didn't want it to go. TALC's The Gift aka Nichol Thomson dusts down a particularly ancient model and brings it back to beautiful life (despite occasionally needing to tune it up - can't see Kanye West needing to do this somehow). So, yay for the vocoder - every home should have one!
Passion Pit come to these shores in February - they support Black Kids at Koko on the 18th and hang out at Pure Groove Records on the 29th. I'm waiting for the bound-to-be-bonkers headline London gig before shelling out for any tickets. They're also working on an album and have nabbed a budget for string sessions and children's choirs which exactly what the music industry should be spending its dwindling cash on. Passion Pit were big in my house last year - their demographic was the 4-43 age group. The video shows that we were not the only ones..
The My Girls video seems to be on every blog in the whole wide world today. When the tracks tingly synth opening wafted over the crowd at Koko the other week, there was a feeling of deja vu (or should that be deja ecoute) and fond nostalgia for Candi Staton and The Source. The true house heads knew that the real "source" of this groove was Frankie Knuckles and this has not gone unnoticed by the bedroom remixers. Check out Panda Bear in conference with the Chicago originator:
Your Love My Girls: Frankie Knuckles x Animal Collective
