Loud And Quiet 59 – Mac Demarco by LoudAndQuiet

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 59 / the alternative music tabloid

+ Slowdive La Sera Trash Talk Luke Abbott Olga Bell Matt Berry

No joke Mac DeMarco

contents

welcome

Trash Talk – 12

Music. It’s a serious business. Of course no one wants to admit that they take themselves too seriously, but most people do. They’ve all seen what happens to The Cheeky Girls, the Jedwards, the Darkenesses. It’s no wonder nobody wants to crack a joke – it’s a short walk to novelty. Mac DeMarco is no joke, although, for the record, that’s not something he’s ever contested himself. He really doesn’t care how many people see him that way, perhaps – now three acclaimed records into a young career – aware of the weight of his well crafted, lethargic pop songs. Before I left him to his own devises in Amsterdam this month, I asked him outright if he wished he were taken more seriously. I believed him when he said no. To defend the Canadian’s pranks and gags, then (the onstage nudity, the ironic cover versions that close his shows, the cross-eyed poses to camera, the absurd answers in certain interviews), seems like a fight with no cause, but there’s something in Mac DeMarco that has his fans eager to make sure he’s not misrepresented. It all comes down to his songs, which clearly haven’t fallen out of his head in a way that his perceived slacker image would have us believe. If anyone’s earned the right to prick about, it’s him, and in doing so he’s become the artist that all other ‘Pitchfork bands’ aspire to be. Simple as DeMarco’s songs are, it’s hard to imagine most of his peers being able to convincingly perform them, never mind dream them up so consistently. The same could be said for comedic actor Matt Berry, whose star-turns in Toast of London and The IT Crowd have until now brought into question the sincerity of his music. It’s what we discuss on page 22, although to see just how seriously Berry takes this original vocation of his, you need look no further than his new album, ‘Music For Insomniacs’ – an instrumental ode to Mike Oldfield and sleepless nights. Stuart Stubbs

Slowdive – 16 La sera – 20 Matt berry – 22 Olga Bell – 24 Luke Abbott – 26 Mac demarco – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 59 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

+ Slowdive La Sera

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Trash Talk Luke Abbott Olga Bell Matt Berry

No joke Mac DeMarco

c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy S o n n y M c c a r t ney

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T hi s M o nth L &Q L o ve s P r im ave r a So und, A l e x C ul l , K e o ng wo o , L e a h W il s o n, N a tha n B e a ze r , nita ke e l e r , s a m hinde , T o ne s s a n s o m , W il l l awr e nce , The vie ws ex pre ssed in Loud And Quiet are those of the re spective contributor s and do not nece ssari ly reflect the opinion s of the m agazine or it s s taff. All right s res erved 2014 Loud And Quiet LTD. ISS N 2049-9892 Printed by Shar man & Comp any LTD . Di stributed by loud and quiet LTD. & forte

THE BEGINNING

Yorke’s Notes The month’s hidden headlines, revised / SST Records and Greg Ginn have settled their ongoing lawsuit with FLAG, a group made up of ex-Black Flag members, and ex-Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. Rollins isn’t in FLAG, but when he and Keith Morris (who also previously fronted BF and is a member of FLAG) attempted to trademark the group’s iconic 4-bar logo last summer, Ginn and his label sued. At first it looked like the judge had ruled in favour of FLAG, but the two camps have now settled the dispute. FLAG will continue, but without the logo. Ginn and SST will retain its copyright and the name and music of Black Flag. www.blackflagofficial.com

Try this at home

Illustration by Gareth Arrowsmith www.garetharrowsmith.com

Is it, is it wicked?: Sean McGeady’s week on a diet of UKG / It’s surprising how quickly nostalgia can be eclipsed. There’s only so many memories So Solid Crew can conjure. Even Daniel Bedingfield’s ‘Gotta Get Thru This’ doesn’t sustain me long. On a diet of flimsy rhythms, the onset of malnutrition is rapid. Dry eyes, brittle hair, mottled teeth – all the symptoms are there. It’s only been a day and I’m gaunt. I’m not convinced I can cope. It’s just a week, I think to myself, but a week is a long time to listen to nothing but UK Garage, just to get to the bottom of its recent resurgence. It’s the next big anniversary we’ve got to look forward to, now that Brit Pop has turned 20. And it feels like the celebrations have already started. But really, what got into us at the turn of the century? Imagine an auricular nightmare whose inhabitants express all the musical tact of a lobotomised Katy Perry, and all the lyrical dexterity of a lamb kofta. It exists. I’m soon lost in it. Everything’s so thin here. I’m scrambling for substance. I can’t find it. Where’s the kick drum?! Everything’s out of place. Between pitch-shifted vocals and comedy sound effects, each track sounds like a drugfuelled collision between Cubase and Cartoon Network. Repetition punctuated by springs and boings. It’s so self-referential, too. Ms. Dynamite and Lisa Maffia, Craig David and Robbie Craig, repeatedly reciting their own names in some desperate attempt to recall their identities. I feel my identity slipping, too. My mind shuts down as a defense mechanism. I am losing myself.

It’s been days now. Something’s gone wrong. Am I finding merit in Mis-Teeq? Or is this auditory Stockholm syndrome? I’m capture-bonding with Artful Dodger; their debut album has me hooked. Do I like garage? My hunger renewed, I search for something more modern. Toddla T doesn’t sate me. Mosca doesn’t fill me up. Disclosure is good. It’s tastier, more nutritious, perhaps because they’ve worked hardest at replicating the sound of 2000.They are to UK Garage what Kasabian are to Oasis. But it’s not pure. To OD on UKG you have to go back. Back to the old skool. It’s been a week now. On the tube, I glance into the dark windows and catch my reflection mouthing the words to 3 of a Kind’s 2004 number one single ‘Baby Cakes’. I’m not even listening to it. My feet are moving too, involuntarily dancing to the hideous jaunt of the 2-step shuffle. I’m infected. It’s in my bones. There’s no way back. I like it. I like UK garage. I love UK garage. Anger and disgust has given way to delirium. “Do you really like it?!” I ask some anonymous suited commuter. “Is it, is it wicked?!” He spits on me and gets off the tube. Finally my mind and body gives way. My legs buckle. I collapse, foaming at the mouth. The drug is too powerful. London’s commuters don’t care. They’ve seen it all before. “It’s his own fault.” I’m left tapping and choking on the Piccadilly Line, my body twitching in time to Shanks & Bigfoot’s ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’. Listen to anything enough and you will become accustomed. You’ve heard Emeli Sande, right?

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Dean Wareham, Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, Television’s Tom Verlaine, Suicide’s Martin Rev and more are to live score 15 unseen Andy Warhol films at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance this October. The event, curated by Wareham, celebrates the 20th anniversary of The Andy Warhol Museum, with the films featuring Marcel Duchamp, Edie Sedgwick, Donovan and others. www.warhol.org The Flaming Lips next album will be a complete cover of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, called ‘With A Little Help From My Fwends’. It will feature guests on each track, with Moby and Miley Cyrus on ‘Lucy InThe SkyWith Diamonds’. A portion of its proceeds will go The Bella Foundation, which assists lowincome, elderly and terminally ill pet owners with veterinary costs. www.flamminglips.com To celebrate the release of her autobiography, Clothes Clothes Clothes. Music Music Music. Boys Boys Boys, former Slits member Viv Albertine will be in conversation with Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey on June 24th atThe Big Green Bookshop, Wood Green, London. The evening will include a Q&A with the audience and book signing. www.biggreenbookshop.com Dom Yorke

books + second life

Nice Price, Baby Reef Younis maps out the second lives of superstars gone by, starting with Robert Matthew Van Winkle / series of failed, forgetful comebacks have seen him drop to theatre and Christmas light appearances amongst private function bookings and less than illustrious shows at the Desoto Seafood Festival and Wisconsin State Fair. But for all of the jokes, rejuvenations, resurrections, and a stack of regrettable music, Van Winkle’s ability to reinvent himself has been a common theme. As a dancer, rapper, motocross rider, former jet-ski racer, store-owner, and TV personality, he’s the king of the second life, and away from the fading novelty appearances of a washed up 46-year old rapper, he’s become a bit of a real-estate success story. Currently the handyman and host of The Vanilla Ice Project, a Changing Rooms-meets-MTV Cribs show where our erstwhile hero uses his home improvement skills to flip Palm Beach mansions for profit, his property dabbles have all the hallmarks of a Foxtons agent’s wet dream: a backdrop of silver Rolls’, popping champagne corks and private swimming pools. Hip-hop icon, home renovation expert. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds, but put in context of the Rob Van Winkle legacy, it’s probably the closest he’ll ever get to reality, even if it is TV. Word to your contractor.

Robert Matthew Van Winkle. Just let that name digest a little, and imagine all the things a Robert Matthew Van Winkle could achieve in this world: a small-time banker, a local councillor or an estate agent, perhaps. But not this Robert Matthew Van Winkle, he was destined for something bigger. That something came with a change to his mouthful of a moniker, a ground-breaking debut that became hip-hop’s fastest selling album of all time (as well as one of its snickering footnotes) and over 30 years of living the dream and doggedly battling the doldrums. Throw in a relationship with Madonna, a cameo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, a pet goat, support from Public Enemy, run-ins with Death Row enforcer Suge Knight, dabbles with punk-rock and reggae, obligatory fire-arm and assault charges, depression, vegetarianism, the drug-fuelled crash and inevitable suicide attempt, and Robert Van Winkle’s time as the smoother, cooler, Vanilla Ice makes for one of the great, contrasting music stories. At the height of his power, those shaved eyebrows and balloon pants hit the road with MC Hammer, opened for N.W.A and arguably produced the first genuine crossover hip-hop single to conquer the billboard charts. At the bottom end, a

Beastings by Benjamin Myers blue moose

In his latest novel, Benjamin Myers quite literally takes us for a walk on the dark side. Or rather a run on the dark side. A mute girl escaping abuse steals a baby and takes to the hills, pursued by her abuser, a demented drug-addled priest. We follow her bid to freedom, through the dramatic backdrop of the Cumbrian fells, along the way Myers’ description of the landscape so intense and vivid it breathes on the page. Needless to say, then, Beastings is not for the faint hearted. At times it’s genuinely unsettling as its author’s rich descriptive prose leads us willingly into the heart of a gothic nightmare. It is, however, a story that will grip you to the final word and undoubtedly Myers best work yet, following his 2012 standout, Pig Iron.

One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel by Julian cope

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, boys, boys. by Viv Albertine

Faber and Faber

Julian Cope’s life and work thus far has blurred the lines between myth, fantasy and reality, and One Three One does nothing to buck that trend. The book tells the story of a drug-fucked, timetravelling ’80s burnout and dedicated English hooligan whose kidnap during the 1990 World Cup is the catalyst for a series of events that could only have flowed from the pen of a true one percenter. And as always, Cope relishes his role as storyteller. One Three One picks you up and gets you high with the first line, and drops you off, pleasantly dazed but expectant of a massive comedown, over four hundred pages later. Righteous stuff!

Viv Albertine’s punk rock credentials are as solid as they come. Prior to helping to change the perception of women’s place in rock as part of seminal all-girl punk band The Slits, Albertine had formed her first band, The Flowers of Romance, with one Sid Vicious. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (Albertine’s autobiography) is a cool and candid eyewitness account of punk rock told from the girls’ perspective. The era and its output have been raked over so many times that it is heartening to hear the story told from a fresh standpoint, especially one that reminds us what was so exciting about it all in the first place.

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Blowback by Lee Bullman and Michael Forwell, published by Pan Macmillan available now. www.leebullman.com

by jani ne & L ee bull man

getting to know you

Honor Titus New York gutter punks Cerebral Ballzy grew up in skateparks listening to vintage hardcore. This month they release their second album, ‘Jaded & Faded’, which many thought they never would. Front man Honor Titus fills in our Getting To Know You questionnaire in an attempt to prove that recording artists are people too /

The best piece of advice you’ve ever been given “Don’t worry before you gotta. Worry changes nothing”

Your style icon The Reid brothers, aka The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Your biggest disappointment Not making worthwhile work.

The most famous person you’ve met I’ve met Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney. They both have this strange psychic enlightened thing about them. They both noticed me and were cordial and greeted me with almost familiarity.

The celebrity that pisses you off most even though you’ve never met them Miley, because she’s never kissed me.

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building Myself, duh! The worst date you’ve been on Lol. Your mumsy is a horrible cook and the BJ in the loo was lacklustre at best.

Your biggest fear “Drowning”

Your guilty pleasure Makeup. Your favourite word Fortune. Your pet-hate People who eat loudly, slurping and whatnot. And people who don’t know how to engage in proper conversation, talking incessantly without the care to listen. If you could only eat one food forever, it would be… Mashed potatoes, red velvet cake or pizza. The worst job you’ve had Le plungeur. Real Orwellian toiling over some dirty fucking dishes in hopes of surviving until the next tour. “Down & Out in NYC and London.” Didn’t last long. The film you can quote the most of Breathless (lol). Favourite place in the world Hannah’s bosom, although I’ll never see that again.

The best book in the world Querelle by Jean Genet.

The worst birthday or Christmas present you’ve received Nothing is always pretty bad but someone got me Harry Potter once and I was bummed knowing that someone wasted money on that for me. Your favourite item of clothing My NASCAR jacket has been garnering acclaim.

What is success to you? Being able to create and write comfortably. What talent do you wish you had? Piano virtuoso.

Your hidden talent Writing.

What is the most overrated thing in the world? Hatred.

The one song you wished you’d written ‘This Charming man’ by The Smiths

What would you change about your physical appearance? My skin has been an absolute nightmare!!! Woe is me. What’s your biggest turn-off? Stupidity What would you tell your 15-year-old self? Play the piano Your best piece of advice for others Do what you want and seek out pertinent and honest and valid knowledge.

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my place

At home with Trash Talk photo g rapher: nathaniel wood / writer: david zammitt

His band may have cultivated a reputation for fearsomeness but, today at least, Trash Talk’s Lee Spielman is on relatively bubbly form. Talking me through the contents of his L.A. warehouse apartment, I barely need to utter a prompting word as the singer, in understandably hoarse tones, whizzes through the overflowing inventory of his home in record time. If I didn’t know better, I would say that he wanted to get rid of me. But it isn’t rudeness that keeps our time brief. Lee is eager to get back to potentially the biggest day of Trash Talk’s career to date. Today’s date marks the release of the hardcore punks’ latest LP, ‘No Peace’, and some Californian fans have been able to bypass the hassle of getting to their local record shop, or even having to fire up Spotify, as Spielman has been driving around Los Angeles personally handing out copies. His and his band’s Twitter profiles are littered with pictures of fans posing as they clutch the new LP after responding to Spielman’s generous offer. As we chat, a user calling himself Django writes, “Fucking @LeeSpielman just drove to my house to hook me up with the new @TRASH_TALK. Rad dude.” As trite as it sounds, that, for Trash Talk, is what it’s all about. There’s a barbecue for fans later on in LA’s Pacific Park and the band have just announced an upcoming US tour that will be completely free. It’s hard to not feel a little superfluous but Spielman is also happy to talk as he rhymes off the tales behind his possessions and his living quarters at a rate of knots. It might not be what most would consider homely, but the converted work space is leafy suburbia compared to his previous abode. “I like it,” he says, looking around. “It’s definitely a change of pace. The old place was a crazy punk warehouse in South Central that was covered in graffiti and ramps. We just moved to LA and it was our first house together as a band. We were shipping merch out of there and it was

kind of a crazy, weird flophouse with people coming in and out all the time. Our landlord ended up not being down with that so we ended up being kicked out. He was just a shady landlord altogether. But we came over to this spot to find somewhere industrial enough to do work.” The area, unsurprisingly, is attracting investment and is already beginning to change in the year that he’s lived there. “They’re taking the whole industrial area of Downtown Los Angeles and realising that all those businesses fail and they’re turning them all into loft-style apartments like New York or something. It’s crazy to see the area becoming gentrified. They’ve opened a Whole Foods near my house and there’s a little boutique coffee shop when a couple of years ago it was just alleys and warehouse buildings.” I tell him that Whole Foods doesn’t seem very Trash Talk. “It’s strange but we’ll see what happens with it,” he says. “But it’ll be cool. Everyone in my building’s tight.” The material objects with which Spielman surrounds himself are more than the sum of their parts. The immense pride he has in his and Trash Talk’s work is obvious and he’s acutely aware that the privileged position he and his band mates occupy might not – and likely won’t – last forever. And so he preserves fanatically. There are keepsakes strewn around the space that freeze tours, parties, and friends in time. Collecting, for him, is all part of recording what he still views as an adventure. “Fuck yeah,” he buzzes. “You need something to remind you. I don’t work 9-5. I’m just here having fun with my friends trying to make cool and interesting shit that blows people’s minds, you know? Like the free tour shit. It gets boring if you keep doing the same shit. We wanna make kids happy. We all had those bands when we were little kids. We all had those bands who mean something to us.”

