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ARCHIVED REVIEWS November 2006
7.30pm. £13. Carling Academy Wednesday November 1
7.30pm. £5. Bar Academy Wednesday November 1
8pm. £8.50. Glee Club Wednesday November 1
7.30pm. £15. Wulfrun Hall
However, while you do get some homegrown drone on the n traditional Sumri Hallarm, her solo album, Dirty Paper Cup (Red Grape) largely confounds expectations by teaming her with English pastoral pop songwriter Boo Hewardine who shares production credits with former Bible cohort Neill MacColl. Introducing banjo and acoustic guitar into the mix variously conjures Icelandic bluegrass on Diamonds On My Belly (though also veined with Eastern flavours) while Hometown Hero fuses medieval troubadour moods with a click track, Plastic Halo offers trad finger-picking 60s English folk (while she prettily sings ‘I hope you choke on your plastic halo’), Happily Ever After adds impishness to the title line’s romantic fantasy, while Tomoko could be lifted from the theme music of some pre-school TV programme and Lou Reed’s Who Loves The Sun in transformed into a vaudeville jaunt. Intoxicatingly spooked and skewed stuff, those months of endless light clearly have a special magic. 8pm. £6. Glee Club
7.30pm. £10. Barfly
7.30pm. £8. Barfly
The Datsuns
7.30pm. £10. Wulfrun Hall Friday November 3
7.30pm. £14. Little Civic
6pm. £12.50. Carling Academy Saturday November 4
7.30pm. £7. Barfly
There’s little to encourage such over-enthusiasm in new single He (Modern Art), a thrashy mix of garage and distortion pedals which unfolds the story of dodgy fertility expert Cecil Jacobson, or the, admittedly melodically more attractive, Blood Brothers. 7.30pm. £15. Carling Academy Sunday November 5
7.30pm. £7.50. Barfly Sunday November 5
7pm. £8. Bar Academy Sunday November 5
8pm. £12.50. Glee Club Monday November 6 Midlake
A five piece from smalltown Texas, they’ve attracted comparisons to Flaming Lips, Granddaddy and Mercury Rev. All references you’ll hear on The Trials of Van Occupanther (Bella Union), but also the influence of Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and (on Roscoe especially) CS&N with a sound that is both contemporary and steeped in the late 60s and early 70s. Dealing with themes of retreat from the modern world, it’s a folksily pastoral album that takes its title from the figure of a village-dwelling reclusive, ostracised scientist while the songs talk of the changing seasons and getting back to the earth. The band do crank up the rock heat here and there, nudging the guitars into buzzing flurries on In This Camp, Head Home and Young Bride, but it’s the more reflective, often keyboard based, numbers that really see them glow. The dreamy Bandits, a driftingly lazy Van Occupanther with its woodwinds, the cloud-tipped harmonies of Branches and the softly strummed quilted folk of Chasing After Deer all offer a musical and spiritual balm to wash away the grime of the rat race. Well worth catching is opening act Fionn Regan. The latest name on the acoustic singer-songwriter scene to find himself draped in the new Nick Drake/Elliott Smith cloak depending on your age and reference points, Regan hails from Dublin and picks a rather fine guitar that suggests he's also not unfamiliar with the collected works of Bert Jansch and John Fahey.
As debut album The End of History (Bella Union) demonstrates, he also has an open hearted voice that will conjure comparisons with Damien Rice and Conor Oberst but also Loudon Wainwright (Hey Rabbit's lament for the destruction of nature) and Paul Simon (Snowy Atlas Mountains). What's also caught the attention is his way his often skeletal arrangements are accompanied by original lyrics steeped in melancholy, despondency and, in some instances (as with 'my jumper is soaked in pig's blood' on Snowy Atlas Mountains), downright disturbing weirdness. Many of his images are plucked from rural nature. On the darkly urgent Hunter's World he uses a fox in a trap as a twisted romantic metaphor and even end of relationship song Put A Penny In The Slot sees him 'sit like a doc leaf sit beside a stinging nettle'. The same song bears witness to his sense of wit as, having broken up with his lover he apologises for having "arrived home with items in my bag from your house, there's some cutlery, a table cloth, some Hennessy and a book on presidents deceased." It doesn't always come off; the bit about needing a full stomach to drill for oil on Campaign Button feels forced as do some of the rhymes on the sprightly strummed Blackwater Child. But these are minor quibbles when faced with an artist you know you'll still be able to listen to long after the fashion parade has passed by. 7.30pm. £7.50. Barfly Monday November 6 The Fratellis
Their pub floor laddy rock pop romping with songs that are almost exclusively about the sex and having a bit of a larf out on the town has seen the Glasgow trio elevated to sell-out headline slots in a comparatively short space of time, debut album Costello Music (Island), shifting truck loads of copies among moping Libertines fans. All power to them, but it might be a good idea to enjoy the lifestyle while they can. Certainly songs like Chelsea Dagger, the dance friendly Flathead, Creepin Up The Backstairs, Clash flavoured Everybody Knows You Cried Last Night and Whistle For The Choir have sufficient jauntiness and cocky attitude to see blokes singing them drunkenly as they stagger down the street come closing time. But there’s a certain sameness in there too, and a certain feeling they might be trying too hard to with titles like Vince The Loveable Stoner and Got Ma Nuts From A Hippy, to sustain the initial rush beyond a disappointing second album. 7.30pm. £11.50. Carling Academy Monday November 6 Sean Lennon
