Melody's Echo Chamber Interview

Originally appeared in issue 10 of VOLUME MAGAZINE.

Land of Kings // Dalston, E8, 4 May 2012

'Cool' - or at least the hollow approximation of it – has risen inexorably up London’s Kingsland Road and festered ungainly around Dalston for what seems like an eternity. A grubbily disordered wonderland that serves as a byword for ‘au courant’, it’s a place where you could likely find yourself watching a gauche indie troupe,  a surrealist live art collective and a woman smashing pint glasses into a microphone in the name of ‘art’ within the same evening. The multi-venue extravaganza Land of Kings attempts to accumulate such varied curios across a 2-day stretch. Crotchless high-visibility leggings and designer drugs ground from powdered seagull’s feet are strictly optional.

First up, Toy, in the cavernous enclaves of the Magnolia Banqueting Suite; a yawning space more accustomed to hosting Turkish wedding parties than the great unwashed hoards of E8. There’s a preposterous amount of hair on display, and they look like the sort of group you see on those mid-70s Germanic music programmes where each band is accompanied by churning ‘psychedelic’ visuals. Fortunately, their merging of relentless motorik rhythms and shoegaze-minus-the-boring-bits sounds fucking IMMENSE. Imagine if Hawkwind had time-travelled and played the UFO Club. Seriously. You’ll even overlook the fact the bass player looks like Gareth Hale (of Hale & Pace ‘fame’) in a Spinal Tap wig.

After this shock to the system, ‘Slagbox’ (think single’s night for jaded hipsters) at Barden’s seems a logical next stop. Regrettably, though perhaps fittingly, the venue is laced with the wretch-inducing odour of fish – as though a Grimsby trawler had just dumped a year’s supply of mackerel beside the bogs. A sharp exit, then, to watch We Were Evergreen at the Shacklewell Arms. These London-based Parisians play the sort of twee xylophone-infected melodies you expect to hear on a Match.com advert, as a bearded numpty gazes longingly into the doe eyes of a girl in a flowery smock dress. It’ll certainly appeal to those people who think France is full of KOOKY (read: nauseating) people riding bicycles and filling brown paper bags full of artisan bread. However, despite the fact they’re most likely virgins, even a decrepit cynic such as I finds them impossible to hate. Their closing number is a bass-heavy librarian-disco jam with a trumpet. And a ukulele, for fuck’s sake. And it’s still good. They’ll be soundtracking some Zooey Deschanel vehicle imminently, no doubt.

After feeling somewhat mortified that I enjoyed such pretty-pretty CUTENESS, blood is in order. Fortunately, O Children take the stage at the chronically unfinished new venue, Birthdays. Amid the acrid smell of new paint, their faintly camp melodrama – fronted by Tobi O’Kandi’s booming baritone – provides much-needed respite. A great deal of the set is drawn from new LP ‘Apnea’, and despite the portentous title it sounds like they’ve cheered-up a bit. Opener ‘PT Cruiser’ is the best song about a car since the ‘Cayonero’ ode from The Simpsons, and elsewhere a new-found optimism is strapped to their ever-strong pop sensibilities. It’s about as ‘gothic’ as a night in with a DVD of The Craft, but far, far more gratifying.

An aborted attempt to watch Connan Mockasin – mystifyingly stuck-on at one of the smaller venues – rather unceremoniously concludes the evening. It’s been a chaotic, occasionally shambolic, sporadically nightmarish affair, punctuated with some genuine delights. For better or worse, Land of Kings is as accurate a distillation of the Dalston oeuvre as one could hope for.

Luke Steele (The Sleepy Jackson / Empire of the Sun) Interview

Connan Mockasin // Bush Hall, 28 September 2011

The War On Drugs // Cargo, 13 September 2011

Pumping gas in a desolate thoroughfare. Eating ‘grits’ in a sinister trucker’s café. Being chased through overgrown backwoods by a toothless gun-toting simpleton in dungarees. Yes, the image of the fabled ‘life on the road’ in America is as informed by Kerouac/Twin Peaks/Texas Chainsaw clichés as ever; constructed from hand-me-down Springsteen albums and copies of low-budget Alabaman horrors. Fortunately, one gang who don’t take such dim-witted notions on-board is The War On Drugs – bona-fide Americans who have birthed the soundtrack to the most fucked-up psychedelic road movie you’ve never seen in ‘Slave Ambient’.

Considering they’ve made one of 2011’s finest albums, you could be forgiven the band would introduce themselves with a chest-beating, ostentatious fanfare. Not so. Their on-stage demeanour is certainly inauspicious, and their ‘banter’ consists of chat about guitars and, erm, jeans. Still, TWOD are all about the music – free of the soaked-in-oats, plaid shirt bullshit that such a horrific phrase evokes.

And what music: they filter the best in ‘heartland’, Uncut Magazine favourites – Neil Young, Dylan, The Boss – through a shoegaze filter, pebble-dashing it with Krautrock blobs. At their best (‘Your Love Is Calling My Name’) this seemingly hellish prospect is seamless, like Route 66 gently shifting into the motorik rhythms of the Autobahn. The FX-soaked ‘Come To The City’ and ‘Baby Missiles’ might not have any choruses as such, but are peculiarly catchy all the same, featuring some gloriously shabby harmonica stabs and some dazzling wig-outs. There’s still a certain traditionalist, porch song air at times (‘I Was There’) and Granduciel’s voice (an amalgamation of Dylan and former TWOD bandmate Kurt Vile) is somewhat reedy, but they’re still a great deal spacier than most. The bleeding-knuckle encore is certainly more Hawkwind than Tom Petty.