01. Graffitied wall & door “This wall right here is what the old house used to look like. That door is my bedroom door to my old room. When we moved out of that place we had to demolish it or else we were going to get sued by the landlord. But the workers I had helping me saved that wall cut it out and transferred it to my new house. We were in that old spot for like two years and so much happened there – shows and stuff. So it was important to keep something.”

02. custom board “Jay Howell did this as well. It’s a Creature skateboard and we put out a video with them for Slander. It’s all of our friends. Everyone who kicks it with us, everyone who works with us – they’re all in the crowd. My roommate, Rick, who takes photos, he’s in there with a Polaroid camera. My other friend is standing on top of the guitar stack.”

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03. Decks

05. Lee’s bedroom

“All of these are boards my friends have sent me. I haven’t really thought about it but I wanna hang them all up. They’re all cruisers and old shapes and stuff. Strange companies and shit. It’s the same as all the other collecting. I’ve always collected skateboards. I’ve met so many people who are like 40, who say, ‘Oh fuck, I wish I had that. That’s the board that I had when I was five’.”

“All this shit on my walls – we used to have this wall in my old house called the shit wall. It was just things that we collected on tour and stuff. I put all that stuff in a box and now it’s hanging on the walls. There’s a little pink photo – that’s my friend at the the Marciano House in LA on New Year’s Eve three years ago. It was this 53 million dollar mansion that we went to this weird ass party in. The Polaroids in the middle are all photos from the warehouse so they’re all grainy as fuck.That’s a picture of Lil B up top. Sometimes at festivals kids show up and ask us to sign stuff and then they put it on eBay Buy It Now, you know what I mean? They do that to bands all the time. So I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll sign your fuckin’ photos if you gimme that Lil B photo, so this kid gave me a signed Lil B photo.’The peace sign is a painting that my friend from England actually made – my buddy from Leeds. He used to play in a bunch of sick punk bands and he comes on tour with us and kicks it. He’s been one of the dudes that’s been with us in England since we first came. When nobody gave a fuck he helped us out, let us sleep on his floor and shit. There’re two graffiti stickers with two throw-ups. One of those people passed away – Jade. And one of them is MQ, one of our favourite graffiti writers. And that’s a Drake tour ticket stub!”

04. Microphones “I’ve had these microphones forever. There’s like red in them, which is blood. We’ve played hundreds of shows with those mics. The grills look fucked – busted and beaten and caked with blood. I try to take them everywhere. If I don’t I get pretty fucked off because every time you break someone else’s mic it costs you like two hundred bucks, so it’s better to take your own.”

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my place

06. The Roof “Up here, this was like my number one thing for wanting to get this apartment. When the dude was showing me around, I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a roof,’ and he was nonchalantly like, ‘Let’s go and see the roof.’ But the moment you get up the stairs it’s like holy fuckin’ shit! It’s a breathtaking view. I used to live in a house with no windows and an alley in South Central so now to live in an apartment with 18-foot high ceilings and industrial windows and a view like that from the roof, it just makes you feel better when you wake up every day and you’re not in a dark, black box. It’s refreshing to how you operate your whole day. This roof, we barbecue up here, we kick it up here. It’s my little getaway spot. The sun sets on the west, right on my window so it looks fuckin’ supertight. It feels good.”

07. The spare room

08. Photo book

“A friend of ours who used to sell merch for us used to live in here but now it’s just our spare room. Our drummer lives in New York so every time he’s out here he stays in here. It’s kind of bare and grim but… Sometimes people come home drunk and just make it to this room before any other one.”

“This is a book that we put out a year ago. It’s our second one and it’s just us and all of our homies and all the photos we took. It almost serves as a yearbook with photos from Japan, Australia and Europe. We try to document everything so that when we are 50 and we can’t remember shit we can flip through that book and work out what everything is, what happened and why we took that photo, you know? It’s the Trash Talk yearbook.”

09. Never Count Tomorrow “This is from my friend Jay Howell. He’s done a music video for us before and has a show on Nickelodeon called Sanjay and Craig and he did Bob’s Burgers and stuff. Right when I moved into my house I went to his art show and that was his gift to me. That’s why it hangs there framed, because he fucking kills it. It was like a housewarming gift of sorts.”

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P r i m av e r a S o u n d

Pacemakers In their first extensive interview since their split in 1995, Daniel Dylan Wray meets Slowdive at Primavera Sound photo g rapher: Jenna foxton / writer: daniel dylan wray

In the build up to my interview time with Slowdive I sit watching John Grant perform. The sky begins to shift into looming black and grey patches, which soon transform into total blanket coverage of black, ominous dread. Shattering forks of lightning spark in the sky and then thunder rumbles with such shuddering force it sounds like an angry giant has been awoken in the heavens.Within minutes, a festival that only moments earlier was soaked in beaming sunlight is being clattered with biblical rain. John Grant sadly loses half his audience as people run for shelter and it is here that I duck backstage to meet the newly reformed band that originated from Reading in 1989. In the series of cabins that make up the dressing rooms and backstage areas of Primavera Sound, all that can be heard is the unrelenting thud and hammer of rain on the thin roofs and the quiet hum of last month’s Loud And Quiet front cover artist on the distant stage. The weather seems

bizarrely fitting, as, for me, Slowdive’s music has always had such an elemental force to it. While it may not be this kind of black-sky-end-of-days style weather, there has certainly always been a cloudiness to their work, an atmospheric ambiguity and fogginess that fluctuates in tensions and densities leaving one never really knowing if they are about to experience a break in the clouds or witness them fall in on you. With Slowdive’s return to playing live again, that question and elemental feeling is as relevant as ever. It’s almost twenty years since Slowdive released any material, 1995’s monstrously overlooked and underappreciated ‘Pygmalion’, an album that was essentially their resignation letter – handed-in crammed full of electronic loops, transcendental tectonic shifts and eerie, lucid ambience, this was done knowing full well that it would not meet the requirements of label boss Alan McGee, who had supposedly demanded a pophit from the group. Sure enough it did

the job. The band were dropped after three LP’s on Creation and have not performed or released any material as Slowdive since. ‘Pygmalion’ was never even heard live outside of their practice space. Tonight is their fourth show since reforming but it is unquestionably their biggest one yet, their grand return to their biggest audience. Sitting down with founders Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell they both concede, “we’re all a bit anxious”. The biggest question of any reunion after so long is always why? In 2009 Halstead told Drowned in Sound when asked about the possibility of a future Slowdive reunion happening: “I doubt it. I would really have to need some money!” So, has that day finally come? “That day has definitely come,” he says, laughing. “I don’t know if we’ll make that much… to be completely honest, it’s something we’ve wanted to do and we wanted to make a new record so the gigs were just part of the plan to do that really.”

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In fact Halstead is keen to point out that Slowdive are not likely to become yet another reformed band living off twenty-year-old material. “It’s the heritage industry,” he says. “It’s kind of a shame. It just seems very hard as an industry, the bottom has fallen out of it so much.” The duration of their absence has been so great since the group last got together and played music that Halstead had to use a website called Guitar-Geek to look up what his guitar and pedal set-up used to be, in order to try and recreate the group’s sound. Tonight it will be a sound that the band has allowed their audience to dictate to them, somewhat. As Goswell tells me: “It’s a bit of a mix. Some stuff is taken from sets we used to play and we did ask people on Twitter what their favourite tracks were and took note of that.” “It feels like natural selection to me,” adds Halstead. “It feels like we’re playing the stronger material from the records. It would be nice to play some

more stuff from ‘Pygmalion’ but… “…We need more time to work on it,” says Goswell. “It will take us a while. We’ll get there, though.” While the return of Slowdive has been greeted euphorically by fans and press, seeing their summer gig schedule fill up swiftly, they weren’t always welcomed with such open arms. In the early 1990s with new musical genres on the rise, the press took a universal backlash against Shoegaze, a scene that Slowdive were thrown into whether they liked it or not, and journalists took it in turns to come up with the harshest putdowns for the group. Writing about ‘Souvlaki’ – an album now held up as something of a masterpiece – Dave Simpson, then of Melody Maker, wrote: “At its worst, this record is a soulless void, devoid of pain, anger, feeling or concern. ‘Sing’ aside, I would rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge than ever listen to it again.” He was not alone in his criticism, although looking back on this side of things Halstead is characteristically relaxed and

indifferent. “Personally I don’t really care,” he says. “I think we got caught up in it. A lot of the stuff wasn’t directed at us, it was directed at a scene that had kind of had its day. We got eaten up by Grunge and we got eaten up by Britpop. When I was a kid you used to buy the NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. You’d read the reviews and you’d go out and buy a record because that was your source and it’s not like that now – you end up with a much more direct relationship with people that buy your music. It’s a different set-up now and I don’t think any of us are interested in mainstream press really, in the same way that we were at the time.” Slowdive were incredibly young back then, still teenagers, and with twenty years of gestation time I wonder if their youth and naivety can now be viewed as a blessing or a curse? “You don’t remain naive for very long in that industry,” says Goswell, although Halstead’s opinion differs. “I think we did, though. We were very naïve in a business sense and probably

musically as well and we didn’t really understand how the business worked. We signed to Creation, which was our favourite label. To be fair we all really enjoyed it. It was a really amazing experience to be able to do those things and tour America when you were eighteen years old. I know a lot of emphasis has been placed on the fact that the press didn’t really get it but I don’t know how much that affected our own personal enjoyment of it. We did genuinely enjoy it and we did genuinely enjoy making the records and going out and doing the gigs. That was our world, the press thing was outside of it; we didn’t really have anything to do with it, it just happened around us.” I ask if there are any feelings of vindication now? “It would obviously be disappointing if you made a record and not that it gets a bad review but that it just doesn’t get appraised in anyway, just that it’s like, ‘oh, this is part of this scene and we don’t really like that,’”

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says Halstead. “But there were still kids out there who liked the records and if there is any vindication then it’s that there are still kids out there that want to listen to the music now.” “I think business-wise it was a curse,” says Goswell, to elaborate on the band’s naivety when it came to business matters. “In a band when you get signed you are told all these things that you have to have – a manager, an accountant etc. We were made bankrupt, we had a lot of problems due to an accountant who did ultimately end up in prison, and he was sued by a lot of bands, a lot of bigger bands, so we were very naïve in that sense and that side of things was very difficult and that sort of ricocheted around for years after we split up. So I would say from that point of view it was definitely a curse being young and naïve. We were too trusting, believing that people had our best interests at heart when actually they didn’t and obviously twenty years later we’re all a lot more savvy.”

P r i m av e r a S o u n d

“At the time as a band we were just literally interested in making the music and we had a manager who dealt with everything else,” says Halstead. “It wasn’t really until the band split up that we realised, ‘oh fuck, all that shit he was supposed to be taking care of he really didn’t.’ It happens in all walks of life though, doesn’t it? It’s not just music.”

he music industry in 1994 compared to 2014’s is of course infinitely different, and something that Halstead is certainly aware of. “It’s [the industry] a weird, strange beast,” he says. “Especially at that time I think it was. Now that the music industry has eaten itself and it’s a different kind of world I, in some ways, miss the sort of irresponsibility of that period in music because it was like bands would be signed for fifty grand and told to go and do some demos and be forgotten about for two years and then someone in accounts would be like ‘hang on a minute, didn’t we give fifty grand to some band like two years ago?’. That doesn’t happen anymore and there was something quite nice about that in some ways. Now everything is very responsible and now as a band you have to be able to completely look after yourself musically, financially, you have to have all the social network stuff. You have to do everything. It’s crazy. You’ll have promoters emailing you saying, ‘can you promote the show a bit more on your Facebook’, and I’m

like, ‘that’s your fucking job!’ But now it’s up to the bands to do everything. They are not allowed to be irresponsible anymore, which is sort of a shame. We were basically irresponsible because we didn’t take care of the business ourselves and that did allow us to make the records we wanted to make.” Of all the labels to be young and irresponsible on, Creation during the ’90s was the perfect home – a label as notorious for its partying as it was its musical output. However, Slowdive were on the verge, compared to Primal Scream and Ride. Goswell points out that they didn’t live in London, while Halstead recalls how young they were. “We always felt like the kids who were up a bit late because everyone was so much older than us,” he says. “I remember McGee taking us to the Hacienda with Bobby Gillespie. It was about a week after we signed to Creation and we did a gig in Manchester and I just sat down and it was a bit like hanging out with your parents because these guys were like twenty years older than us. That’s how it felt, so I don’t remember going to a party at Creation. We would always turn up and be slightly aware that a party had been going on.” “Yeah you would arrive like that,” says Goswell. “I remember Teenage Fanclub still being there the morning after being wasted the night before. I remember going to see Primal Scream with McGee and he was dishing out E’s.” “You probably shouldn’t say that,” says Halstead, at which point I explain that I have previously interviewed Alan

McGee and I don’t think for one second he would have any issues or sense of denial when it comes to his drug-use being discussed in public. Their relationship with the label wasn’t always as fraught as is often documented, though. “We would always go into the studio and the record company would never come,” says Halstead. “We’d just make the records and give them to Creation. Other than on one occasion when we gave Alan half a record and he was just like, ‘no, I think you guys should make some other stuff’, every other time we’d just give them the record and they’d say ‘cool’ and they’d put it out.” Talk turns back to the future and the now, with the band about an hour away from taking the stage. They’ve expressed plans for new material, too, so what, exactly, does the future hold for Slowdive?

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“We’re going to get through the summer and play these shows and see how we go,” says Halstead. “The thing with Slowdive is that it’s always very organic; there has never really been a plan and I can never see that changing at this point. I think if we get to the end of the summer and feel like we have some ideas and it feels like a creative enterprise worth doing then we’ll move forward and try recording something. I guess we’ll have to figure out how Slowdive MKII will work.” I stand side of stage to wait to see how Slowdive MK II will work. As the simple banner with the band’s name rolls down on stage the crowd erupts. Brian Eno’s (a collaborator on ‘Souvlaki’) ‘Deep Blue Day’ plays as warm-up music, a gentle swirling of glistening euphoria fills the air and Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel guitar glides seamlessly through the now muggy and calm evening. The band ascend the ramp, walk on under heavy purple lighting and play their first ever song from their first EP, ‘Slowdive’. Halstead and Goswell’s voices merge and entangle like estranged friends. It’s a harmonious melding that, when boosted by guitars that sound like underwater chainsaws and drums that thunder and clatter with surprising clout, sounds as forceful as it does withheld. During ‘When the Sun Hits’, ‘Machine Gun’ and the incredible ‘Crazy forYou’, out in the vast audience heads are in hands, arms are aloft, eyes are wide and manic euphoria is on the faces of people who have, in some cases, been waiting a lifetime to hear this music performed live. Goswell tells the audience “This has been very special for us” as they close with a longstanding, screeching Syd Barrett cover of ‘Golden Hair’. And like the freak flash-flood weather earlier on, Slowdive are here and gone within the hour, leaving behind them a permeating, lingering atmosphere, which is unquestionably all their own.