He may be looking increasingly like his dad, but the whiny falsetto, dreary tunes, banal rhymes and turgid songs of new album Friendly Fire (EMI), his first in eight years, is hardly going to earn any other comparisons. Written, it would seem, in response to the collapse of his relationship with Bijou Phillips, the material’s restrained, resigned and reflective, largely dribbled out as soft rock ballads that stand far removed from the noisier, more experimental work he’s done with assorted collaborators in the time between albums. His debut, Into The Sun, didn’t set the world alight and this is unlikely to start any fan fever either. Being generous, spite fuelled opener Dead Meat isn’t bad, Tomorrow’s passable 40s crooner pastiche, Would I Be The One is a pleasant enough glam slam cover of an obscure Marc Bolan number and the closer, Falling Out Of Love, benefits from an injection of musical oomph, but it’s hard to imagine the prevailing woozy doodling and Lennon’s languid singing stifling any conversations already begun before he takes to the stage. 7.30pm. £15. Warwick Arts Centre Tuesday November 7 Ron Sexsmith
Reunited with producer Mitchell Froom, Sexsmith's tenth album, Time Being (V2), is his most reflective with songs that, sporting titles like I Think We're Lost, Reason For Our Love, Some Dusty Things and Hands Of Time, ponder mortality, the passing years and why we're here in the first place. As befits the subject matter, the approach is relaxed and mellow and although he does turn up the heat slightly on the jangling I Think We're Lost and the poppy singalong Ship Of Fools, it’s mostly acoustic strummed soft folk pop that recalls vintage McCartney lullabies on more than one occasion. There's a nice bluesy groove at work for Jazz At The Bookstore, a lament about how great music is so often relegated to in store aural wallpaper while The Grim Trucker is a witty if slightly unsettling number that breaks out into cod burlesque vohdeodoh jazz routine. But it's fair to say the best stuff here is the softer balladry, Sexsmith's husked croon lulling you into a cosy melancholic warmth on the spare beauty of And Now The Day Is Done, and the tenderly lovely faded love of Snow Angel. Never less than an entrancing live performer, the new material should bring an added gloss to tonight’s gig. 8pm. £16.50. Glee Club Tuesday November 7 Mumm-Ra
A five piece from Bexhill On Sea, as you might surmise from influences that embrace the Beta Band, Kinks, XTC and Sigur Ros they tend to favour slightly skewed tempo shifting rock. Their last EP, Black hurts Day And The Night Rolls On threw up the clattering Davis Essex meets Kasabian indie of Song B on one hand, the sparse loss and loneliness ballad Light Up This Room and the Yes prog shades of The Temple on the other. They’re back now though with Out Of The Question (Columbia), a shamelessly direct slice of bopping along jangly guitar pop rush that you’d be forgiven for thinking even had sleigh bells ringing away in the background. A considerably more optimistic indication of future developments and commercial success, it’ll doubtless prove something of a live highlight in a set that promises to be a book now taster for next year’s debut album. 7.30pm. £5. Bar Academy Wednesday November 8 Lucinda Williams
Finally making her Birmingham debut after the 2004 European tour dates were cancelled following her mother’s death, the influential feisty country n blues star was something of a latecomer to success, critically lauded and with having provided hit songs for other acts but not cracking the commercial market in her own right until she was 45 with 1998s Grammy winning album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. Since when she’s gone from strength to strength, each successive album impossibly better than the last. Now 53, she’ll be looking to do it again next year when her long awaited new studio set West arrives in February. But until then, she’s plugging a remastered reissue of Car Wheels which not only comes with alternate takes of Still I Long For Your Kiss and Down The Big Road Blues and the original version of Out Of Touch but also includes the bonus disc WXPN Live At Penn’s Landing, a full concert recording from the same year that includes almost everything from the breakthrough album as well as earlier material such as Pineola, Hot Blood, and Changed The Locks. Regularly absent from the live set in recent years, whether Cars Wheels itself will return to the show for this tour remains to be seen, depending on how loud you holler. But recent US gigs bode well for fans here with set lists featuring old classics Pineola, Drunken Angel, Lake Charles, Bust To Baton Rouge and Joy alongside solid such gold nuggets from 2003’s World Without Tears as Fruits of My Labor, Righteously, Ventura and the brilliant Those Three Days. Better yet, there’s likely going to be tasters of the forthcoming album with Jailhouse Tears, Where Is My Love, Unsuffer Me and Knowing among the new songs that have been finding their way into the gutsy shows. Support comes from the ever welcome Teddy Thompson. 7.30pm. £22.50. Symphony Hall Wednesday November 8 Luke Haines
Formerly frontman for the Auteurs, Black Box Recorder and Baader Meinhof, last year Haines was out flogging copies of his collected works 3CD set Luke Haines is Dead. Good to see then that he’s now working to the future, back touring with a brand new set of material from Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop (Degenerate Music) and sporting white suit, Panama hat and Victorian tache. He’s thankfully still as sardonic and sour in his jaded snapshots of England, a worm eaten Ray Davies referencing the likes of Peter Sutcliffe on ostensible football song Leeds United, Jonathan King and Chicory Tip on teenage fumbling nightclub memoir The Walton Hop, and 60s boxer Freddie Mills (rumouredly murdered by the Krays) while taking to task the little Englander mentality on Here’s To Old England and chastising Gary Glitter for sullying his rather fine glampop band by association on Bad Reputation. As might be expected from a man who recorded a song titled Bugger Bognor he makes no apologies for his singular lyrical vision and the undisguised vitriol of his potshots while his musical bent follows a similar self-willed path, cheerfully plastering things with 80s electropop, pub rock, chugging punk and even a dash of swing. A very English individual to be cherished, even if he’s probably hate the prospect. 7.30pm. £7. Bar Academy Wednesday November 8 Radio 4