Indeed, while The War On Drugs may happily flirt with the some of the facets of ‘respectable’ American music – the backdrops of mountains and open-road, their relaxed stoner disposition, song titles like ‘Buenos Aires Beach’ – theirs is a novel take on seemingly rigid source material, like frazzling an old photographic slide under the sun. When their fuzzy road-trip winds up in your town it may not roll-up with all guns blazing, but they’ll quietly go about their business all the same. This is a thing of ragged glory. Join the crusade.

Originally appeared in CLASH Magazine

Wu Tang Clan // London Forum, 11 June 2011

You may find this hard to believe, but hip-hop existed long before gushing hacks were wiping their weeping bellends on Odd Future’s altar. Although it was released almost 18 years ago, Wu-Tang’s astonishing debut LP still sits as uneasily today with OFWGKTA’s dubious mix of schlocky horror and queer-bashing as it did against the G-Funk onslaught back in 1993. Their stoned mysticism, obsession with obscure Kung-Fu films and horrifying accounts of life in the Staten Island slums were the stuff of middle-class, white boy dreams. Even this bitter scribe can remember when the only two albums everyone owned in school were ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory’ and the Wu’s gargantuan second effort ‘Wu-Tang Forever’. Christ, how many groups can even claim to have their own (hysterically awful) Playstation game, as they did with ‘99’s ‘Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style’?

Although hardly unusual for hip-hop, live gigs for Wu-Tang always seemed like something of a grudging obligation; an excuse to send grim hangers-on called things like Intrepid Foxx over to mumble their way through an embarrassing masquerade of a show. Indeed, from the off tonight, Wu-Tang are as reliably unreliable as ever – what’s billed as a ‘full reunion’ is lacking the group’s de facto leader RZA (unable to leave California due to ‘contractual commitments’, apparently), Raekwon and Inspectah Deck. Once inside, the proceedings follow a strict tick list of half-arsedness. They’ve neglected to bring any merchandise over. There’s a fuck-awful nu-metal band supporting. And the warm-up DJs spend half the time placating the crowd. Good start, lads.

When they predictably saunter on at well-past the advertised stage time (fucking hell, does ANYONE in hip-hop own a clock other than Flavor Flav?! ), the Wu announce their arrival with a flatulent, bass-heavy grunt from the PA. Make no mistake, the sound tonight is laughable; so bad, in fact, that it would reinforce your dad’s notion of the genre – that it’s all a bunch of indecipherably angry blokes shouting into a wind tunnel.

This is a particular indignity as the 75-minute set leans heavily on ‘36 Chambers’, exactly as the fanboys would hope. That album’s rough, skeletal, cold-sweat production is hopelessly lost tonight, to the point where only the most antagonistic numbers (‘Shame On A Nigga’, particularly) have any impact. Indeed, GZA – perhaps the most considered, intricate MC in the collective, so valued that they once remarked, “We form like Voltron, and GZA happens to be the head” – is completely mislaid in the mix altogether. Those who were arsed to get out of bed and get on the plane shamble around like old biddies in a supermarket, stumbling into and barking over one another’s rhymes. The crude cacophony of sound benefits the more aggro MCs, such as Ghostface Killah and Method Man to some extent, however. Perhaps predictably for a man who missed the Wu’s last London appearance to film an episode of CSI, Method trowels some Hollywood pizzazz over the evening; scurrying around the stage, diving into the crowd, and supplying the set’s undisputed highlight with his own ‘Method Man’, an absolutely fucking electric slab of self-aggrandisement.

Unfortunately, the Wu spend a large chunk of a relatively short set doing what can only be described as ‘bollocking around’. An ODB tribute is to be expected, but do we really need a shout-out to seemingly every rapper who ever died? Do we expect those from the ‘Slums of Shaolin’ to be bigging-up William & Kate? Do the audience need to hear about your fucking Twitter pages or gripes with the promoter? Tonight reaches a nadir in one of the most absurd stabs at product placement imaginable, when a flunky holds aloft a t-shirt at the back of the stage WHILST WU-TANG PERFORM. It goes without saying that Wu-Tang have never been adverse to expanding their market (the countless solo albums, the film scores, the clothing line attest to this), but they’ve lost their crucial element: danger.

There’s no sense that they’re doing this out of necessity any longer. In their mid-90s prime the Clan was the result of a bunch of enormously talented individuals fashioning their skills into something cooperatively great. Now, they have the demeanour of a lethargic travelling circus, slothfully reeling-out their back catalogue to the devotees, provided ‘outside interests’ do not deem otherwise. Those who still worship at the temple of Wu – who are animated and adoring throughout tonight – deserve better than this wet fart of a show for their 35 quid.

As ‘Triumph’ and a messy take on ‘Hand On The Pump’ ring-out, there’s only one question left to answer. Wu-Tang Forever? Nah, you’re alright, love. Let’s just remember the good times.

Originally appeared in CLASH Magazine

We're All Going To Die