Girl uninterrupted Katy Goodman’s life after Vivian Girls, in the form of La Sera reborn photo g rapher: P hil sharp / writer: Tom fenwick

Katy Goodman and I are having communication issues. “Wait, what did you sa… ” The phone line briefly crackles, only to cut out completely. It buzzes again and Goodman’s warm, convivial tones return in semi-clarity; “Okay, you’re going to have to repeat everything you just said.” Goodman and I have been trying to meet in pers on for a few days now, but after a gig falls through at the last minute it becomes apparent that we’re going to miss one another by a distance of almost 1000 miles. She is in the middle of a whistle-stop, two week European tour to promote her latest album, ‘Hour Of The Dawn’, a record that has seen her return in reinvigorated form under the guise of La Sera. I finally manage to catch her early on a Sunday morning, during what must be quite a jarring cultural shift, as she makes her way from Leeds to Paris, for the next date on the tour. She’s just woken from a brief nap – “Y’know, sleeping in the bus!” – and, putting our concerns about temperamental phone lines to one side, our conversation immediately turns to the experience of life on the road. “I love it,” she says. “England has been especially phenomenal and I’m super stoked about our live performance. I mean, that was a big focus when we were writing our album – that the songs would be fun to play live. And everyone who’s seen the show so far is telling us they love hearing the new stuff, so I think we accomplished our goal. “We’re on our way to Barcelona right now which is super exciting because I love the city with all its crazy, gorgeous Gaudi design. Plus I love the

big festival experience; it’s just so cool to hang out with people you might never normally meet and the huge crossover of fans makes for a really fun experience. But I don’t get to go out as much these days as I used to, so maybe that’s what makes the whole tour more fun,” she says. “Of course, it helps that we have a really awesome group of people with us. The guys in La Sera right now are just great and when everyone gets along well it makes life so much easier.” Life wasn’t always like this. La Sera started out back in 2011 as every bit the solo project, Goodman’s outlet from her day job as ‘Kickball Katy’, bassist for Vivian Girls, a group she formed alongside Cassie Ramone and Frankie Rose back in 2007. The trio’s career spanned three albums of freewheeling punk and infectious melodies that deftly drew together elements of ’60s girl groups with driving power pop. But after a number of years of inactivity – a period in which they all explored separate musical ventures – occasionally hinting at the possibility of a fourth collaboration, Vivian Girls finally confirmed their split earlier this year. It was an announcement that at the time seemed wholly amicable, a decision that Goodman approaches philosophically. “With the Vivian Girls we accomplished everything we set out to do and we all felt that if you don’t feel you can produce music with the same energy anymore, then everyone should move on and do different things; because there is something very important in drawing energy out of music” It was a move that forcibly

upgraded La Sera from side project to main concern for Goodman, although the shift in responsibility didn’t come as easily as you might assume for someone who was already used to the limelight. She says: “It is quite different and it was kinda hard going from being one of three to being the front person, but I feel like I’m finally happy with it now. It’s all about time – like anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it. I mean, it definitely took me a while to figure it all out, but now I’m comfortable having La Sera as my main project. While it might have started differently, that was four years ago, so it hasn’t been a sudden change; it’s just slowly transitioned into being my main thing.” This gradual evolution is evident just by listening to La Sera’s records; from Goodman’s self-titled debut, which held a dreamy, sun flecked, folk-pop charm, to its 2012 followup, ‘Sees The Light’, that built on what had come before, while adding new, angular musical sensibilities. Yet you only need to hear her latest single, ‘Losing To The Dark’, (a tale of drinkand drug-addled boyfriends set to muscular guitar solos and big rock arrangements) and it’s clear that for her third LP Goodman’s slate has almost been wiped completely clean. ‘Hour Of The Dawn’ holds a thrilling clarity and vigour that has the feel of a highly assured debut. It retains the influence of Goodman’s adopted home of California (she relocated in between albums) while returning in part to the sweat and hustle of Vivian Girls’ Brooklyn roots. “What we were going for was sort of a power pop vibe,” she says. “The

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Pretenders or The Cars – even The Smiths were a huge influence, because we wanted to make a classic eighties sounding rock album. We recorded as much of it live as we could, so it could still have that energy and hopefully that translates into the new sound. Y’know, warm but very energetic.” Much of this sonic bombast in La Sera’s sound has come about from working with new collaborators – in particular guitarist/producer Tod Wisenbaker – and it’s the companionship of these fellow songwriters and musicians that is something she’s sorely missed during the recording of her previous two albums alone. Unsurprisingly for a musician once of such a tight band as Vivian Girls, it seems that Goodman exists best in a group. “I much prefer writing and recording as a band,” she confirms. “I think that a lot of people’s input usually helps and makes it better. Of course, sometimes I guess it doesn’t always work out, but you just have to work with wonderful people. “Tod has obviously really influenced our sound, but everyone brought something to the music, so I guess it’s the first time that I’ve fully collaborated on a La Sera album. The first two records were just me writing the songs and then having a different producer come and record them with me. But this album has been totally different. I would come to practices with less finished things – just parts of songs – then the band would add their own input. In fact, two of the songs started with ideas from other people, so generally something good would always come out of it.”

Underneath all of the guitar shredding and West Coast warmth lies a darker lyrical intent on ‘Hour of The Dawn’. There are bittersweet anthems to summers past (‘Summer Of Love’), the transience of youth (‘Kiss This Town Away’) and desperate longing (‘All My Love Is For You’). “My heart is yours to throw away,” Goodman sings on the latter track. While on the raucous ‘Running Wild’, which holds clarity and amped up Rockabilly reminiscent of ‘Rusholme Ruffians’, Goodman sings “There’s no use in crying/If you’re drowning in the sea”. It’s an interesting dichotomy, which Goodman has toyed with before, but

never with quite such direct force or upbeat musical accompaniment. “Yeah, I’ve always liked that idea,” she says. “|If it’s a happy sounding song then it’s far more interesting to have really sad lyrics and occasionally vice versa. Although at its core I’d say this is actually a kind of hopeful album. It’s all about change and things getting better. The lyrics are all from my personal experiences with all of the songs based on people I know, or myself, or like things that have happened in my life.” With the idea of change on the table, it’s hard not to speculate how much the breakup of Vivian Girls –

who formed such a large part of her youth – had on the themes of an album that – with its vibrant and cacophonous sound paired with themes of loss, longing and belonging – seems like a blast of light after a period of darkness. It seems almost too coincidental, but it’s a suggestion that Goodman quickly dismisses. “Well, we recorded our album almost a year ago,” she explains, “which was a while before Vivian Girls broke up, so it didn’t really affect ‘Hour Of The Dawn’ or its sound because, y’know, it was already done.” She laughs. Then pauses. “Okay, well I guess until recently La

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Sera had always just been where I played soft, dreamy music because I could play loud, fast music elsewhere. The Vivian Girls had been the channel for my aggressive musical side for so long that when we started to wind that band down, I realised that I really still wanted to keep playing fast, high energy punk. So, since we played together less and less over the last few years I was definitely writing more punk sounding songs, simply because I love playing that kind of music live.” So, with a breakout new album that sounds fresher than anything she’s done since Vivian Girls, and a collective of musicians surrounding her that has finally made La Sera a tangible group, Goodman seems to be in her most natural habitat. But with her knack for changing sounds and styles over La Sera’s past few records, you have to wonder if she’ll stick with this style, now she finally seems comfortable. “I do feel super comfortable up on stage playing fast, aggressive music,” she says, “so now that most of our songs are that way I find the whole thing easier. So yeah, I think that we are going to continue along the same path of this album. “I mean, of course our next record won’t sound exactly like this one, but we’ll definitely be the same band. I think that we’ve found a sound that we are all into and comfortable with and like playing, so we will continue in this way for a while. Of course, I don’t know what is going to come next, but it’s that sense of freedom, of being able to do anything that we want to and not feeling like we have to be the same. I don’t know...” The line crackles again “...it just feels like a new day.”

To Sleep is To Dream Matt Berry stayed up all night so you don’t have to

photo g rapher: B en meadows / writer: S tuart stubbs

Last night, London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, played host to the BAFTA Television Awards 2014. Matt Berry was there, nominated in the Best Situation Comedy category for Toast of London, a show in which he stars as unfortunate jobbing actor and voiceover artist Steven Toast; a show that he co-created and co-wrote alongside Father Ted creator Arthur Matthews. Berry applauded politely as he lost out to BBC Three’s Him & Her. Then he got drunk. He thinks he went to the awards’ after party at The Grosvenor Hotel, but he knows that the party did, at some point, move back to his flat, until something like 4am. And so instead of meeting at Berry’s Thames-side home as planned, no longer fit for purpose, we meet at the pub next door. “It was some night,” he says on the exhale as he sits down. He doesn’t look as bad as he feels, although I suspect he would do had he won last night. Or maybe not. “Once you’ve lost, you might as well get pissed,” he says. The second series of Toast of London starts filming in four weeks, and so Berry is midway through growing a beard bushy enough to carve out Steven Toast’s manly shoe brush moustache from. It’s the official reason why we’re not taking photos today, although Berry later tells me it’s because he knew how hung over he’d be. Berry lives in one of those enviable apartments that you only ever see as a tourist in London, in one of those luxury Wharf conversions you need to be on a boat tour to get a proper look at. It’s all he’s ever wanted, and he says that when it came on the market three years ago he took it almost entirely from its riverside balcony. “The estate agent opened the door and I walk straight through to the outside and was like, ‘yes, this is the one’. I hadn’t even looked inside.” This spot – even more sanctuarylike on a calm Monday in early summer

– is a reminder of just how well Matt Berry is doing right now. Earlier in the month he turned 40, but while he’s never been more in demand than he is now, his professional life began as he approached another milestone a decade earlier. Today, he marvels at the fact that he was 29 when he took his first acting job, as Todd Rivers/Dr. Lucien Sanchez on cult ’80s spoof series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace – a show within a show that ham-fistedly mashed E.R. and The Twilight Zone to hilarious and bizarre affect. “It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago,” he says, “and now I’m 40! You’ve got to do as much stuff as possible because it goes so quick. That’s the only thing I’ve taken from it – ‘shit, man, it don’t half move quick!’.” Todd Rivers was a star turn in a trio of then underrated performances from Berry and show creators Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness. Berry quit his job at The London Dungeon and, quite unexpectedly, became an actor. “[Up until then] there was no plan to do comedy,” he tells me, “and I certainly wasn’t thinking about making any money out of it.” If there’s a thread that runs through all of Berry’s comedy characters since (The IT Crowd’s arrogant and absurd megalomaniac Douglas Reynholm, The Mighty Boosh’s angry zoo owner and upper class bully Dixon Bainbridge, the ill-fated Steven Toast and the testosterone-filled lothario of Beef from Vic Reeves’ and Bob Mortimer’s more recent House of Fools), it’s the bullishness that comes with that voice of his – that booming, velvet voice that constantly sounds overdubbed but ever so slightly too high in the mix and just out of synch. It started with Dr. Sanchez and has had more than a few convinced that Matt Berry is simply playing himself at varying decibels, regardless of the role. Yet on meeting him you can’t fail to realise just how

good a comic actor he is, even if his characters are nuanced. I can tell that it’s not too much of a stretch for him to deliver that burr, but it’s not him. He supposes people do expect him to be like Reynholm or Bainbridge or Toast, “but it’s all bullshit and greasepaint, isn’t it?” “I’d like to think that there’s not any of me in those characters,” he says. “I mean, Toast, as an example, he’s a bunch of actors that I’ve worked with and the characteristics of them that I found most funny. I’m nothing like him. He’s pissed off with his lot. He thinks he should be a lot more well known and successful; that is not where I am,” he insists. “He does this thing where he makes out that he doesn’t know who other actors are because he can’t deal with competition. I’ve seen actors do that.” When I ask him what he tells people he does for a living if ever asked, he says: “Oh God, I don’t know. I’d probably say I’m self employed and hope they leave me alone.” It’s impossible to ignore Berry’s acting career, but a more pressing matter is his fourth album, ‘Music For Insomniacs’, released the day we meet [19 May 2014] via Acid Jazz Records. Contrary to how it may look now that Berry has made a name for himself as a comic actor, a career in music was always where he saw his life heading, and his latest album is a particularly poignant one. ‘Music For Insomniacs’ is a record made for a function, and also Matt Berry’s ode to a hero he found as a child. He was 12 when he first heard ‘Tubular Bells’ by Mike Oldfield; it affected him deeply. “That made its mark with me,” he says. “It was the thing that stuck with me because it wasn’t a pop song, it was the length of a whole side. It sounded like chaos and I could sense that there was a damaged person behind the whole thing, and if

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you’re 12 and you feel like that yourself, it’s a big deal.” Berry was so inspired by Oldfield that he started making music himself. “My parents did an amazing thing – they bought me an organ, like a grandad type organ,” he says, miming the cumbersome instrument. “So they bought that but the coolest thing they did was they totally left it up to me to decide whether I would play it or not. There was no forcing me to take lessons or anything like that. They knew that I wanted one, but that was it. And because there was no pressure to learn it I just approached it from an ideas angle. So I couldn’t play anyone else’s songs because I can’t read music and I couldn’t then, so I’ve had to make up my own. And from there I got a 4-track tape recorder, and I was fascinated by that, and I was off.” He’s felt his way around music ever since, playing the organ, guitar and bass however the hell he likes and selfrecording his four records to date: ‘Opium’ (2008), ‘Witchazel’ (2011), ‘Kill The Wolf’ (2013) and the new ‘Music For Insomniacs’. It was whilst writing music for The Mighty Boosh that Berry was offered his first role as Dr. Sanchez, and in 2006 Steve Coogan didn’t seem to care about Berry’s lack of music academia when he asked him to compose the music for his Saxondale series. The same went for Richard Ayoade who wrote spoof Jesus Christ rock opera AD/BC with Berry in 2004. “The rules of music stop so many people,” he tells me. “My band, for instance, they’re all technically amazing, and they say, ‘these songs you’ve written shouldn’t work, because you’re going against all these things,’ and I’m like, ‘yeah, but they sound alright though, right?’ And they’re like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, but they shouldn’t’. They wouldn’t be able to write them because they don’t want to look like they don’t know what they’re

doing, whereas I just don’t give a fuck.” Berry contests it, but ‘Music For Insomniacs’ is a far cry from his previous albums. It’s completely instrumental, for one, and performed solely on a synthesizer. It’s also divided into two 23-minute suites. Where ‘Opium’, ‘Witchazel’ and ‘Kill the Wolf’ were earthy, folk-based records, featuring songs about the perils of the countryside and woodland animals, ‘Music For Insomniacs’ is purposefully out of this world, just like ‘Tubular Bells’ and John Michel Jarre’s ‘Oxygene’ (another Matt Berry touchstone), and just where your head should be at 3am. Berry wrote it whilst suffering from chronic sleeplessness, in order to occupy another endless night and to provide fellow insomniacs with a cure. The way he saw it was, the ambient music he was advised to listen to was too uneventful, thus causing his mind to wander, whilst anything too chaotic was a distraction from nodding off. There had to be a medium and ‘Music For Insomniacs’ is Berry’s – an album that dovetails from Oldfield homage to twinkling lullaby; from strange field recordings to rising robo

‘The rules of music stop so many people, whereas I just don’t give a fuck’

nursery rhymes; from near silence to motorik krautrock. It’s a seriously composed score for a serious problem, which is not how Berry’s musical output has been seen up until now. On one hand it seems unfair that his music should be considered a joke just because of his increasingly successful career in comedy, but Berry’s seemingly blurred the lines a little himself on that front. If you take his voice out of his previous records – which can’t help but recall Dr. Sanchez’s brief foray into pop music (‘One Track Lover’) or Steven Toast’s sudden musical outbursts – plenty of humour remains. ‘Love Is A Fool’ from ‘Opium’, for example, is a lounge track purposefully introduced in Berry’s bawdy acting tone, and much has been made of the line “I don’t give a damn for the cows and the sheep as they strain to excrete” on ‘Witchazel’. Berry’s two worlds occasionally bleed into one another, too, with ‘Witchazel’ track ‘Take My Hand’ appearing as the theme song to Toast of London and the melody of a track performed in a number of episodes planted into the closing minutes of

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‘Music For Insomniacs Part 1’. The artwork for ‘Music For Insomniacs’ hangs in Toast’s theatrical agent’s office, too, and the fact that Berry likes to have Toast sing when he can doesn’t help matters. And yet much of ‘Kill The Wolf’ and its younger siblings are in fact no less daft than Foxygen, say. Forget it’s the guy from The IT Crowd for a second and I’d be surprised if your initial thought is that this is a novelty record. “I think my comedy used to get in the way of being serious,” says Berry, “but I don’t think it does anymore. You’ve just got to have a bit of form. I’ve had three albums that have done alright, critically, and I’m not doing it for a fucking joke. I think you’ve got to prove yourself and do enough stuff for people to see that you’re taking it seriously. Plus, this country is not good at dealing with anyone who does more than one thing. In every other European country it’s not a big thing, but here it’s like, ‘hang on a minute, you’re the funny guy, what’s this?!’. But as the albums have come out and it’s obvious that a lot of work goes into everything it’s kinda shifted a bit, I think. It’s too much work for one joke.”

On the edge of something In ‘Krai’, her debut solo album, Olga Bell explores remote regions of the Soviet Union, where she was born and lived as a child. It’s a record performed completely in Russian, and one that explores the idea of nationality from a composer who considers herself American but holds her heritage so dear that she extensively visited these little known areas without leaving her Brooklyn apartment photo g rapher: G UY EPPEL / writer: THOMAS MAY

“I should begin by saying that one of my earliest musical memories is of my mother playing a cassette recording of the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble.” It’s surely no accident that Olga Bell (perhaps best known as a touring member of Dirty Projectors) begins our interview at this point. ‘Krai’, her debut solo LP released earlier this year via One Little Indian and performed completely in Russian, is an intense interrogation of her concepts of identity and belonging: concepts that are continually shaped and reshaped by messy webs of memory and nostalgia. So perhaps a scene from Bell’s own

personal history, in which numerous strands – those of family, of nationality, of music and sound – coalesce in a single moment, is the only logical starting point for our discussion. “[My mother] was a radio broadcaster and journalist. And she had a programme on Radio Moscow called ‘Folk Box’ and she would DJ music on that programme and talk about it: music from all across the Soviet Union which was a territory even more vast than Russia at the time.” Bell’s enthusiasm for this music is palpable, even as her voice is relayed to me over the phone from across the Atlantic. The composer’s conversation

is engaging and erratic, continually spinning off in unexpected transgressions and observations, her humour and personability a far cry from the occasional steeliness of her latest record. “So even though I grew up as a classical musician, as a classical pianist, and then I moved to New York to get into electronic composition, songwriting, beat making, that sound, that sound of the Pokrovsky Ensemble…” At this point she trails off, trying in vain to recall the name of the recording, lodged somewhere deep within her subconscious. “Basically it’s this Russian folk singing

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sound that just became so ingrained in me I didn’t even realise it until I had this opportunity to write an original composition for voices and a bandbased chamber ensemble.” Having emigrated from Russia at the age of seven, Bell grew up in Alaska before relocating to her current home of NewYork. And as such, Bell’s Russian identity is little more than spectral: half-formed and elusive, learned from and displaced onto other people, other times and places. “It really begins with my mother, and then it expands to my piano teacher who is very much also like family to me,” she recalls.