More Gang of Four meets the Clash dance floor agit-pop from the New York outfit with swirly snarly stabbing guitars, writhing bass and crisp drumming, occasionally interspersed with some faux reggae loping rhythms. However, while they clearly know their way round the instruments these days, inspiration seems to have deserted them on the songwriting front. Too many tracks on current album Enemies Like These sound indistinguishable from one another, most never seem to be going anywhere and give up long before they arrive. At the worst, Packing Things Up On The Scene they sound like Duran imitators, but even the best cuts here, the pop swinging (Always A) Target and the melodic Grass Is Greener, just come across as minor shades of Interpol or The Killers. With enemies like this, they’re unlikely to win many new friends. 7.30pm. £8.50. Barfly Wednesday November 8 Gretchen Peters
You might not know the name, but, covered as they have been by the likes of Bryan Adams, Martina and Shania Twain, you've probably heard her songs. But nobody sings them like she does, so you really owe it to yourself catch her while she’s here promoting Trio, a stunning live set of uncluttered, pure and achingly lovely stripped down tales of love, loss and leaving, the melancholy veined with a spiritual conviction that inner strength will prevail. All of her three albums are represented here. Her overlooked Secret Of Life debut leads the count with four songs, the affirmations of constancy that are Over Africa and When You Are Old, the heartbreaking Circus Girl with its lonely narrator, and On A Bus To St. Cloud, the classic lament for lost love that provided a hit for Trisha Yearwood but which has never sounded as exquisite as it does here. From the self-titled album comes Souvenirs, her ‘little travelogue across America’ where she finds the promised land littered with "little tin toys that fall apart", gospel hued forgiveness plea Revival, and the coming of age Like Water Into Wine. And from Halcyon, arguably her best and most potent collection to date, comes Museum’s wistful tale of turning a broken heart into a work of art and the devastating This Used To Be My Town about a murdered girl’s ghost returning to where she once lived. For fans who’ve longed to have Peters’ own versions of songs she’s written for others, the show also includes Faith Hill’s 1998 hit, The Secret Of Life where a couple of guys in a bar agree that a decent cup of coffee and Rolling Stones records make life worth living. She may not be as widely known as those who have benefited from her writing, but if proof were ever needed that this other GP is one of the most gifted songwriters and performers in America and Americana then this has it in spades. 8pm. £13.50. Glee Club Thursday November 9 Motorhead
Some things never change, and having recently reissued their 80s classics Another Perfect Day, Orgasmatron and Rock n Roll with bonus live CDs, Lemmy and co gird up their jeans to make ears bleed in the cause of brand new studio set Kiss of Death (SPV). It doesn’t sound like 20 years have past between Rock n Roll and now, the album slamming into the concrete from the opening track, Sucker, and continuing to deliver ramped up blues metal boogie split through with aggression, attitude and the smell of cigarettes, beer and sweat soaked leathers that haven’t been washed in months. Hammering through the unrelenting but still melodic likes of Devil I Know, Trigger, Living In The Past, Going Down and the guttural death metal of Living In The Past and Kingdom Of The Worm, it’s hard to believe Lemmy’s not far short of his bus pass but can still bellow young pretenders off the stage from 30 foot. Flitting across a variety of metal variations in the course of the album, the marginally folk inflected God Was Never On Your Side even lets you catch a glimpse of Lem’s sensitive acoustic blues side, though it’s unlikely to intrude into the raw rock of a live set that promises to mix up tracks from the album with 30s years worth of ‘Head highlights. 7.30pm. £22. Carling Academy Thursday November 9 Flaming Lips
For many the best band in America, after two decades of critical praise and minor cult success, the Lips have morphed into one of the biggest and most influential names around, finally catapulting into global consciousness with 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and its accompanying live shows. Now Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins return as conquering rock band heroes for their second tour built around At War With The Mystics, another experimental journey into the psychedelic cosmos of Coyne’s imagination, a world that often makes Brian Wilson seem like Chas n Dave. Yes Free Radicals is basically the band mucking about with some Prince disco, but the rest takes off into the gargantuan stratosphere with the trademark blend of perfect pop and barking quirkiness that is The Sound of Failure and My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion with its twittering electronic birds and spacey burbles. Druggy, surreal, warped and patently the illegitimate offspring of the Mothers of Invention, Todd Rundgren and Yes, they get pretty funky on The W.A.N.D and Haven’t Got A Clue while Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung is everything excess the title suggests, and then adds some Pink Floyd too. New single It Overtakes Me is an epic little ditty that shifts from crunchy dancepop into a symphonic psychedelic wash while the soft soul Mr Ambulance Driver and Goin’ On are reminders that they can also make simple, crystalline pop that doesn’t feel the need to shake the galaxy with prog excesses. Not of course that anyone’s going along tonight in the hope of seeing a low key show of restrained balladry, to which end the Lips will pucker up and deliver admirably. 7.30pm. £20. NIA Thursday November 9 Bruce Springsteen & The Seeger Sessions Band