“Growing up I had this incredible piano teacher who I worked with from age seven to seventeen and my lessons all happened in Russian and sometimes we would have some soup after lessons. We ate a little bit of Russian food in my household growing up but because I had an American stepfather we mostly spoke English and we mostly ate like normal Alaskan people do, I guess. I do have family in Moscow still but I’ve only been back there twice since leaving in 1990.” And it’s this deeply felt – yet residual and intangible – sense of nationality that Bell explores on ‘Krai’, a nine part song-cycle first performed at the Ecstatic Music Festival in 2011. “Judd Greenstein, who’s a wonderful composer and friend of mine around New York, asked me to share a programme with him [at the festival],” she says. “He was writing a piece called ‘Yehudim’ in which I performed. And that piece was retelling the stories of King Solomon but it was sort of a fusion of Judd’s history and Jewish culture and the music he was interested in presently. And I was inspired by that and I decided that I would do something similar for the first half of the programme which was wide open, and mine.” Following this initial moment of inspiration, Bell settled upon the Russian concept of “krai” (pronounced “cry”) to provide the piece with its overarching structure and concept. The word has numerous meanings in Russian. “It’s an incredible little four letter word that can mean ‘my homeland’, ‘the frontier’, ‘the edge of something’,” says Bell. “In everyday Russian, it just means ‘the edge’, like the edge of the table, or the edge of the curtain.” But the word also has a more specific definition, referring to a collection of remote regions around the country. It’s these territories that Bell’s piece explores, taking the form of a sort of sonic cartography: each of ‘Krai’’s movements evokes one of these regions, drawing on its musical and cultural traditions, its climate and landscape. “I just googled that word ‘krai’ and at the top of the search results was the map of the krais of Russia,” she tells me. “I had only really been to two of them and I just decided to go digitally, travel around.” Bell spent the following months engaged in painstaking research, gathering together information to use throughout the composition. “I was pretty methodical about it; I would pick one and I would write to my mom and say ‘now I’m going to spend the next few weeks trying to write something for Zabaikalsky Krai; tell me everything you know. Tell me who lives there, historically who’s lived there, what it sounds like…’ And she would just send me all these video and audio links; and her friends at the radio were able to send me incredible field recordings.” Despite having collected her source

materials remotely in this way, Bell is keen to emphasise the breadth and comprehensiveness of her research: a point that seems important to her personally and professionally. “I tried to really have the greatest sample size that I could,” she continues. “I just kept searching and listening and watching until something really grabbed me and then I would study it. For the fourth movement, for instance, I was sent, by a friend who’s in Russia, just a really super-duper lo-fi recording of this little granny, and she’s singing a melody that seemed really simple but then she would change time signatures. And I was so hypnotised and enamoured by it that I learned it and then I sang it into my computer and then I played it on my keyboard. I learned the technique and rhythms that she was using in this...” – pausing for emphasis, marvelling at the seemingly effortless musical complexity – “...little ditty that I’m sure she just rattled off like it was nothing.” Our conversation continues to deviate via anecdotes and asides like this, bespeaking Bell’s desire to emphasise her faithfulness in recreating the sounds and traditions of the krai. “In the second movement for instance, which is ‘Altai Krai’: the indigenous music of that region is very much like Tuva, which is right near by. And they have this really, really incredible throat singing. I tried to imitate that with the processor that’s working on my voice. And the very simple strummed guitar part was

totally inspired by exactly what I heard on all these recordings of traditional Altai singers. And there’s a jaw-harp which I learned to play and I was able to record in my closet.” Here, she begins to laugh, acknowledging the quaintness of her attempts to approximate the music that has so powerfully captured her imagination. Such descriptions of the process of composing and recording ‘Krai’ – insofar as they can be interpreted as efforts to establish the authenticity of the project – are perhaps surprising, or at least conspicuous. Of course, any understanding of ‘Krai’ as arising seamlessly from the cultures and places it describes is by no means unproblematic. “It’s sort of an ethnomusicological project, a little bit, but it’s still largely a work of fiction,” Bell allows. “It’s like these impressions of mine.” Even whilst it draws together threads of musical traditions, social history, and even, on occasion, natural sounds, Bell’s narrative remains as artificially constructed as it is rooted in any reality: ‘Krai’ is, and could only ever have been, a sonic reconstruction of the composer’s hyper-mediated, “digital” exploration of the territories of its title. “I could probably go to these places, especially the ones that I’ve not ever actually been to, and have a completely different experience and feel inspired to write something completely different,” she explains. “You could really make an argument that in some way it’s inauthentic.” But rather than undermine the validity of ‘Krai’, this element of what

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Bell describes as inauthenticity in fact seems fundamental to the work’s evocative allure. Throughout the piece, the regions that Bell attempts to capture remain veiled in mystique, as if lying – to employ another of the many meanings of the word “krai” – on “the edge of something”. And as such, the piece as a whole can be read as an allegory for Bell’s own sense of Russianness: laden with significance yet understood at a distance, reconstructed out of fragments – stories, cultural artefacts, distant memories – non-imminent to the artist’s own experience in the hereand-now. This tension – between Bell’s desire to create an artwork true to her homeland, true to herself, and her acknowledgement of the project’s inevitable failure – is played out strikingly within the music itself. Delivered entirely in Russian, Bell’s vocals adhere strictly to the conventions of the indigenous folk singing found across the various krai: “what I really wanted was this fully Russian experience, as far as the singing goes,” she tells me. Yet any attempts to create such a genuine, “fully Russian” experience are continually undermined by the accompanying ensemble, which, in Bell’s own words, intentionally sounds “strange and impossible”, mixing elements of electronica, contemporary chamber composition, and guitar-based indie. “It’s an interesting foil to the traditional voices,” she comments, before elaborating: “There’s nothing wrong with [retelling a tradition], but I’m interested in music that provides challenges and collisions and this swing between something that is confusing and something that’s familiar and something that’s dissonant. That’s what really interests me.” ‘Krai’, then, is a piece that perpetually erodes and impedes – negates, even – its own progress, the fulfilment of its lofty ambitions residing at an ever-receding horizon. But if this is music about failure, then its failure isn’t without its own beauty: there’s a tragic romanticism to Bell’s acknowledgement of the futility of her (nonetheless earnest) attempts to capture, recreate, and preserve the traditions of these regions – and, by extension, her own elusive sense of nationality. In this sense, ‘Krai’ is probably better understood as a nuanced examination, not of what it means to be Russian, but of what it means to belong to nowhere in particular: to possess an identity that’s based, in the end, on loss, on absence. Or, as the composer puts it towards the end of our conversation: “I do feel American, but I think that part of the American identity is that everyone has come to America from somewhere else.” It’s a poignant image, and one that should serve as a sensitive framing for any encounter with ‘Krai’’s aloof and beguiling sonic territories.

cross the table of a pub beer garden in Shoreditch, Luke Abbott emits an exasperated chuckle: “I don’t know!” he laughs, likeably self-aware, almost apologetic. “I just don’t know, I don’t know!” The electronic musician, composer and producer has said the phrase so many times in the last 45 minutes that it’s almost become a comedic mantra. What was he planning when he started work on his sprawling, dense and brazenly unorthodox new album? Why does he enjoy making such odd, challenging music? What emotional qualities does he think are expressed through it? Each time, Abbott admits to being unsure before furrowing his brow and starting to answer via an anecdote or a diversion into musical critical theory, or just throwing the question straight back over the table. But Abbott’s diffident conversational approach isn’t some exercise in strategic evasion, practiced inarticulacy or laziness. In fact, it’s almost the opposite: so insistent and conscientious is he to express himself with sincerity and honesty that he’s almost paralysingly averse to soundbites. “I’m not sure I have a straight-up answer for you on that one,” he says, thoughtfully, at the end of an engaging ramble around why he might be drawn to abstract music – and it’s not just his verbal communication to which that confession applies. Straight answers in the musical sphere aren’t his forte either: Abbott’s latest response to the straight question of making an album is ‘Wysing Forest’, a 50-minute, largely improvised electronic sound collage that variously presents pristine calm washes, deeply unsettling throbs and blasts of strident noise, all often simultaneously. It’s equally unnerving, bucolic, blissful and foreboding. Even to those familiar with Abbott’s previous work – stand-outs like the beatifically lovely ‘Modern Driveway’, or the relatively straightforward but

endlessly engaging unsung classic of ‘Holkham Drones’ – ‘Wysing Forest’ represents less a step of progression and more a giant leap into ambitious abstraction. It makes for a bewildering first listen – towering, entirely unpredictable and stylistically opaque – but never unpleasant and actually unexpectedly enchanting. Perhaps its most curious quality though is its addictiveness – with each passing play, a little more of Abbott’s vision for the record (and, it transpires, for music in general) comes into focus, and each minor revelation encourages another spin. Thankfully, that sort of repeated sharpening and whittling process is expected by its creator. “It’s supposed to be hard work,” Abbott says, aware of but unfazed by how this might sound. “It’s a record that’s designed to reward people who pay attention to it. It’s more in line with my own tastes than anything I’ve done before, and the things I like about music aren’t necessarily the things that are easy to get a hold of. “It’s me indulging in things other than really forgiving, melodic music – I wanted it to feel like it came from nothing, and for it to have a sense of real growth, and end up like a document of real events that happened. Everything on the record was played live; it all just came out that way without being planned. I wanted to present the music in its rawest form.” ‘Wysing Forest’’s genesis came during Abbott’s six-week spell as the musician in residence at the Wysing Arts Centre in rural Cambridgeshire, although he didn’t know he was writing it at the time – he originally used his residency, in the freezing winter of 2012, just to play about: “I spent the time just trying to quite indulgently make noises I liked, letting the music emerge,” he explains. “There was no plan to make an album. I was just making things that pleased

me.” He would give live performances to the other residents and to visitors, and after generating several hours of interesting sound, Abbott cherrypicked the best sections and bound them together into a thirty-minute piece that was given to Wysing’s visitors on an mp3 player to listen to as they wondered around the Arts Centre’s grounds. After that proved successful, Abbott discussed the idea of expanding the piece to album length with his label boss James Holden, and finally, 18 months after improvising to himself in the icy isolation of Cambridgeshire, ‘Wysing Forest’ as a full-length LP was born. The idea of ‘Wysing Forest’ existing as an album in the traditional sense, however, doesn’t sit easily with Abbott. For a start, throughout our conversation, he frequently points out the intrinsic nonsense of a series of live improvisations and explorations (as opposed to chiselled, finished arrangements) existing in a form that can be repeat-played: “The whole point of working like that is that you capture a moment,” he insists. “You can’t recreate that moment, you have to keep doing something new.” More fundamentally, though, he also rejects the idea of an album being a studio-prepared creation where the disc or the download itself is merely a representation of a set of musicians, preferring instead to see music as something far more immediate and present: “Try and forget about everything else and experience it as something that your speakers do,” he suggests of his own record. “When you put speakers on, and sound comes out, that noise is there, in the room. It’s a real vibration that’s happening. When you’re making music, you can either create an impression of something by slotting the sounds together to create a recognisable scene, which I’m not interested in, or you can make music that comes out of speakers and happens, and that for me is the exciting thing.

“Put a speaker on, turn it up and let it do its thing,” he continues, warming to his theme. “The performance is the speaker making its noise, and once you start thinking about the speaker as a sound object instead of a conduit to a kind of mysterious, imaginary world beyond – once you start looking at the speaker as an object which performs noises at you, then it’s a really different experience. That’s the thing I love most about dance music, because most of the time it happens on fucking big sound systems, and that’s a physical experience: people in front of a sound system are responding to that noise because those noises are hitting them, physically. Maybe my music is designed for more a domestic environment, but it’s still about the noise the speakers make in the room, not the illusion of another world beyond them. What I like most about electroacoustic music is that fundamentally it’s not about illusion. It’s about sounds coming out of boxes with cones that move air. That’s exciting to me.” If this feels like quite a radically academic, oppressively reductive stance to take on something as affective as music – this is not an outpouring of emotion, but simply a variably vibrating man-made box! – Abbott offers redress: “A man playing a guitar is holding a box that’s making a noise into a room. I mean, even a voice comes from a box. And a speaker is the same thing, it’s just the point of this project from the outset was to try and realise this notion that you can humanise something that’s overtly mechanical, like a speaker.” He uses an example from ‘Wysing Forest’ to try and explain himself. ‘Amphis’ is the 12-minuter at the front of the album which opens disconcertingly, becomes progressively more screwy and then veers into the sort of tripped out abstraction that prompts lucid dreaming before calming at the end into gorgeously

Living In A Box Electronic composer Luke Abbott discusses his new, largely improvised album, ‘Wysing Forest’; a record he admits to being unforgiving and purposefully anti-melody photo g rapher: Gabriel Green / writer: sam walton

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deep sub throbs. Recorded live in front of an audience, there are occasionally audible coughs, and towards the track’s conclusion there’s the sound of the grille on the room’s PA rattling from the bass. “It’s the nicest sound on the record,” enthuses Abbott. “On some level, you understand that’s the noise of something loud, so by recording that you capture a sense of the weight of the sound, and also the fact that it happened in a room, which means you’re listening to a space. It blurs the line between which sounds are electricity and which sounds are just the world making a noise. And I like that grey area.”

More broadly though, it seems this humanising of the usually sterile, perfectly preserved world of electronic music is something of Abbott’s lifework. “There are lots of ways to make very simple music with electronics,” he begins, laying out his ambition. “But trying to isolate and define the things that turn machines or software into performative and enigmatic instruments – that’s the game, I think. That’s the challenge. Trying to capture what it is that makes something a human performance or a human experience is a very intangible thing.” Viewpoints like these go a long way to explaining Abbott’s approach to

sound in general. The longer our conversation progresses, the less he feels like a conventional musician, composing music for people to listen to and connect with, and more like a fine artist whose principle media happens to be sound, interested in creation and exploration of the medium for its own epicurean sake: “If you’re interested in making music with hooks in it, it’s because you’re interested in creating something that’s going to be accessible to people,” he explains. “And, like in DJing, there’s a social contract there that demands you provide a service, which feels quite utilitarian to me. If I’m doing what I

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do for the pure love of it, what I purely love is the weird stuff, and by that rationale, I have to do this.” He smiles, comforted by his own conclusion. “I’m left with no choice!” With that in mind, it seems somewhat obvious that Abbott is reconciled to the idea that his latest creation won’t be for everyone. “I’m not unbothered about whether people like my stuff,” he admits when asked if, hand-on-heart, he really doesn’t care about the reception of his work. “But I don’t want anyone to like it who doesn’t really like it. For me, the fact that it’s difficult to listen to in some ways is fine, because it’s work that’s supposed to be explored. For me it was exploratory, writing it was exploratory, it was about the real-world testing of fanciful ideas that I had about how you can make electronic music better by making it more fallible and human. It feels like progress – a step in the right direction. It’s a weird direction, sure, but it’s a real one.” And there’s no question that Abbott’s album is weird, in the context of 99% of modern popular music: ‘Wysing Forest’ is released on the same day as Ed Sheeran’s latest effort and a reissue of Bon Jovi’s ‘New Jersey’, and among those two dubious totems it feels almost aggressively alien. But in the context of sound in general, there’s an undeniably naturalistic feeling to Abbott’s contribution. Its organic presentation and sonic transparency lend it an air of approachability – almost. “Well exactly,” nods Abbott. “All sounds that can be appreciated are music, if you follow the John Cage/ Michael Nyman school. Music is a process of apprehension, so music starts happening when someone takes on sound in a musical way.” Statements like these add further support to the idea that Abbott’s approach is more high-concept than most, and indeed his degree and educational background in fine art, and desire eventually to return to it, is no surprise. “Art’s something I’d like to get back to at some point,” he adds when asked about future plans, “but I’m working it out as I go along. I don’t have a grand plan, I just want to be real about what I’m doing as I’m doing it. So this album – presenting real recordings of real things that really happened – that’s a much more sincere statement for me to make than having constructed something in the studio. Having said that, the next thing I might do is to construct something in the studio, and go in completely the other direction!” But how? There’s a pause as Abbott ponders an answer. Finally, and not for the last time in our conversation, he chuckles: “I don’t know.”