Back in 97, Springsteen recorded We Shall Overcome for a Pete Seeger tribute album. Self-confessedly no expert on Seeger's music, he spent several days boning up on the songs and emerged a man obsessed. Over the following years, the idea of recording a whole album of Seeger's music simmered away on the back burner. Then, after being introduced to a bunch of musicians who'd played at a fiesta on his farm, he finally decided to do it instead of talking about it. Recorded totally live, the result was The Seeger Sessions (Sony), the sound of Springsteen having fun again, shouting out cues to the musicians as they play and generally letting it all hang out. Since Seeger was interpreter rather than songwriter, with the exception of My Oklahoma Home and additional lyrics by 50s civil rights activist Alice Wine to the gospel hymn Eyes On The Prize, all of the material is trad or public domain. Opening in frolicsome, banjo plucking form with the knees slapping hoe downing Old Dan Tucker, it swishes its skirts and coat-tails through railroad rouser John Henry, Negro spiritual Jacob's Ladder, the ramshackle clattering spiritual O Mary Don't You Weep, sea shanty protest Pay Me My Money Down and, as a good time closer, the veritably ancient Froggie Went A'Courtin'. Quieter notes are struck on 1815 Irish anti-war ballad Mrs McGrath (where the Boss gets to sing too-ri-aa, fol-did-dle-di-aa) and the haunting work song Erie Canal, but the album's finest moment comes with a hymnal reading of the classic world weary Shenandoah which with lonesome banjo, choral backing, slow march beat and a play out flourish of melancholic tuba, conjures heart aching images of some John Ford epic with early mist rising over the fields and mountains of the Civil War devastated South as a bone tired Henry Fonda leans against a pine and dreams of home. As you might surmise from the tour billing, it’s this album and songs that forms the bulk of the shows but that’s not to say there won’t be a few Springsteen originals in there too. Set lists from the tour to date have been featuring the thematically complementary likes of Atlantic City, The Ghost of Tom Joad, My City of Ruins, Fire, The Promised Land and The River while a staple ingredient now, usually among the encores, his their cover of Love of the Common People, once a hit for the Everlys but probably better known here by way of Paul Young. But whatever you get, this is going to be a very special Springsteen night to remember. 7.30pm. £50. NEC Thursday November 9 Unkle Bob
Another Glasgow based outfit (though only one of them’s Scottish) with a love of the Byrds, bluegrass, REM, vocal harmonies and all things jangly guitar, the five piece have earned themselves a place on several year Best Of lists already with debut album Sugar and Spite (Friendly Sounds). playing here as support to Cosmic Rough Riders, there’s times when you find yourself also thinking of Prefab Sprout or even early Radiohead without the band actually sounding like copyists. Reflecting the title, the album deals in assorted shades of love songs, from the bitterness of slow swaying soarer Better Off and a spare This Way to the stifled emotions of Hold It Down (a song Rod Stewart should be lining up to record), the blues banjo darkness of Vagabond and the more romantic sunny day uplift of One By One. Anyone who’s encountered their sublime lovelorn single Hit Parade with its tumbling hook melodies and "I wanna get laid, I wanna get played, I wanna walk down the hit parade" chorus will surely have be become a disciple on the spot, and if that somehow didn’t do the trick then the scuffed bittersweet folk-pop lament Too Many People or the early REM flavours of Put A Record On will bring them to their emotional knees. Get in early and this time next year you’ll be dining out on how you saw them when you didn’t have to queue a week in advance. 7.30pm. £6. Little Civic Friday November 10 Wolfmother
Having caused a bit of a stir among the music press with their self-titled debut album, the Australian power trio headline their biggest UK tour yet. Sporting a cover featuring one of those semi-clad warrior women that only seem to exist on heavy metal album sleeves, they make no bones about their influences. Listen to tracks like Dimension, Woman, Mind’s Eye, Vagabond, Jackass 2 featured new single Joker & The Thief, and Colossal and your head immediately fills with images of Cream, Zeppelin, The Who, Hendrix and Deep Purple while fleshing out the landscape a little more Apple Tree offers White Stripes garage blues, Witchcraft has a touch of Jethro Tull flute solo and Tales even hints at the Small Faces. Musically adept with their shifting time signatures, they crank up raspy big guitars, Percy Plant vocal howls and massive riffs and if they don’t actually bring anything new to their old school blues rock, audiences will be too busy fingering those air guitars and bobbing heads to give a damn. Taking up the other dressings rooms will be South London’s Maccabees, an outfit whose songs have been likened those of Ray Davies and Ian Dury, wide eyed romantic single First Love the middle ground between The Futureheads and Blur;
Bloc Partyish Leeds combo ¡Forward, Russia! giving another nudge to album Give Me A Wall (Dance To The Radio) with its numerically titles noise mongering art rock; and, by way of something a little different, the folkier harmony indie pop sounds of Fields. 7.30pm. £13.50. Carling Academy Friday November 10 Taste of Chaos A riff fest package tour with no particular outfit taking the headline tag, this promises to deliver a night of blistering contemporary metal, even if originality may be in shorter supply.
Ontario emo by the book’s provided by Alexisonfire, over here with Crisis (Hassle), their third album crammed with guitar squalls, thundering drums, and screamo rock yowls all taken at a speed metal pace as they pile drive their way through such numbers as the frenzied Drunks, Lovers Sinners and Saints, the anthemic crowdrouser We Are The Sound and the delightfully titled Boiled Frogs.