Are you having a laugh? photo g rapher: S onny M ccartney / writer: stuart stubbs

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Some people can’t see beyond Mac DeMarco’s flippant one-liners, ironic classic rock covers and adolescent tomfoolery. But on meeting the 24-year-old in Amsterdam, ahead of his biggest shows to date, Stuart Stubbs confirms what he’s always suspected – knob gags will only get you so far When Mac DeMarco tells kids that he doesn’t smoke weed, they almost cry. His impression of this terrible news being played out on the face of an expectant teenager is uncanny, and not for the first time today I question just how much longer it will be before the 24-year old stops allowing music to get in the way of his true calling as an actor. “But dude, your music is perfect to hit my bong to,” he pleads in a broken, goofy voice. His lip trembles. His cheeks sag. Of all the misconceptions that surround him, the most prevalent is that Mac DeMarco is a grade A stoner. At shows fans bring him leafy gifts in polythene bags, which they toss onto the stage at their everyday hero. It’s a sentiment he appreciates, but all that pot goes to his guitarist, Pete Sagar, who’ll comb the stage once they’re done. Suddenly, meeting in Amsterdam doesn’t seem like the no-brainer it once was. DeMarco has become a master of misdirection – the guy pulling a moony to cover just how hard he’s working. Earlier this year he filled in our GettingTo KnowYou questionnaire. Beside ‘Guilty pleasure’, he wrote, ‘Pissing in the bath’; next to ‘Your biggest disappointment’, he put, ‘My

penis’. But DeMarco hasn’t reached 3 acclaimed albums in just 2 years on jokes alone. Knob gags will only get you so far.

utside his hotel, Mac DeMarco is instantly recognisable, from his ice hockey hair and plaid shirt down to his too-short worker pants and bright red Vans. He simultaneously looks like a man who’s given up on fashion and one who’s ahead of trend, purposefully carving out a whole new look by himself. Tonight is the opening show of a European tour that for the first time sees him bypass the toilet circuit and make straight for the bigger rooms. “It’s like, ‘only the big fucking shows in the big cities!’” he says, adopting what I quickly realise is a favourite character voice of his – a gruff, burly bark that he assigns to figures of authority, meatheads and villains. He seems genuinely pleased to see me and we take a short walk to one of Amsterdam’s million cafes for lunch in the sun. He orders water and tells me that it’s a new rule of his not to drink

before a show. “It always made me feel like I was going to barf the whole time I was up there [on stage],” he says. “I spent two years feeling like that.” He changes his food order from fish to vegetarian, too, and says he’ll be fitting a little more exercise into his touring schedule from now on. ‘Salad Days’ – DeMarco’s third album – was released a month ago, exclusively to positive reviews, as far as I can tell. He takes my word for it, admitting, “I don’t give a shit to go online and see what people are saying anymore. It’s a bit strange for me.” He says he only read the Pitchfork review and NME’s, later adding Loud And Quiet’s, which is a credit to his good manners. DeMarco is a friendly guy, willing to talk and naturally funny. His foolhardy onstage persona clearly isn’t a stretch for him, but where you might expect him to reduce all manner of topics to an offhand one-liner, he’s considered in conversation. He puts at least part of his success down to his approachability, saying: “I think what kids connect to is that I come off as a regular guy to them. I’m somebody who they might think, ‘yeah, Mac would drink a beer with me’, and I will, it’s fine. I’m not a cool, indie guy

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or anything like that. I never have been. I’ve tried to be before in my life; it didn’t work out very well.” He seems happy with his lot, now at least, six month’s after making his “burnt out, weathered album.” DeMarco wrote and recorded ‘Salad Days’ in a month at home, playing all of the instruments himself, sticking to the formula that created ‘Rock and Roll Night Club’ and ‘2’ in 2012. But by the end of 2013 his ‘Jizz Jazz Studio’ (his bedroom) had moved from Montreal to Brooklyn, and he’d grown tired of solidly touring, having been on the road for the best part of two years. It’s overly dramatic to say the resulting album is DeMarco’s breakdown record. Even ‘angry’ feels a bit overcooked. But as his familiar guitar lilts like it always has, his voice as lethargic and nonplussed as ever, he’s notably cynical too, about fame on ‘Passing Out Pieces’ and his age on ‘Salad Days’. “I was unable to write a normal song because I was just thinking about all this crazy shit that had happened to me,” he says. “I remember listening back to some of the songs and thinking Jesus Christ, why am I telling people all of this? I mean, I was terrified to listen to it!

“When I started recording I was pissed off. I was not in a very good head space – unhealthy, feeling sketchy, but what it turned out being was… the album reflects my view points from that time, but if you take a song like ‘Salad Days’, the whole songs is like, ‘man, I’m so jaded, I’m getting older, being on tour is so hard, this shit’s crazy.’ But then the chorus switches over to ‘grow up, you little prick – it’s amazing that this shit’s even happening in the first place!’ A lot of the album, to me, is like a check up on myself. Like, ‘change your tune, dude, you’re being a prick!’ “Even when we started to tour this record, I was like, ‘meh, whatever’,” he says, hunching his shoulders, screwing up his face and talking like a goblin to amplify his resentment. “There was a string of shows where I was calling the audience peasants and shit, and it was really dark. But then there was this one incident where we played a show in Nashville, in a record store, and there was something in that show where I was like, ‘these kids are so psyched, what the fuck is wrong with me?!’ Since that day I’ve felt incredibly good, and all the shows have been good. I don’t know why, but thank God to those kids!”

Hang on, you were calling your fans peasants? “Yeah, I think they were confused.” I find this hilarious; DeMarco looks a little regretful as he explains how at the end of his shows his band have been covering ‘Unknown Legend’ by Neil Young, “so I get them all to kneel for Neil Young,” he says. “It’s a fun thing to do, and we’ll probably do it tonight if they call for an encore. Everybody then jumps up for the final chorus.” Pre his Nashville epiphany, DeMarco says he would berate anyone for not joining in, and then, as the final chorus approached he would summon his audience to stand with outstretched arms, shouting, “Rise peasants”. If it was a sight half as funny as the one of him recreating it, I’m sorry I missed it. “So it’s just me being alcoholic psychopath guy,” he says, and returns to his mineral water. He says he’s now “gained some level of respect for the people who are spending money on me farting around. They’re not only paying my rent but making me extremely happy. I think it’s just growing up, maybe.” When I ask him if he’s started to feel old, as ‘Salad Days’ seems to suggest, he says: “I’m planning on never feeling old.”

ac DeMarco was born Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV in Duncan, a small town in British Columbia, Canada, but he grew up in Edmondton, Alberta – the country’s oil heartland; a capital city of brawn. I’m not surprised to hear that it wasn’t the place for him – he left town as soon as he could, first for Vancouver and college, then on to Montreal. His father wasn’t around, kicked out by his mum whilst – as he told Pitchfork late last year – he was half way through watching All Dogs Go To Heaven – a sad enough film when your parents aren’t splitting up. And so it was DeMarco’s mother who exposed him (and his younger brother, Hank, who is currently studying ballet in Calgary) to everything, including music, from Harry Neilson and The Kinks to The Beatles and psychedelic Frank Zappa movies – “a bonding experience.” Unfortunately, pop country was also high on the list; a genre of wholesome, God-fearing, authentic American music that, fortunately, has never been exported to the UK beyond two Shania

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Twain songs and the odd ironic appearance from Dolly Parton. “That’s because the English countryside is nice and cutesy,” says DeMarco. “In America it’s, ‘My fucking truck! My fucking chewing tobacco! My fucking muscles! My fucking slut I fucked last night!’” He barks in pantomime jock. “I grew up in a town that was very much like that. I just never really fitted in and it freaked me the fuck out.” Unless you’re one of them, Canadians call these characters ‘chongos’ – “Weird meatheads who wear shitty tribal design T-shirts and makeup,” says DeMarco, “like Jersey Shore style shit. “I had some girl friends who’d go to these bars for a joke and there’d be toilets in the middle of the room for people to puke into – just really greasyass fucking bar culture. I got the hell out of that town as soon as I finished high school.” NME, at least, see Edmonton’s working class all over DeMarco, perhaps understandably so when you line him up against current American guitar bands, and especially those on his label – the Brooklyn based Captured Tracks. “I mean, I used to wear skinny jeans, but my ass is too big for them. Look at these,” he says, lifting his foot

“There was a string of shows where I was calling the audience peasants and shit”

above the table and reaching inside his trouser leg. “I’ve got room to stick my fucking arm up there. My sperm count is probably up. “The NME’s funny,” he says. “They always portray me as, ‘Country boy, grease monkey, knows how to fix cars.’ I’m like, ‘not really, but ok,’” he shrugs. “‘Here comes Mac DeMarco,’” he yells like a southern state cowboy, “‘working class and covered in car oil!’” He doesn’t lose sleep over people getting him wrong, not unless it’s harmful to a third party, and then he’ll set the record straight. That’s rarely the case, though, so if some wish to perpetuate the image of Mac DeMarco the ape-man, so be it. You want to peg him as a stoner? A clown? A joke? Fine. “The more I can confuse people the better,” he says. “Everything else aside from the music I have a pretty good sense of humour about.” It’s ‘slacker’ that he gets most of all, though, which is perhaps the most inaccurate term of the lot. You only

need to see him perform once to grasp how much of a gifted guitarist DeMarco is, although, of course, he does his best to pull focus from that, stripping naked, drinking heavily, calling his audience ‘peasants’. He first picked up the instrument when he was 14 and took lessons for a year; progressing quickly from the AC/DC riffs he initially wanted to learn. He chose to quit and start his own bands when he sensed that his teacher, having noticed his early potential, was trying to turn him into a jazz-fusion guitarist. “Fuck that!” he says. His first groups were overtly novelty acts, I suspect as a defence mechanism that he still has in place today, in part, at least.The Meat Cleavers took the piss out of chongos, performing shit-fi garage tunes about Nascar and “redneck shit”. ‘Going To The Bar’ and ‘Fuck Me by the Poolside’ are two of their more memorable song titles. The first show they ever played was at a skate park in a sketchy part of

town, “hooker central”, after they’d sent joke threatening letters to Edmonton’s local promoters saying, “Give us a show or we’re going to beat the fucking shit out of you.” That the strategy worked only seems to confirm DeMarco’s stories of a hometown up for a fight. A second group – playing smooth RnB and called The Sound of Love – was then formed to act as DeMarco’s vehicle for wooing girls from his school… or slagging them off for turning him down. “I was kind of a jerk in high school,” he says. At his shows today, his encores – where he and his band play a medley of ridiculous covers, including tracks by Neil Young, Limp Bizkit and Metallica – have become a draw of their own. It’s the daftest part of the evening and ironically where the true extent of his work ethic is most realised – fucking a guitar whilst shredding ‘Enter Sandman’ is not something easily mastered, and besides, when was the last time you heard of a young guitarist who even took lessons? “The whole concept of encores is so hilarious and stupid to me,” he says, “so we use it to play covers and do something outrageous. A show’s gotta be a good time. I’m not there to bum people out.” He finds the term ‘slacker’ a little tiring, essentially because it undermines the effort put into making the music, which is pretty much the only area of DeMarco’s life that is free from gags. “Sometimes I’ll sit down for an interview and the guy’s thinking, [DeMarco adopts his hoarse villain voice again] ‘I’m going to get a kookyass interview – this guy’s pretty much fucking retarded’, and then when I can put sentences together they’re like, what the fuck’s going on, this isn’t what I planned. It’s strange,” he says, “but it’s my life now, and I’ve come to accept that.” He ends a lot of sentences in a similar way, sometimes with a simple “… but it’s ok,” emphasising that there are worst things in the world he could be worried about. And he knows that it’s all his own doing, too – his overriding image as village idiot. “If you do something where people have to double take, it makes them pay more attention,” he says, and so when his label suggested that he release ‘Salad Days’ on April Fool’s Day, he just couldn’t resist. DeMarco has become Captured Track’s biggest artist (a fact that he insists will change as soon as Wild Nothing and Diiv release more music),

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but last year the two had their first major run-in. He calls ‘Salad Days’ his “therapy” and “meditation”, and considering its underlining theme of a young man coming to terms with new pressures put on him due to his own success, the last thing he wanted to hear from his label was that they needed another upbeat track to pitch to late night television shows. He’d never been asked to change anything before, and when Captured Tracks asked if he could re-record an old song from his previous band, Makeout Videotape, it was like poking a hornets’ nest with a shitty stick. “When they told me that I was like, ‘Fuck you guys! That’s not cool! You don’t tell your artists that!’ But then you find out that tons of labels do that. I was pissed at first, but I ended up writing that ‘Let Her Go’ song, which is pretty vague, and at that point I was like, ‘you take it or leave it, I’m not changing anything else’. It was weird. When a lot of people who work at the label aren’t even musicians, it’s like, ‘why should I even fucking value your opinion on what I’m doing?’ But I do love those people,” he insists. “They do a really good a job and I do appreciate them.” Since the disagreement he’s likened the situation to telling an artist that their painting isn’t quite finished. Like I say, the music at the centre of Mac DeMarco’s goofy circus is out of bounds. “My main goal is to do whatever I want to do. “I love doing this stuff,” he says, referring to our interview and photo shoot, “but the more you get caught up in the industry side of things, the more and more you get pushed around.” Unsurprisingly, when ‘Salad Days’ leaked a month before its official release, it was the label that was bummed out, not DeMarco, who says he found it interesting to find out which tracks kids were most into without having been told what to think by the music press. “Usually people are like, ‘Oh my god, my album leaked,’” he bawls. “And it’s like, ‘Fuck that shit, man, who gives a shit? It’s done!’. Some people take that so seriously – my label was very bummed out. I remember getting calls from everyone I work with that day saying [serious, whispered voice] ‘are you ok?’, and it really is like, ‘who died? Who gives a fuck!?’ I mean, I understand from their standpoint – sales, blah, blah, blah – but it’s stuff I really don’t give a shit about. If kids want to hear it that badly, I find that cute.”

e settle our bill and leave our chosen café. I remind DeMarco of a time when we spoke on the phone, for an interview we ran in Loud And Quiet 38. ‘Rock and Roll Nightclub’ had just been released. Momentarily, he thinks about politely saying he remembers it. Back then, the joke did extend to his music – a happy accident that produced ‘Rock and Roll Nightclub’: his pervy lounge record of half-speed vocals that made him sound like a deviant Roy Orbison still looking for a good time between sleazy cabaret gigs. “It’s the dirty side of life,” DeMarco had told me. “Show them their dirty underwear.” ‘Rock and Roll Nightclub’ was a surprise hit, but DeMarco was all too aware that it was essentially a gag, so he dialled it back for his following album and wrote ‘2’ (“a normal record”), having managed to give up his grocery store night job and thriftily make a thousand dollar advance from Captured Tracks last five months. People liked ‘2’ even more, and it’s a time he remembers fondly, when he still lived in Montreal with his girlfriend Kiera, who’s quickly becoming as well known as DeMarco due to his public displays of affection and willingness to discuss his relationship in interviews.At Primavera Sound last year, he dived into the crowd to find “Kiki” and serenade her with ‘2’’s closer, ‘Still Together’. It was a touching moment of genuine affection. Then the band performed a cover of ‘Blackbird’ by The Beatles (DeMarco’s a big fan), the death metal way, with bassist Piers shouting absurd lyrics of his own, seemingly made up on the spot, about desecrating the graves of his family. Normal service had resumed. And yet even at these ridiculous times, or perhaps especially when they occur, you can’t help but feel that few other bands possess the musicality to get away with it. Mac DeMarco is an anomaly – a DIY hipster with more than a handful of actual songs; the most overly qualified chancer in Brooklyn. DeMarco has been pushing the suitable absurd genre of ‘Jizz Jazz’ since we last spoke, although it’s a name that’s yet to catch on. “It’s my response when people ask me what my music sounds like,” he says. “They’re like, ‘well, what’s that?’, and I’m like, ‘well, why don’t you go and fucking listen to it and then you’ll know.’” We walk along the canals of Amsterdam to take some photos and DeMarco’s heightened alter ego soon

springs to life, prompted purely by the presence of the photo lens. “Hullo and welcome to Amsterdam,” he yells in cod Dutch to a boatload of tourists passing under one bridge. He stretches his arms out over the water and steps up onto the railings. The passengers below wave and take photos of their own. It’s refreshing to see a young musician doing anything beyond pouting at the camera, petrified of showing their teeth and looking remotely natural. The opposite is true of DeMarco, who you have to sneakily catch looking straight-faced. I don’t think it’s due to him being so

comfortable in the camera’s gaze, but rather that he feels so awkward by it that he crosses his eyes and flails his arms. It’s how he reacts at the thought of anyone wanting a picture of him. I mean, what makes him so special? Before we walk back to the hotel I give him a copy of Loud And Quiet. Spontaneously, he bursts into a crazed cockney market trader, plugging the wares of our magazine, imploring an imagined audience to “try Loud And fucking Quiet, a great fucking newspaper.” He then does it a second time to allow me to film it on my phone. We reach his hotel, say our

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goodbyes and off goes Mac DeMarco, strolling on to a live session in Amsterdam’s red light district ahead of tonight’s show. Once again he is laidback and calm – an approachable everyday kinda guy. The next time I see him is exactly one week later, on stage in London. He’s spitting water into peoples’ mouths on the front row.