More post-hardcore’s served up by young Californians Saosin, their overproduced eponymous debut with the new line up (EMI) doing the stock in trade quiet bit, loud bit, buzzing guitars and swoop n soar vocal thing on a dozen melody fisted tracks that clearly have an awareness of West Coast pop harmony sensibilities to go with the rock maelstrom generated on things like It’s So Simple, Collapse, and Bury Your Head. There’s not exactly a huge display of variation between the songs, so you can at least slip out to the bar between numbers without noticing the gap when you return.
New York emo rockers Taking Back Sunday give another clout to the Louder Now album, the hardcore assault of Spin, the limb jerking What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost and body crashing rockfest Twenty Twenty Surgery balanced by the poppier Blinkish radio sniffing shades of new single Liar (Warner), the slow surging Miami and obligatory acoustic ballad Divine Intervention.
Finally there’s New Jersey’s Senses Fail, joining the tour to promote Still Searching (Vagrant), the follow up to 2004 debut Let it Enfold You and a further collection of snotty screamo rock punk that’s full of bluster but doesn’t really stand out from the crowd. That said, kick off single Calling All Cars with its familiar bubblegum Blink formula and big ballad Lost And Found have the potential to cross them over into more mainstream territory while All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues and the thundering Shark Attack keep the faithful happy, suggesting they may well prove the highlight of the evening. 7.30pm. £20. NIA Friday November 10 Untitled Musical Project
Hailing from Stafford via Birmingham, UMP are a punky trio spitting out vitriol and contempt at the usual complacent targets, believing you can change the world with a snarling guitar, throbbing bass and gobbed vocals. They make their debut with a bare boned three tracker (White Heat) that clocks in at just under seven minutes, spraying out untrammelled energy and noise with the juddery Pistols inflected Beards & Drugs and a furious metal boogie driven Facsimile while their bluesier Jack White inclinations surface on the shouty Why Isn't Paul McCartney Dead Already?, a track that could well become the anthem of the Heather Mills fan club. 10.30pm. £3. Barfly Saturday November 11 Paul Simon
Of course he’ll be obliged to drop in the old chestnuts everyone wants to hear, a Mother And Child Reunion and Gracelands here, a Mrs Robinson and a Bridge Over Troubled Water (possibly) there, but the reason for this first visit in a seeming eternity is to promote Surprise, his first album since You're The One six years ago and his best since 1990's Rhythm of the Saints, Simon sounding a lot younger and more sprightly than his 64 years might lead you to expect. And yet it’s clearly an album of a man seasoned by life and experience as he sings about his family, the malaise of alienation that's occupied his thoughts since he first started writing songs, regret, God and the post 9/11 world. Never the most direct of political commentators, preferring to mask things with metaphor and allusion, he's nevertheless fairly upfront here on the opening How Can You Live In The Northeast which encompasses Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans floods and how religion more often leaves us in the dark than leads us into the light. Likewise Wartime Prayers is a gospel hued post 9/11 hymn for the nation and the battered American Dream while Outrageous romps along on chicken scratching guitar licks as the narrator bemoans corporate greed in the verses and spends the chorus wondering 'who's gonna love you when your looks are gone' as he does 900 sit ups a day. Eno may bring his own electronic sheens to the material and perhaps have prompted the complex arrangements and elliptical musical structures, but this is unmistakably Simon. Indeed, despite some buzzing techno colours, Once Upon A Time There Was An Ocean melodically harks right back to You Can Call Me Al while Everything About It Is A Love Song, That's Me and the poignant Another Galaxy shimmer with his distinctive folk pop warmth. There's even a wry self-deprecating nod towards his own supposed arrogance on the choppy Bo Diddley rhythmed Sure Don't Feel Like Love where he sings "once in August 1993 I was wrong and I could be wrong again." Rounding off with his parental love song Father And Daughter, this is no album from some ageing musician content to recycle well worn past formula as he grows older but the work of a man who takes the foundations of his past and consistently seeks to redevelop and redesign the structures erected upon it. A pleasant surprise, indeed. 7.30pm. £45/£40. NEC Saturday November 11 Switches
The Guildford four piece must have an interesting record collection. New single Law Down The Law (Degenerate) kicks out like some glam stomping disco funky Franz Ferdinand but come Solid Gold and they’re displaying Queen and Sparks pretentions while I’ve Got A Problem’s a throwaway knees up romp before the acoustic simplicity of She’ll Push Me Away drifts off into Simon & Garfunkel folksiness. It’s one thing to cover all bases, quite another to expect them all to cross pollinate when you need to sell tickets at this stage in your ascent of the ladder. 7.30pm. £6. Bar Academy Sunday November 12 John Power