Reviews / Albums

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How To Dress Well What Is This Heart We ir d Wor l d By J oe Goggin s . In sto re s June 23

Tom Krell – the man who, for all intents and purposes, is How to Dress Well – revealed himself to be under no illusion about the primary problem faced by so-called ‘indie R&B’ artists when he gave an interview to The Guardian around the time his breakthrough second LP, ‘Total Loss’, dropped in 2012. He suggested that a lot of his contemporaries were making music “ready to be played in Urban Outfitters”, rather than “experienced in any meaningful way”. Given that no other genre has been quite as de rigueur as this one in the hipster community these past couple of years, it’s a brave move to take such a stance – like Kasabian trying to ban football supporters from buying their records – and Krell is very much throwing the gauntlet down to himself. On ‘Total Loss’, he stayed true to

his word by creating a record that was not only superficially beautiful, immaculately produced and glacially paced, but was scored through with unrelentingly emotive themes, with constant reference to depression and isolation. It represented a huge step forward, sonically, from his distorted debut, ‘Love Remains’, and any suspicions that he might take another left turn on ‘What Is This Heart?’ are swiftly validated by opener ‘2 Years On (Shame Dream)’. It’s a gentle slow-burner, driven almost entirely by snatches of acoustic guitar and Krell’s signature falsetto, which offers up a far more refined, less melodramatic take on Michael Jackson than, say, The Weeknd. The major breakthrough that Krell makes on this record, though, is the way in which he uses sonic space; where ‘Total Loss’ often felt

claustrophobic, paranoid, even, ‘What IsThis Heart?’ feels airier, and considerably more open; on the likes of ‘Face Again’ and ‘Pour Cyril’, the vocals are presented in completely clean fashion, with only the faintest backing; a stuttering beat on the former, mournful horns on the latter. There’s evidence of instrumental experimentation, too – ‘Repeat Pleasure’ explodes briefly into a freewheeling electric guitar solo at the midpoint, and violin weaves in and out of ‘See You Fall’’. It feels like an album of two halves, with the last five tracks playing around with beats and effects more boldly than those preceding it, placing them closer, stylistically, to ‘Total Loss’. ‘Precious Love’’s rattling drum track lends an off-kilter feel to its otherwise straightforward pop structure, and the outstanding ‘A Power’ channels ‘Total Loss’’s

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appetite for echoed vocals and slick instrumental flourishes; the gradual build to the euphoric last minute or so means it’s as close to anthemic as Krell has yet come. ‘What Is This Heart?’ feels less cohesive than ‘Total Loss’, which is a little strange when you consider that Krell largely sticks to one vocal setting throughout. In such unvarnished form, his voice comes to grate a little by the end, although that’s probably just as much to do with the album being a little overlong. As far as creating indie R&B with real meaning goes, though, this is another triumph; a collection of thrillingly modern love songs that carry soul as well as polish. I’m sure the folks at Urban Outfitters are going to love it, but ‘What Is This Heart?’ is much more than a trophy record to display on the wall in a clip frame.

Reviews 0 7/ 1 0

Clipping CLPPNG Su b p op By J osh s u nth. In sto re s June 9

Los Angeles hip-hop trio Clipping have been hoarding critical attention since their debut, ‘Midcity’, caught everyone out with its frantic minimalism and messiness early last year. That recored used white noise, collages of sound and clipped beats to announce the group’s arrival with impertinence, but having found their niche, ‘CLPPNG’ is an altogether softer affair.The leftfield instrumentals are overlayed with palatable versus, hooks and choruses you could sing along to. For the most part, it works well, although ‘CLPPNG’ has some serious troughs. Unsurprisingly, the album starts at full throttle – with a pitchy electronic squeal and a salvo of

Daveed Diggs’ observational rap. ‘Intro’ is the most direct nod to ‘Midcity’ here, which started in a similar fashion, but for the remaining 55 minutes or so they curb their eccentricities. Lead single ‘Work Work’, is the new Clipping at their best – all minimal bass and cowbell, whilst Diggs flexes his narrative muscles. It has the almost unrecognisable skeleton of a trap beat buried beneath its foundations, and Cocc Pistol Cree’s verse is the best guest appearance on the album. Though coming from totally opposing fields – Jonathan Snipes is one half of the tongue-in-cheek production duo Captain Ahab, whilst William Hutson makes drone as the

elusive Rale – the two producers here have oodles of experience making fringe music, and it shows. During its verses, album peak ‘Dominoes’ apes minimalist grime producer Logos’ production template – all icy bass, spacious beats and lasers – before seamlessly pulling its fuzzed piano line out of nowhere for the chorus. ‘Taking Off’ uses a frantic percussive line, but rather than drawing out a proper rhythm, it adds eerie pertinence to the song’s echo. By the time that saxophone kicks in you feel like you’re stranded in a dystopian jazz club. Of course, not all is swell. ‘Tonight (ft Gangsta Boo)’ is totally out of place in an album whose most

laudable trait otherwise is how cerebral it is. It’s an ode to Friday night lust that is about as blunt as its subject matter. ‘Dream’, on the other hand, tries much too hard at softspoken profundity, and instead dips further and further into cliché. More often than not, however, Clipping find their balance. Though lyrically complex, and often lightning fast, Daveed Diggs is deft and acrobatic with his words. He can be brutally honest and astute, as on ‘Ends’ (“Shoot up in the air, see where it come down, don’t look now”) and then go pen the delightfully flippant intro of ‘Inside Out’. Even ‘CLPPNG’’s conspicuous low points pale alongside these dizzy peaks.

This, their third LP, sees Stockholm sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg make their major label debut, smoothing the rough edges of a brand of cutesy indie folk that has won growing critical acclaim over the last couple of years. It’s always an interesting time for old school fans of a band (see The Black Keys’ catapult into the mainstream after signing for Warner Bros), but while innocence is an impossible quality to preserve, it’s troubling to see how every single ounce of the charm

found on 2008’s ‘Drunken Trees’ EP or 2010’s comparatively lo-fi fulllength ‘The Big Black and the Blue’ has been squeezed out of First Aid Kit’s art. Having overseen 2012’s ‘The Lion’s Roar’, Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis returns on production duties and seems determined to make this effort an even more painstakingly polished affair. Given that that record closed with a cosy sing-along featuring Conor Oberst and folk-bynumbers sibling troop the Felice Brothers, his success in that respect

is quite the feat. ‘Stay Gold’ is the musical equivalent of a coffee table photo-book, offensive for its inoffensiveness. When you tune into the faux Midwestern accents and Americana-lite lyrical totems on singles ‘Cedar Lane’ and ‘My Silver Lining’ you may want to have a bucket on hand.That said, Columbia and the Söderbergs’ collective coffers should benefit immensely when the car manufacturers finally come knocking. ‘Stay Gold’ should shift a decent haul of Nissans.

0 4/ 1 0

First Aid Kit Stay Gold C ol um bia By DAVI D z amm itt. In st o re s June 9

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Albums 08/10

0 8/10

07 /10

06/ 10

Les Big Byrd They Worshipped Cats

Luke Abbott Wysing Forest

Lust For Youth International

A Rec ordi n g s

B o r de r c o mmun it y

Human Hair My Life as a Beast and Lowly Form

By Dan iel Dy l an Wray. In sto re s now

B y R e e f Y o unis . I n s t o re s J une 2 3

Th e s tat e 5 1 c o ns pi r acy

Sac r e d B o n es B y Th o ma s Ma y . In s t o r es J u n e 9

By Sa m C o rnf o rth. I n s t o r es J u n e 2 3

Jumpy Suicide-like organs stabs, waves of muddy guitars that seem lost in their own headless path and the occasional blast of a popdrenched chorus has pretty much been the staple output of groups like Wooden Shijps for many years. While Les Big Byrd can occasionally adopt that same successful template on tracks like ‘Tinnitus Ætérnum’ there is something refreshingly expansive and free from formula about their own take on garagepsych-pop, too. It appears this Swedish outfit (recorded and released by the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe, via his label ‘A’) relish in flowery 12-string baroque pop as frequently as they do head-splitting, drug-rot psychedelia. This results in a record that moves as frequently between genres as it does timeframes. While feeling unmistakably ‘now’ there is also something about ‘They Worshipped Cats’ that has the allure and excitement of buying an album from a bargain bin because it has an enticing and enchanting album cover, and then finding it to be a lost gem of the 1960s.

Intros, first impressions, headspace – they all informs perceptions in seconds. That’s great if you’re delivering three-minute pops of perfectly formed ear candy but for albums like ‘Wysing Forest’ it puts a premium on patience. Four years after the rumbling resonance of Abbott’s ‘Holkham Drones’ debut, we’re dropped into another intense, immersive world. Recorded in the rural retreat of Wysing Arts Centre over a six-week residency, the sense of distance gives ‘Wysing Forest’ a cold sense of contemplation. Balancing pulsing panorama against bedroom introspection, ‘Free Migration’ comes alive with subdued chaos as brilliantly sinister rhythms melt into fields of static, whereas ‘Highrise’ glints in the sunshine, mirroring the kinesis of the city up in the clouds. But it’s album opener ‘Amphis’, with its disjointed quasar beats and atmospheric shifts, that sets the tone. At an uncompromising 12 minutes, it’s a challenging, heavyunit; a malevolent bouncer muttering: “if your head’s not right, you’re not coming in.” Great albums don’t need first impressions, just lasting ones.

Jack Lenton used to be a furniture salesman and his debut album with Human Hair resembles a gritty, grimy sofa. Despite the filthy noise that bubbles away in the background, this isn’t a hard sell for the frontman whose bark breathes charisma into the collection of menacing songs. The band’s existence dates back to 2008 – as do the songs on the albums – with singer Lenton and guitarist Henry Withers (previously of Lovvers) the only surviving members from the band’s original lineup, duelling their respective influences of Nick Cave and Swans against Pavement and The Fall across ‘My Life as a Beast and Lowly Form’. The perfectly balanced blend on ‘Party Size’ and ‘Left Hand’ jangles along buoyantly whilst retaining their grubby bite. Elsewhere the thunderous guitars and chaotic yelps evaporate on closer ‘Manor of Curses’ to reveal a subtler, softer and more downbeat side to Human Hair. It’s an unexpected and fitting twist to a peculiar album that never loses the ability to keep on surprising beyond its DIY punk backbone.

If Lust For Youth makes music about youthfulness, then it’s only in the sense that Hannes Norrvide’s records pre-mourn its inevitable fading. And whilst this is still true of the Swede’s third record, here the tone is more one of wistful regret than bitter irony. It’s like a New Order to the Joy Division of his earlier work, the music unearthing a newfound nuance in its less direct confrontation with despair. And the comparison with the former doesn’t end there. This record is wrapped in the gloss of the early ’80s, as compact synth and guitar hooks tumble over one another in a stream of melody and pollowy textures. At its best, ‘International’ might just measure up to its influences, too; on standout ‘Illume’ Norrvide’s by-nowtrademark vocals (think Foals’Yannis Philippakis via Robert Smith) sound haunted and naively hopeful in equal measure. Such glimpses of quality are fleeting, though, and by ‘International’’s close one is left wondering whether Norrvide’s new sense of (relative) contentedness has fatally diminished his music’s vital urgency.

Danish quartet Lower are one of a handful of bands currently causing a stir in Copenhagen’s burgeoning underground punk scene. On the one hand, that’s all the information needed to describe this, their debut – tonally it’s as bleached and bleak as its fellow citizens’ gritty, slightly joyless crime dramas, and aesthetically it carries all the trademarks of any young band causing a stir in a burgeoning underground punk scene: dank semibarked poetry, militantly lo-fi

production values and almost proselytising outsiderness. On the other hand, however, ‘Seek Warmer Climes’ has an enticing weirdness that elevates it above standard co-op collective no-wave punk bands the world over. For a start, there’s the sprawling album centrepiece ‘Expanding Horizons’, which ditches the rattling roughness of its surroundings for a shoegazing seven minutes (more than twice the length of anything else here), and then ‘Soft Option’ is an unexpectedly melodic

piece of grunge pop with added flecks of Morrissey. Elsewhere, too, Lower’s approach to almost every aspect of making an album feels pleasingly transgressive, be it texture, song structure or track sequencing. ‘Seek Warmer Climes’ is a genre album that will delight its admirers and baffle everyone else. That it manages this while remaining one step removed from the standard rulebook makes its achievement particularly intriguing, if not entirely loveable.

06/10

Lower Seek Warmer Climes Matad or By SAM WALT ON. In sto re s June 17

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Reviews 05/10

0 8/10

07 /10

07/ 10

Julie Byrne Rooms with Walls and Windows

Peter Matthew Bauer Liberation!

Greys If Anything

The Proper Ornaments Wooden Head

Me m phi s I n d us t ri e s

ca rpa rk

F o r t u n a P op

B y T o m Fe nwick. I n st o re s J une 2 3

By J o e g o ggi ns . I n s t o re s J u n e 2 3

B y H a y ley Sco tt. In st o r es J u n e 9

‘Liberation!’ is a freewheeling take on Peter Matthew Bauer’s personal experiences of life, death and spirituality – reverb drenched declarations of faith and doubt washed over with garrulous melodies and emphatic percussion. It’s a mood neatly summarised in the opening three tracks, Eastern monastical chants rising through ‘I Was Born In An Ashram’, which give way to the shuddering Rock and Roll of ‘Latin American Ficciones’ – a duality that evens out on ‘Philadelphia Raga’ as the harmonies of East and West embrace in the City Of Brotherly Love. It’s this heady brew of cultures and ideas that plays strong through the rest of the album, culminating in the joyous rabble rousing closer of ‘You AreThe Chapel’. It may be a little rough around the edges at times, but with competing solo projects from Walter Martin (sentimental indie rock) and Hamilton Leithauser (polished indie anthems), ‘Liberation!’ is a delightful album from an unexpected source; Bauer’s search for the mystic marking the finest effort yet to arise from The Walkmen’s dissolution.

In opening ‘If Anything’ with a track called ‘Guy Picciotto’ – ninety seconds of melodic punk, of which the Fugazi man would surely approve – Greys set their stall out pretty firmly from the off. The Toronto outfit describe themselves simply as a ‘loud rock band’, but in fact their sound is made up of the same components that, say, compatriots METZ touch upon; they’re in thrall to Dischord, of course, but there’s more than a hint of Nirvana’s ear for a hook and the sheer energy of this debut full-length is so visceral that you can’t discount the punk tag either. The cacophonous ‘Adderall’ nudges towards noise rock territory, whilst ‘Chick Singer’ and the furious ‘Brain Dead’ are a little more straightforward in structure, guitars and drums locked in a race to the finish with singer Shehzaad Jiwani providing consistently punishing vocals. Slow-burning closer ‘Lull’ might be the highlight, though, with the guitars given room to be a little more mellifluous; it’s a neat way, too, to bat away accusations of charlatanism on this hugely promising debut.

Attributing their formation to a mutual appreciation of The Velvet Underground, it would be easy to denounce The Proper Ornaments for being yet another indie band with too much reverence for the past. Here, it’s not wholly untrue, and as a band whose overall style is defined by the often incongruous ‘neo-psychedelic’ tag, there are obvious indications of a derived aesthetic. But The Proper Ornaments meld the right amounts of their primary ’60s influences with their own pop sensibility and somnolent interpretation of psychedelia, wherein the melodic warmth of The Beach Boys meets a deeper and darker undercurrent of the aforementioned Velvets. Recorded on a broken 8-track reelto-reel, ‘Wooden Head’’s languid pace runs the risk of becoming tedious mid-listen, yet there’s the sporadic upbeat moments like the comparatively sprightly ‘Magazine’ to counteract any drop in momentum. ‘Summer’s Gone’’s lyrical content focuses beautifully and deftly on mental illness, and it’s this harmonised, Byrdsian introspection that prevails.