Formerly bassist with Liverpool cult heroes The Las whose There She Goes was once a staple soundtrack inclusion for every high school/college movie out of Hollywood, Power’s largely lived in the shadow of their songwriter Lee Mavers, his own material rarely surfacing in the band’s output. Quitting the band he went on to form Cast, enjoying sizeable success before that all fell apart four years ago in the car wreck that was the Beat Route album. Last year he rejoined Mavers for a LA’s tour, a reunion that may prove an ongoing existence and even produce a long overdue second album. More immediately, it prompted Power to pick up the guitar again and record another solo album, Willow She Weeps (Tanuki Tanuki), an acoustic gentle folk blues collection that points up both his Nick Drake and Captain Beefheart affections and includes the lovely shanty swaying All My Days was the first song he ever wrote, way back in the mid 80s. There’s a country gospel touch to the slide guitar folk galumphing Old Red Sea, Give It To Me is clattering swampy blues, the title track more of a mossy back porch folk tune, Jumpin’ Bean a rustbucket stomp and Goodbye a wry taste of the folksy pop that hued some of the early Beatles albums. None of it’s going to put gold discs on the wall or resurrect the days of hit singles and sell out tours, but it all sounds like a man happy with the music he’s making, and ready to spread those smiles around among those who share the same uncluttered, honest tastes. 8pm. £10. Glee Club Sunday November 12 Dufus
Part of the same New York anti-folk scene as Moldy Peaches, they’ve been going for around ten years now, a shifting line up revolving around mainstay Seth Faergoaliza. They’re arriving here with their tenth album The Last Classed Blast, issued here via Birmingham’s Iron Man label, a typical mix of the beguiling and the difficult, the accessible and the experimental, respectively ably represented by Dawn Crusade and You Weren’t Ready on the one hand and War Is Over and the poppy fuzz guitar charms of Tuto on the other. A curiosity about where things might progress if left to their own devices tends to make some of the tracks ramble on long past their interest buffers, Heaven Is Waiting and On And On cases in point, but then you get the six and a half minute doodling childlike Balloon Rocking Chair that could happily extend for the same again. Who knows, live it may well do. It says much that numbers titled Dissassemblement Hymn # Exponential and Nenglich Phlarlooselee are infinitely more pleasurable listening than they sound, the latter a lovely ramshackle circus waltz that might have sprung from a band featuring Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Given the roam from the unaccompanied folk gospel of Sacred Charney to the mutant klezmer of Babylon Com, it won’t surprise newcomers that the live show could take off in any direction, numbers extending up to 30 minutes with the band sometimes augmented by fans climbing on stage to add their own contributions. An acquired taste perhaps, but certainly an individual one. 8pm. £5. Jug of Ale Sunday November 12 Less Than Jake
Less of the ska punk outfit they started life as, the Florida boys have grown up (the lyrics now seasoned and stained by life experiences and 15 years together) and moved more towards mainstream poprock with current album In With The Out Crowd, songs such as Soundtrack Of My Life, Overrated, Landmines And Landslides and Hopeless Case clearly looking to capture the same market as the army of chewy indie pop guitar bands currently soaking up American youth record sales. Still, you have to keep the old fans happy too, so trumpets and sax and ska lope rhythms are back in action for the tour’s tie in single, P.S. Shock The World (Warner), though ironically it’s also one of the least interesting or memorable cuts from the album. 7pm. £17.50. Carling Academy Sunday November 12 Show of Hands
Over the 15 years that Steve Knightley and Phil Beer have been working together as Show of Hands, they’ve been quietly building such a solid and substantial audience that they’ve proven quite capable of twice selling out the Royal Albert Hall. They look set to repeat the performance for a third time next Easter. Not bad for what most consider just some acoustic folk duo. But while their roots may be in folk music, there’s much more to them than that, embracing world music and rock in equal measure, showing more affinity with names like The Levellers than, say, Fairport. Certainly their current album, Witness (Hands On), is firm testament to the musical and lyrical muscle they pack, the fiery instrumental The Falmouth Packet/Haul Away Joe displaying their global influences while the songs largely take inspiration from incidents and events around the West Country. Witness itself celebrates the alternative lifestyle of a Devon commune, the rousing Roots is a proud defence of English musical heritage and identity and The Dive recalls an East Devon father’s sea rescue of his son. Elsewhere Undertow sings of being trapped in a small seaside town while Johnny Coppin’s Innocent’s Song uses the image of Herod to address child abuse, Union Street unfolds the moving story of the last letters between a Royal Marine and his wife and, heading into parable territory, The Bet spins a Tales of the Unexpected story involving a car crash, a suitcase full of money, a winning streak on the horses and a bitter twist. Given the wealth of material they have, quite how much they’ll be mining from the album remains to be seen but chances are pretty high that the set list will include their highlight version of George Harrison’s If I Needed Someone. It’ll be worth the ticket to hear that alone. Opening proceedings will be their mate Martyn Joseph doubtless taking the opportunity for another reminder of current album, Deep Blue with its response to the world under Bush and Blair; How Did We End Up Here forthrightly referencing prisoner abuse, rigged elections and the economic agenda behind American foreign policy and Yet Still This Will Not Be addressing political self-interest and the ‘nurturing child soldiers with the munitions from our factories’.
With a set likely to include old favourites This Being Woman and Dic Penderyn alongside his riff on What If God Were One Of Us and his staple live cover of U2’s Stuck in A Moment, this is guaranteed to be as classy as ever. Friday November 10 Wolfmother
Having caused a bit of a stir among the music press with their self-titled debut album, the Australian power trio headline their biggest UK tour yet. Sporting a cover featuring one of those semi-clad warrior women that only seem to exist on heavy metal album sleeves, they make no bones about their influences. Listen to tracks like Dimension, Woman, Mind’s Eye, Vagabond, Jackass 2 featured new single Joker & The Thief, and Colossal and your head immediately fills with images of Cream, Zeppelin, The Who, Hendrix and Deep Purple while fleshing out the landscape a little more Apple Tree offers White Stripes garage blues, Witchcraft has a touch of Jethro Tull flute solo and Tales even hints at the Small Faces. Musically adept with their shifting time signatures, they crank up raspy big guitars, Percy Plant vocal howls and massive riffs and if they don’t actually bring anything new to their old school blues rock, audiences will be too busy fingering those air guitars and bobbing heads to give a damn. Taking up the other dressings rooms will be South London’s Maccabees, an outfit whose songs have been likened those of Ray Davies and Ian Dury, wide eyed romantic single First Love the middle ground between The Futureheads and Blur;
Bloc Partyish Leeds combo ¡Forward, Russia! giving another nudge to album Give Me A Wall (Dance To The Radio) with its numerically titles noise mongering art rock; and, by way of something a little different, the folkier harmony indie pop sounds of Fields. 7.30pm. £13.50. Carling Academy Friday November 10 Taste of Chaos A riff fest package tour with no particular outfit taking the headline tag, this promises to deliver a night of blistering contemporary metal, even if originality may be in shorter supply.
Ontario emo by the book’s provided by Alexisonfire, over here with Crisis (Hassle), their third album crammed with guitar squalls, thundering drums, and screamo rock yowls all taken at a speed metal pace as they pile drive their way through such numbers as the frenzied Drunks, Lovers Sinners and Saints, the anthemic crowdrouser We Are The Sound and the delightfully titled Boiled Frogs.
More post-hardcore’s served up by young Californians Saosin, their overproduced eponymous debut with the new line up (EMI) doing the stock in trade quiet bit, loud bit, buzzing guitars and swoop n soar vocal thing on a dozen melody fisted tracks that clearly have an awareness of West Coast pop harmony sensibilities to go with the rock maelstrom generated on things like It’s So Simple, Collapse, and Bury Your Head. There’s not exactly a huge display of variation between the songs, so you can at least slip out to the bar between numbers without noticing the gap when you return.
New York emo rockers Taking Back Sunday give another clout to the Louder Now album, the hardcore assault of Spin, the limb jerking What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost and body crashing rockfest Twenty Twenty Surgery balanced by the poppier Blinkish radio sniffing shades of new single Liar (Warner), the slow surging Miami and obligatory acoustic ballad Divine Intervention.
Finally there’s New Jersey’s Senses Fail, joining the tour to promote Still Searching (Vagrant), the follow up to 2004 debut Let it Enfold You and a further collection of snotty screamo rock punk that’s full of bluster but doesn’t really stand out from the crowd. That said, kick off single Calling All Cars with its familiar bubblegum Blink formula and big ballad Lost And Found have the potential to cross them over into more mainstream territory while All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues and the thundering Shark Attack keep the faithful happy, suggesting they may well prove the highlight of the evening. 7.30pm. £20. NIA Friday November 10 Untitled Musical Project
Hailing from Stafford via Birmingham, UMP are a punky trio spitting out vitriol and contempt at the usual complacent targets, believing you can change the world with a snarling guitar, throbbing bass and gobbed vocals. They make their debut with a bare boned three tracker (White Heat) that clocks in at just under seven minutes, spraying out untrammelled energy and noise with the juddery Pistols inflected Beards & Drugs and a furious metal boogie driven Facsimile while their bluesier Jack White inclinations surface on the shouty Why Isn't Paul McCartney Dead Already?, a track that could well become the anthem of the Heather Mills fan club. 10.30pm. £3. Barfly Saturday November 11 Paul Simon
Of course he’ll be obliged to drop in the old chestnuts everyone wants to hear, a Mother And Child Reunion and Gracelands here, a Mrs Robinson and a Bridge Over Troubled Water (possibly) there, but the reason for this first visit in a seeming eternity is to promote Surprise, his first album since You're The One six years ago and his best since 1990's Rhythm of the Saints, Simon sounding a lot younger and more sprightly than his 64 years might lead you to expect. And yet it’s clearly an album of a man seasoned by life and experience as he sings about his family, the malaise of alienation that's occupied his thoughts since he first started writing songs, regret, God and the post 9/11 world. Never the most direct of political commentators, preferring to mask things with metaphor and allusion, he's nevertheless fairly upfront here on the opening How Can You Live In The Northeast which encompasses Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans floods and how religion more often leaves us in the dark than leads us into the light. Likewise Wartime Prayers is a gospel hued post 9/11 hymn for the nation and the battered American Dream while Outrageous romps along on chicken scratching guitar licks as the narrator bemoans corporate greed in the verses and spends the chorus wondering 'who's gonna love you when your looks are gone' as he does 900 sit ups a day. Eno may bring his own electronic sheens to the material and perhaps have prompted the complex arrangements and elliptical musical structures, but this is unmistakably Simon. Indeed, despite some buzzing techno colours, Once Upon A Time There Was An Ocean melodically harks right back to You Can Call Me Al while Everything About It Is A Love Song, That's Me and the poignant Another Galaxy shimmer with his distinctive folk pop warmth. There's even a wry self-deprecating nod towards his own supposed arrogance on the choppy Bo Diddley rhythmed Sure Don't Feel Like Love where he sings "once in August 1993 I was wrong and I could be wrong again." Rounding off with his parental love song Father And Daughter, this is no album from some ageing musician content to recycle well worn past formula as he grows older but the work of a man who takes the foundations of his past and consistently seeks to redevelop and redesign the structures erected upon it. A pleasant surprise, indeed. 7.30pm. £45/£40. NEC Saturday November 11 Switches