As with the rest of The Pheromoans’ prolifically shambolic back catalogue, you’ll either go weak at the knees for this or recoil in disgust, such is its unrelenting and grubby homage to The Fall and others of such uncompromising aesthetic. Predictably, there are no huge departures on their second LP for Upset The Rhythm and sixth album proper, which is once again a splurge of lackadaisical monologues, scuffed notes and kaleidoscopic dribble, from a band that relish and

reflect the true boredom of British suburbia. What can be said? On ‘Vagabond Hits 40’, Russell Walker reaches a whole new level of sluggishness with his bone-dry delivery, and on the shrilly detuned intro to single ‘The Boys Are British’ they sound like they’re aurally depicting the life of a lone, sullied square of moon floss. Fortunately though, when their guttural racket does poke its head above the grim spume, there’s actually enough colour to make them almost loveable.

‘Province Baby’ has a swathing CHORUS (capitalised due to its impact in the face of early-album adversity) and ‘Young Black Eyes’ sounds like that recent penchant for Nuggets-era garage rock given a squat-inspired makeover. Neither is as good as ‘Laurie’s Case’, mind, which is the sort of disorderly clatter that makes the Fat Whites, in their un-showered crevice of South London, sound oddly meek. Beautiful or beastly? That’ll all hinge, of course, on your tolerance for mess.

or din al By Chris watk eys. In sto re s June 30

Surely, as a musician, when you first sit down to write a song, one of your aims at least should be to create something new, something different, something that will engage with your listener. And whilst talented Chicago songwriter Julie Byrne has created something beautiful with ‘Rooms With Walls and Windows’, her debut album, something with a shred of originality she has not. ‘WisdomTeeth Song’ is stripped and woozily acoustic. Byrne’s vocals distinctly channel those of Chan Marshall’s Cat Power, while on ‘Young Wife’ those ghostly vocals, shimmering and floaty, sound like they’re drifting over a misty marsh. You’d be delighted if you stumbled across Byrne at some low-key gig, and likely be transfixed by those coldly beautiful vocals, but on record it leaves you strangely unmoved, as you struggle to care for the meaning behind the words she sings. Late on, ‘Keep On Raging’ flows icily like a crystal river, but this is a record ultimately indistinguishable from the countless others cut from the same cloth over the last year.

05/10

The Pheromoans Hearts of Gold Up s e t th e r hy th m By James west. In sto re s June 9

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Albums 08/10

0 7/10

07 /10

05/ 10

Tomas Barfod Love Me

Dignan Porch Observatory

The Antlers Familiars

Strands of Oaks Heal

Se cr e tl y C a nadia n

F a u x D is c x

Tr a ns gre s s ive

De ad Oc e an s

By James F . T hompso n. In sto re s June 9

B y Sa m C o rn f o rth . I n s t o re s J une 1 6

By Ch ri s Watk e ys . I n s t o r es J u n e 1 6

B y Jack Do h er t y . In s t o r es J u n e 2 3

It’s a rare thing for an electronic album to wear its heart on its sleeve. Whereas most intelligent dance music conveys icy insouciance, Tomas Barfod has produced a sophomore release of warmth and emotional resonance. From the plaintive title through to the delicate guest vocals, there’s a sense here of a celebration of vulnerable honesty. Coupled with a nascent interest in analogue synthesisers, ‘Love Me’ moves Barfod away from impassionate production and towards proper songcraft, and sure enough, it’s the songs where he collaborates with singer-songwriters that are most successful. ‘Bell House’ opens with a lone piano and soon introduces folk singer Luke Temple and some affectingly beautiful vocals. Long-time collaborator Nina K crops up three times to suit the up-tempo productions, while Winston Yellen’s Night Beds pitches in on the gorgeous Clams Casino-style ‘Sell You’. Elsewhere, instrumental workouts ‘Destiny’s Child’ and ‘Mandalay’ feel half-baked on an otherwise fully-formed album.

Initially a one man band, Dignan Porch have evolved into something much more. Joe Walsh, the creator and lone member at one point in time, became the first English act to sign to Brooklyn label CapturedTracks on the back of his solo recordings. He then went on to be the first artist of any nationality to release a second album with the imprint: 2012’s ‘Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen’, for which he upgraded his project to a full band.This follow up on Brighton’s Faux Discx still sees lo-fi scratchiness prevail and ultimately doesn’t shy away from the blend of fuzzy, psych pop songs that has served Walsh well in the past. However, ‘Observatory’ is a welcome reminder of the charming spin this south Londoner puts on bleary-eyed, fuzzy-ridden songs – no more so than on the anthemic ‘Wait & Wait & Wait’, which seeps with boredom as Walsh muses: “I’ve been wasting time, I know it’s mine to waste.” Dignan Porch is a welcome tale of a bedroompop project that’s had some determination behind it, unlike the countless others that liked the idea more than the reality.

Brooklyn three-piece The Antlers have been responsible for a handful of the most underrated soul-shifting moments in guitar-based indie rock over the last few years, and this, their third album, should see the band cement their place in the genre’s upper echelons, somewhere close to Grizzly Bear. Yet there’s none of debut album ‘Hospice’’s exciting rawness and sharp edges here, and it’s certainly a more considered and consistent affair than that typified in last record ‘Burst Apart’’s more colourful moments. Opener ‘Palace’ sees the album’s first melancholy shine of brass; slow-burning, poised, and richly beautiful in a way a band like Elbow could only ever dream of, while ‘Doppleganger’ is languorous and lightly jazzy, the kind of song you’d hear in a basement club while a single strand of cigarette smoke curls upward from a lit cigarette.This is clearly a considered album, an effort to produce a single, almost seamless piece of work, but after an opening that promises a golden path into a world of beauty, ‘Familiars’ leads you down the occasional dead end.

Timothy Showalter aka Strand of Oaks has always had a good relationship with the acoustic guitar and all the earthy, authentic weight that comes with that particular instrument, producing record after record of strummed sleepers. But recently, it seems they’ve had a little falling out. ‘HEAL’, Showalter’s fourth album, throws the folk into the fire, summoning an electro beast from its ashes. The sullen strums of yore have been replaced with smothered synth keys, making the world of oak infinitely shinier. It’s clear the aim is to distance itself from the past, but I’m not sure creating an album of The National b-sides is the best way to do it. ‘Shut in’ and ‘Plymouth’ miss the mark so badly that they end up hitting Bono right on the bonce, which would be a brilliant thing if it caused some damage, but so much of ‘HEAL’ doesn’t feel heavy enough for that, even if Showalter is still bravely singing from him personal diary. So it might be best if Strand of Oaks made friends with the acoustic guitar again. Maybe it wasn’t so dull after all.

Sacramento, it seems, inspires a whole other level of aggression in its musical sons. From the Cramps to the Deftones andTrashTalk’s nearest cousins, Death Grips, it appears that a generous allocation of sunshine hours does little to curb a desire to confront listeners with the ugly.They relish in throwing the grenade in and observing the bloody outcome, and all – especially Death Grips – have got about their business with no regard for the conventional music industry. Indeed, while Trash Talk

have never been shrinking violets, anyone who has followed the group’s arc towards album number 4 will notice that the spleen has been notched up even further. It leaves behind the relative sparsity of tracks like ‘Blossom And Burn’ (featuring Hodgy Beats and Tyler, The Creator) and ‘Thanks, But No Thanks’ from 2012’s ‘119’, and shuns any flirtation with groove for an unbending hardcore punk assault. At just over half an hour it’s a fairly lavish gesture from a group who shoehorned 14

songs into just 22 minutes on their last LP. However, while the bonus tracks feel a bit tacked on (the appearance of RatKing’s Wiki and King Krule on ‘Stackin Skins’ seem like an attempt to justify their place on Odd Future Records), there’s barely a superfluous second on ‘No Peace’. It’s raw, disaffected and claustrophobic, and its visceral lexicon somehow makes sense. “Shaved my head, bit my tongue,” Lee Spielman wails, and you’ll wince as the molar pierces your tastebuds.

08/10

Trash Talk No Peace Odd F u tur e By David Za mm itt. In st o re s now

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Reviews 0 7/ 1 0

0 7/10

08 /10

07/ 10

Happyness Weird Little Birthday

Secret Cities Walk Me Home

The Vacant Lots Departure

White Lung Deep Fantasy

We ir d Sm il i ng

We s t e rn

S o n ic C ath e dr a l

Do m i n o

By D ais y Jon es . In sto re s June 16

B y Ja me s F. T h o mp s o n. I n s t o re s J une 2 3

By Ha yl e y s c ott . I n s t o re s J u n e 3 0

B y Dai s y J o n es . In s t o r es J u n e 1 6

Lo-fi ‘college rock’ has been at the forefront of the ’90s revival for almost as long as the actual 1990s by now. Throw in a splash of ’60s psychedelia and late ’80s shoegaze, a fuzz pedal and a one-word band name (Splashh, Yuck, Childhood) and you’ve got a bona fide noughteens band. Happyness fit this mould quite tightly and yes, he does sound like a young Stephen Malkmus. However, all this ‘put-in-box’ing aside and it’s clear the South London trio have made a pretty good album. ‘Weird Little Birthdays’ oozes a woozy optimism that borderlines the euphoric. It’s hard to imagine that the sundrenched fuzz of ‘Orange Luz’ or the dreamy vocals of ‘Pumpkin Noir’ were born from the same place that shat out Old Kent Road. But then again, Ziggy Stardust was born in Brixton – and what? This hypnotic slice of haze could almost become sickly if it weren’t for the snide digs that are hidden beneath the gentle melodies (“You’re cheesy like you don’t know”).We all know that cheesy is the worst thing to be, only second to boring. Luckily, ‘Weird Little Birthdays’ avoids being both.

If ever there’s an apt name for the Roy Orbison style lead-off track on Secret Cities’ third record, it’s ‘Purgatory’. The North Dakota trio have spent years caught between being a bona fide band and a “long distance music project.” It took an $8,500 Kickstarter project to get them together in one place – San Francisco’s indie magnet studio,Tiny Telephone. So what, you ask? Well, the engineering services of Jay Pellicci have ensured this outing sounds leagues brighter than their last, ‘Strange Hearts’, from 2011. Radio-friendly yet deceptively complex earworms like ‘The Rooftop’ and the title track simply wouldn’t have been possible last time. On the other hand, ‘Walk Me Home’ represents something of a regression. By cleaning up their act, Secret Cities have lost the lo-fi, offkilter distinctiveness of days past. Much of this release brings to mind early Ruby Suns, the Shins and any number of post-millennial, harmonyloving indie bands, which is fine but means while it’s impossible to hate ‘Walk Me Home’, it’s hard to especially love it either.

In an era defined by a musical predilection for the anodyne and inoffensive, it’s genuinely refreshing to come across a band whose spirit is so overtly rooted in punk. ‘Departure’ is affirmation of The Vacant Lots’ proclivity for melding minimalist, primitive rock’n’roll songs with a psychedelic undertone permeating every track, all the while breaking the mould of the pervasive, neo-psychedelic sound. It sees the band combine a variety of influences and styles (Bo Diddley meets Link Wray, via the Stooges and Suicide), crafting a more menacing and diverse sound than your usual psych proponents. Look no further than the New Order-esque, synth based ‘Paint This City’ for conviction; their deviation into the use of electronics making for a more singular and up to date interpretation of the wig-out genre. The fuzzed up discordance of ‘MakeThe Connection’ is the album’s prevailing moment; pleasingly repetitious, guitars drone incessantly atop of Jared Artaud’s obscure utterances. It might be a tired aesthetic, but The Vacant Lots are a cut above the rest.

“We sound like the feeling you get when you pee on the prego stick and it shows you a plus sign.” That was frontwoman Mish Way’s description of her band White Lung back in 2010. Three albums later and the Canadian punk group still sound like a hellish delight, of that’s what she meant. Combining the melodic gothdom of AFI, the beautiful vulgarity of Courtney Love and the deranged speed of an ’80s hardcore band, White Lung are still positively blackened. Lyrically, ‘Deep Fantasy’ targets some usual suspects: Addiction (‘Drown with the Monster’), arse-lickers (‘Sycophant’) and body dysmorphia (‘Snake Jaw’). However, it’s not the angst-ridden lyricism or even the velocity by which it’s delivered that makes the trio’s third album a blazing treat for the ears. You could find that on any punk record. It’s the rich sonic textures, the melody amongst the thrashing and the genuinely DIY spirit of the band that elevates them beyond the others. Plus, Mish Way has always been a vocal feminist, which always makes ones ‘pursuits’ that little bit more brilliant.

Ergo Phizmiz’s career seems to have been defined as much by who he isn’t as who he is; with a sound that’s drawn strong comparison to a diverse range of acts from Vivian Stanshall and The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to Frank Zappa and Daniel Johnson. At first it may seem like ‘The Peacock’ is doing little to distance itself from these associations – this album is certainly no paradigm shift in tone from his previous LPs – but listen closely and you’ll hear a musician making gentle

movements that stretch beyond the shadow of his influences. Archaic but rarely arcane, Phizmiz’s songs flit restlessly between pastoral folk (‘Mandrake’, ‘All Fall Down’), crepuscular tango (‘Smiles Of A Summer Night’), woozy rockabilly (‘The Flying House’) and baroque balladry (‘The Light Behind You’), while the undulating psychedelia of ‘Consequences’ and the rattling sing-a-long of ‘Open Artery Surgery’ are sugary bites of off-kilter pop; one synth solo away from the rich

melodies of Metronomy. It’s an unrepentantly eccentric but alarmingly accessible album; one that sees Phizmiz reign in the more obtuse elements of his sound without losing any of his idiosyncratic charm, and continuing to resurrect the bewitching Canterbury sound. Of course, its quintessentially British eccentricity means it will never be to everyone’s taste, but if you’re looking for something off the beaten track then this is an unusual garden of delights.

0 7/ 1 0

Ergo Phizmiz The Peacock Ca r e I n th e com mun it y By Tom F enwick. In sto re s June 9

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Albums 05/10

Cerebral Ballzy Jaded & Faded C ul t By T homas Ma y . In sto re s June 16

Who likes Cerebral Ballzy? Spend some time reading reviews of the Brooklyn quintet’s eponymous debut album of 2011 and you’ll probably be left unsure. Dismissed by punks as punk for hipsters and, consequently, by said hipsters as punk pastiche for punks, ‘Cerebral Ballzy’ was continually conceptualised as music for other people, other factions, and even – in their indebtedness to early ’80s hardcore – other times. And it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the group: their debut album was snotty and petulant, comprising two-minute bursts of punk-by-numbers with Jackass-like lyrics about cutting class, puking, and sk8ing. Sure, the group’s identity as a gang of spoilt

brats might have arisen mostly from considered play-acting, but if it was all just a big joke, then it was about as funny as their woefully misjudged band name. Enter the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, whose label Cult Records is releasing the group’s sophomore record. According to Casablancas, they’re “the coolest band in the world at the moment, a truly legit modern hardcore/punk band.” So what’s changed? On first pass, not much. The Cerebral Ballzy of ‘Jaded & Faded’ is still just as committed to tempos so fast that, through sheer ungodly persistence, they’ll beat the living daylights out of your stupid, naive hope for rhythmic

variety or syncopation. Dynamics, presumably, are for pussies, too; despite a newly expansive production job, these tracks blur together into a single unrelenting outpouring of volume. In short, it’s hard work. And, what’s more, there’s little by way of obvious payoff waiting once the facade of bland extremity has been penetrated. Lyrically, Cerebral Ballzy are still pretty anti-cerebral, pro-ballz with much of the record being, in the band’s own words, about “being fucked up a lot”. But there is, at least, a hint that all this bluster could add up to something more nuanced. Maybe it’s a newfound sensitivity within the group or maybe it’s just the absence of songs about

vomit, but, taken as a whole, the record can seem to cohere – however precariously – into a sincere interrogation of social and cultural identity. Unlike its predecessor, the album exhibits something approaching self-consciousness, examining what it means to be young, horny, and futureless in a city like New York today. “Save your safety for another day / save your maybes for another day / we’ll all decay another day” goes the album’s opening lyric, the music’s exaggerated bravado betraying, perhaps, an undercurrent of uncertainty. But maybe I’m going out on a limb there. It’s hard to tell and, to be honest, you’ll probably be hard-pressed to care either way.

Writing a debut electronic album in 2014 is no mean feat: do you mine a specific chunk of dance’s back catalogue for nostalgia and cash (Disclosure et al), or, like James Holden, push restlessly forward with experimentation and risk alienation? Or, indeed, just have done with it all and stick a EDM-shaped donk on everything? Clearly not one to put all their eggs in one basket, Eaux have managed to concoct a debut electronic album out of all of the above, and accordingly ‘Plastics’, for

all its virtues, feels like a record unsure of where it stands. While there are several moments of towering beauty – opening track ‘Head’ carries a heavy-hearted poignancy redolent of Orbital at their spun-out finest, and the glacial operatics of ‘The Light FallsThrough Itself’ wouldn’t taint one of Goldfrapp’s electronic LPs – it’s difficult to escape the sense of diffidence elsewhere, as Eaux try to craft a modern iteration of ambient techno and slightly fluff their lines.

Indeed, even with the more direct attempt at a build-and-drop of ‘Movers & Shakers’ they can’t quite bring themselves to truly let rip. The result is an uneven listen – sporadically delicious, frequently tantalising with a largely overly tasteful hesitancy. The potential is undoubtedly there; now Eaux just need to decide where they are going. It’s telling that Ben Crook – one third of this trio – describes the group’s music as “never finished, just abandoned.”

06/10

Eaux Plastics AT P By Sam Wal ton . In sto re s JUNE 23

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Reviews / Live

Melt Banana Queens Social Club Sheffield 25/ 0 5/ 20 14 wr iter : Da niel D ylan Wra y Photo gr aph er : Ro y J Baro n

Japanese noise band Melt Banana have had a series of drummers and guest drummers since they formed in 1992, but tonight they are without both a drummer and a bass player, playing as the core two piece of Yasuko Onuki and Ichirou Agata. In place of real drums there is a rapidfire drum machine that hits out beats and clattering explosions that sound like an imploding fireworks factory might do. Onuki has a strange electronic and very colourful device strapped to her hands that during the entire performance I still can’t

figure out what it is or what it does.To replicate any absence of bass the duo appear to have gone down the volume route – blare the thing out; if there was a bass present tonight it would struggle to fight through the deafening guitar attacks and the unrelenting vocal snarls. The pace of the show is constantly stuck on fast forward – much like their records, flab is considered a horrible presence and dicking around in between songs (or during them for that matter) is definitely flab in the world of Melt Banana live on stage.

It’s a constant barrage, and an occasionally overwhelming one that feels like blow after blow to the head. There is a middle section in which the group play a series of increasingly short songs, where each one that gets shorter seems more intent on cramming more into the tiny space it has. By the end we have five to ten second bursts of songs that are like a precession of grenades being let off in the room. The bank holiday Sunday crowd lose themselves in the onslaught, which continues to hit home with

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brutal force. Occasionally, the lack of bass or drums feels noticeable in the one dimensional tone of the performance, but just as often their current set-up feels as apt as it does invigorating. Melt Banana always do such a wonderful job of exposing you to something that feels new and unexplored and tonight is no exception to that. They also made my ears sound like a mini fire alarm was constantly going off inside my brain for the following twenty-four hours after leaving the show.

Reviews

Ratking The Haunt, Brighton

tUnE-yArDs Village Underground

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1 2 / 05 / 2 01 4

wr iter : n athan we s tle y

w r iter : Sam Wa lt o n P h o to g r aph er : G em H a r r i s

Merril Garbus’ latest album as TuneYards is her most dense-sounding yet, although you wouldn’t know it from the accompanying live show. Where once Garbus brought with her the chaos of double drum kits and gaffer-taped ukuleles, tonight is an exercise in jaw-slackeningly tight vocal harmony, hand-held percussion all round, and confident, sleek arrangements that help unpick her latest songs for a live audience. That’s not to say things have simplified – her trademark dissonant chord mutations are still there, as are Garbus’ deliciously jerky polyrhythms and playground hopscotch chants. But the delight here lies in how effortless Garbus makes the complexity appear, like a magician showing how all the tricks are done, then still convincing you it’s actually magic.This is tangy, unselfconscious, bravura stuff.

From the Beastie Boys to the A$AP Mob, New York has always been a fertile breeding ground for imaginative hip-hop collectives. Ratking are the latest ensemble to have the focus shone on them and like the influence behind their name, they are a multi-spirited unit that are propelling themselves in one common direction.Tonight they show that they have the potential to be the next act to forcibly punch their way into mainstream consciousness, despite their flaccid debut album. The trio’s live shows, like those of previous touring partners Death Grips, are a powerful and full-on bout of raw, character filled aggression, where short sharp lines cross over laptop-generated beats and choice samples, creatively twisting grime influences into a sonic tapestry rich in hardcore values and presenting something that is remarkably fresh.

Speedy Ortiz Electrowerkz, Islington

Owen Pallett Oval Space, Hackney

The Amazing Snakeheads Dingwalls, Camden

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22/05/2014

wr iter : J ames F . Th o mpso n

writ e r: Th o ma s ma y

w rit e r: Ja me s F. Th o mp s o n

San Fermin Village Underground Shoreditch, London 07 / 05 / 2 01 4 w r iter m a n d y d r ak e

If your band’s raison d’être is to nakedly emulate the music of another era, your material had better be exceptional. Speedy Ortiz have emerged from the nascent Boston indie scene essentially sounding like they belong on early-nineties college radio. Fortunately, last year’s debut LP, ‘Major Arcana’, represented an infectious amalgamation of femalefronted grunge influences. Unfortunately, it was only 34 minutes long. Across an hour-plus live set, the four-piece are incredibly tight but left exposed by a dearth of firstrate songs. ‘No Below’, ‘Tiger Tank’, ‘Basketball’ and recent single ‘American Horror’ work brilliantly but elsewhere things get frustratingly forgettable. Innovation allows for a margin of error but the derivative aesthetic here relies upon consistency that’s not on show tonight.

The shock-horror of “Sufjan Stevens goes electric” was surely more extreme, but Owen Pallett’s parallel move in 2010, was arguably better judged. ‘Heartland’ found the Canadian shunning the chamber pop hesitancy of his Final Fantasy project, embracing instead a boldness that’s culminated in the orchestral electro-pop of this year’s ‘In Conflict’. And this propulsive, widescreen melodicism dominates tonight’s set, Pallett’s violin backed by a taut two-man rhythm section. It’s a slick performance but the real treat comes when Pallett reminds us of his bedroom songwriter credentials, breaking midway to play solo for a handful of songs. As his violin (via loop pedal) fragments into a dense web of melody and multidimensional textures, it’s nothing if not a profound display of skill. Creative, welcome indulgence.

Front man Dale Barclay and bassist William Coombes emerge on stage topless, awash with tattoos and looking convincingly sociopathic. “Is anybody here up for dancing?” asks Barclay, his eyes bludgeoning the front rows. “Fuck off then,” he snarls back at those responding in the affirmative. Oh dear. Not for nothing have the Amazing Snakeheads gained something of an intimidating live reputation. Yet tonight their fans are equally rabid, revelling in the theatrical antagonism as the Glaswegians careen through their brutal repertoire. It’s barely a stretch to re-imagine the foursome as an eighties hardcore outfit akin to Black Flag. As it is, the violently debauched music here, now augmented by saxophonist Andrew Pattie, is slower but no less visceral. Barclay is the perennial focus, lacerating every song with his guttural howling.

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Yale graduate, assistant to Nico Muhly, ballet and opera composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone is – now at the age of 24 – a strong advert for the idea that music composition comes down to nature over nurture. In the face of such highbrow achievements at such a young again, his ‘pop’ project, San Fermin, could easily have come across as wantonly tryhard and very uncool, but instead it plays to Ludwig-Leone’s strengths, tonight aided by 7 graded players carrying different brass instruments, violins and entwined manly and girlish vocals. As on the group’s eponymous debut album, San Fermin’s show is Dirty Projectors meets Beirut, and while these concept songs that centre around a despondent man and a cynical woman don’t quite yet challenge either of those acts, the DP RnB numbers come damn close.

Live

Kendrick Lamar Heineken Stage, Parc Del Forum, Barcelona. 11.00pm 31 / 0 5 / 2 0 1 4 w rit e r: Stua r t st ubb s Ph ot o g raph e r: Laur a C o ul s o n

Normal festival-set rules don’t really apply at Primavera Sound. Hits are always expected but never guaranteed, which is how The Cure upset so many people two years ago, and delighted a handful beyond anything they’d expected. Nine Inch Nails – perhaps the biggest cult band in the world – still managed to be particularly stubborn this year, while even the phoned in performance from Television (technically and sonically flawless in the Saturday evening sun and amongst the circling joints, but without a word fromTomVerlaine beyond bemoaning an early monitor issue) knew to end on ‘Marquee Moon’, rather than play that album in its original order. Kendrick Lamar, on the other hand, was in a unique position as the lineup’s true superstar and went the other way, opening on ‘Money Trees’ and chucking out ‘Swimming Pools

St. Vincent Sony Stage. 9.50pm

2 0 14 r a ave m i Pr d n u o S

(Drank)’ by track four. He never let up, saving ‘Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe’, but only for the midway point, shortly after performing his verses from A$AP Rocky’s ‘Problems’, twice. His band, wearing Lionel Messi Barcelona shirts highlighted what made Earl Sweatshirt’s DJand-vox setup comparatively lackluster two hours earlier, but, then, that’s what you’re afforded when you when you’ve sold xxxxx copies of your debut album. So the songs from ‘Good Kid (Maad City)’ are presented – much like the album itself – as one, with no favourites. Of course Lamar knows what tracks people most want to hear, but to the uninitiated, everything sounds like the big hit. It’s a lie when he says, “Y’all remind me of Compton,” but everything else during the festival’s most fun set also points to it being the least contrived.

Charles Bradley Ray-Ban Stage. 1.10am

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Playing the slot immediately preceding a festival’s hottest property can be tricky business, as any witness to Primal Scream’s preStones embarrassment at Glastonbury will attest. Thankfully though, any worries that St Vincent’s Annie Clark will be cowed by Arcade Fire’s enormous hexagonal lighting rig hanging above her are brilliantly assuaged by a show as commanding as any over the weekend. Clark’s mesmerising poise and glacial beauty make for a heady pair, and when that’s combined with her latest songs, full of wit, infectious melody,

and effortlessly swaggering guitar playing, the effect is spellbinding but also oddly rapturous: the frequently over-obedient Primavera crowd whoop spontaneously following ‘Rattlesnake’’s mid-song guitar shred, and ‘Marrow’ becomes an unexpectedly singalong delight. The performance culminates with Clark’s slow-motion tumble down a central podium, the most extravagant of several choreographed set pieces that elevate her show from mere festival gig to a display of utter confidence and performing authority.

There is nothing like catching an unknown act at a festival; something that knocks you sideways and takes the air out of your lungs by complete surprise. We go for the bands we know, but the ones we don’t, if we can be bothered, can end up being the highlights. I was walking past the Ray-Ban stage on my way to see someone else when he came on stage. I stopped momentarily out of intrigue and then had my head split wide-open. Initially transfixed by the image: a man in his sixties, white suit, gut hanging out over his trousers, complete with huge band. It

was then when he opened his mouth that I lost myself in this performance. I’ve never heard a vocal performance like it in my life. Bradley’s old soul voice cut through Primavera with immense force. It ran down your spine like a thousand spiders and it hit your stomach with a resonating sense of pain, anguish and genuineness that forged an instant relationship between artist and audience. Charles Bradley expelled every ounce of emotion, dirt, beauty and pain that he had inside of his whole body, and his entire life. It was an utter privilege to give it a chance.

More Primavera Highlights...

The introduction of the new Boiler Room sealed dome stage: like a mini Center Parcs with 360 internal light shows.

Future Island’s Samuel T. Herring, it turns out, was holding back on Letterman. The TV is not ready for his body rolls.

Mogwai’s Jedi powers that meant 10,000 people managed to shush themselves into silence for ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’.

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Cinema 08/ 10

The Beautiful Game Darren Chesworth’s top 10 films about boys kicking balls

Next Goal Win di r e ct o r : Mik e B r e tt & Ste v e J am i s o n P r od u c er : K r i s tia n B r o di e Sta r r i n g : Th e A m er ica n Sam oa sq uad

10. Those Glory, Glory Days (1983) In the North London battle for supremacy Arsenal win on grass, but on celluloid Spurs take the honours. Against the insipid film version of Arsenal fan Nick Hornby’s equally pallid book Fever Pitch, is Philip Saville’s Those Glory, Glory Days. Funny and poignant it tells the story of a schoolgirl’s support for Tottenham during their double winning season of 1960-61.

09. Gregory’s Girl (1981) When a girl, Dorothy, replaces Gregory as centre forward on the school football team, the eponymous hero goes from resentful to love struck in the time it takes hormones to rear their ugly head. Bill Forsyth’s classic coming of age film is funny, tender and captures the awkwardness of teenage life as well as any movie ever made.

08. Looking for Eric (2009) With a passing resemblance to Alan Bleasdale’s early 80s drama, Scully, which told the story of a teenager receiving advice from an imaginary Kenny Dalglish, Looking for Eric, replaces Scouse teenager with middle-aged Mancunian postman, and Dalglish with the more charismatic Eric Cantona. Both works are left leaning, but, as one would expect from a Ken Loach film, Looking for Eric’s political message – working class solidarity – is more explicit.

07. Democracy in Black and White (2014) One place to find democracy in Brazil during the early 1980s was at the Corinthians football club. The

team (including international star Socrates) voted on everything, from what time to have lunch to which players to recruit. This would be unusual in any period, but while living under a military dictatorship it was positively radical. Pedro Asbeg’s excellent documentary perfectly captures this era of social upheaval and unparalleled hope

players, let alone the final score, could rightly be accused of indulgence. That is if the player in question wasn’t Zinedine Zidane, the most graceful footballer the world has ever seen.

06. The Firm (1988)

Albert Camus, novelist, existentialist and goalkeeper wrote: “All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” The goalkeeper in Wim Wenders’ second feature also makes a link between football and existentialism. After murdering a cinema cashier he compares the psychological confrontation between goalkeeper and penalty taker to that between murderer and policeman.

Of course, pre-Hornby football wasn’t all socialism and working class heroes, as the late, great Alan Clarke’s The Firm testifies.Telling the story of a West Ham gang led by Bex (Gary Oldman), the film is an unflinching examination of hooliganism and its depressing effect on the English game. Thoughtful, powerful, and not to be confused with Nick Love’s typically ham-fisted remake or the risible Green Street.

05. Club for a Fiver (1995) Club for a Fiver is about Leyton Orient’s season under the stewardship of joint managers John Sitton and ChrisTurner. No doubt the filmmaker’s original idea was to document a club in crisis, with chairman looking to sell and team facing relegation. But Sitton soon stole the show. Ribald, angry, and aggressive (sacking a player at half time of one match) Sitton barely worked in football again once the film was aired.

04. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) A truism, which pundits never fail to peddle, is that football is a results business.Therefore a film that follows a single player throughout a single game, with no interest in other

03. The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972)

02. An Impossible Job (1994) In nearly half a century England have achieved precisely nothing, yet still there’s anticipation that any new national coach will lead the ‘three lions’ to world domination. When the coach invariably fails he is criticised, ridiculed and sacked. The only difference with Graham Taylor was that he allowed cameras to chronicle the whole embarrassing, hilarious and utterly predictable affair.

01. Hillsborough (1996) Watching Jimmy McGovern’s dramatisation of the Hillsborough disaster is almost unbearable. If it wasn’t bad enough that 96 Liverpool football supporters died through events that were entirely avoidable, the victims and their fellow Liverpool fans were then blamed by South Yorkshire Police (the true culprits) for the disaster.This astonishing film can’t help but leave the viewer angry and distraught.

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Next Goal Wins is a documentary about the lowest ranked football nation in the world: American Samoa. The film opens with footage of the team’s 2001 defeat at the hands of Australia, a defeat so heavy even an American Samoa coach is unsure of the final score. For the record it was 31-0, the best/worst result (depending on your allegiance) in international football history. Now, ten years on, the team prepare for the 2014 World Cup qualifying tournament having been joined by filmmakers Mike Brett and Steve Jamison, and Dutch trainer, Thomas Rongen. Rongen, who played with Johann Cruyff and George Best, is a gnarled, exprofessional, drafted in from the U.S. where he managed at the highest level. An inevitable culture clash follows, with Rongen attempting to instil professionalism into a group of part-time, easygoing, simply not very good American Samoa players. But soon the team begins to improve, and Rongen recognises that his new charges are the antithesis of cynical, big business modern football. So far, so Cool Runnings. But where Next Goal Wins is superior, and what makes sport documentary generally more successful than sport drama, is that no matter how skilled an actor or director, it is impossible to recreate that gut churning excitement of a sporting event. (Ali knocking out Foreman will always trump Will Smith, portraying Ali, pretending to knock out another actor, portraying Foreman.) Combined with this is the fact that the protagonists are all so engaging – from the goalkeeper who will die a happy man if the team wins just one game, to the transgender centre back who is treated like a sister by the other players – meaning that by the end of this heart-warming film you are rooting for American Samoa as though you’d supported them your whole life.

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Watch this, Ian. Close your eyes!

... and now open them!

Yep

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