The Guildford four piece must have an interesting record collection. New single Law Down The Law (Degenerate) kicks out like some glam stomping disco funky Franz Ferdinand but come Solid Gold and they’re displaying Queen and Sparks pretentions while I’ve Got A Problem’s a throwaway knees up romp before the acoustic simplicity of She’ll Push Me Away drifts off into Simon & Garfunkel folksiness. It’s one thing to cover all bases, quite another to expect them all to cross pollinate when you need to sell tickets at this stage in your ascent of the ladder. 7.30pm. £6. Bar Academy Sunday November 12 John Power
Formerly bassist with Liverpool cult heroes The Las whose There She Goes was once a staple soundtrack inclusion for every high school/college movie out of Hollywood, Power’s largely lived in the shadow of their songwriter Lee Mavers, his own material rarely surfacing in the band’s output. Quitting the band he went on to form Cast, enjoying sizeable success before that all fell apart four years ago in the car wreck that was the Beat Route album. Last year he rejoined Mavers for a LA’s tour, a reunion that may prove an ongoing existence and even produce a long overdue second album. More immediately, it prompted Power to pick up the guitar again and record another solo album, Willow She Weeps (Tanuki Tanuki), an acoustic gentle folk blues collection that points up both his Nick Drake and Captain Beefheart affections and includes the lovely shanty swaying All My Days was the first song he ever wrote, way back in the mid 80s. There’s a country gospel touch to the slide guitar folk galumphing Old Red Sea, Give It To Me is clattering swampy blues, the title track more of a mossy back porch folk tune, Jumpin’ Bean a rustbucket stomp and Goodbye a wry taste of the folksy pop that hued some of the early Beatles albums. None of it’s going to put gold discs on the wall or resurrect the days of hit singles and sell out tours, but it all sounds like a man happy with the music he’s making, and ready to spread those smiles around among those who share the same uncluttered, honest tastes. 8pm. £10. Glee Club Sunday November 12 Dufus
Part of the same New York anti-folk scene as Moldy Peaches, they’ve been going for around ten years now, a shifting line up revolving around mainstay Seth Faergoaliza. They’re arriving here with their tenth album The Last Classed Blast, issued here via Birmingham’s Iron Man label, a typical mix of the beguiling and the difficult, the accessible and the experimental, respectively ably represented by Dawn Crusade and You Weren’t Ready on the one hand and War Is Over and the poppy fuzz guitar charms of Tuto on the other. A curiosity about where things might progress if left to their own devices tends to make some of the tracks ramble on long past their interest buffers, Heaven Is Waiting and On And On cases in point, but then you get the six and a half minute doodling childlike Balloon Rocking Chair that could happily extend for the same again. Who knows, live it may well do. It says much that numbers titled Dissassemblement Hymn # Exponential and Nenglich Phlarlooselee are infinitely more pleasurable listening than they sound, the latter a lovely ramshackle circus waltz that might have sprung from a band featuring Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Given the roam from the unaccompanied folk gospel of Sacred Charney to the mutant klezmer of Babylon Com, it won’t surprise newcomers that the live show could take off in any direction, numbers extending up to 30 minutes with the band sometimes augmented by fans climbing on stage to add their own contributions. An acquired taste perhaps, but certainly an individual one. 8pm. £5. Jug of Ale Sunday November 12 Less Than Jake
Less of the ska punk outfit they started life as, the Florida boys have grown up (the lyrics now seasoned and stained by life experiences and 15 years together) and moved more towards mainstream poprock with current album In With The Out Crowd, songs such as Soundtrack Of My Life, Overrated, Landmines And Landslides and Hopeless Case clearly looking to capture the same market as the army of chewy indie pop guitar bands currently soaking up American youth record sales. Still, you have to keep the old fans happy too, so trumpets and sax and ska lope rhythms are back in action for the tour’s tie in single, P.S. Shock The World (Warner), though ironically it’s also one of the least interesting or memorable cuts from the album. 7pm. £17.50. Carling Academy Sunday November 12 Show of Hands
Over the 15 years that Steve Knightley and Phil Beer have been working together as Show of Hands, they’ve been quietly building such a solid and substantial audience that they’ve proven quite capable of twice selling out the Royal Albert Hall. They look set to repeat the performance for a third time next Easter. Not bad for what most consider just some acoustic folk duo. But while their roots may be in folk music, there’s much more to them than that, embracing world music and rock in equal measure, showing more affinity with names like The Levellers than, say, Fairport. Certainly their current album, Witness (Hands On), is firm testament to the musical and lyrical muscle they pack, the fiery instrumental The Falmouth Packet/Haul Away Joe displaying their global influences while the songs largely take inspiration from incidents and events around the West Country. Witness itself celebrates the alternative lifestyle of a Devon commune, the rousing Roots is a proud defence of English musical heritage and identity and The Dive recalls an East Devon father’s sea rescue of his son. Elsewhere Undertow sings of being trapped in a small seaside town while Johnny Coppin’s Innocent’s Song uses the image of Herod to address child abuse, Union Street unfolds the moving story of the last letters between a Royal Marine and his wife and, heading into parable territory, The Bet spins a Tales of the Unexpected story involving a car crash, a suitcase full of money, a winning streak on the horses and a bitter twist. Given the wealth of material they have, quite how much they’ll be mining from the album remains to be seen but chances are pretty high that the set list will include their highlight version of George Harrison’s If I Needed Someone. It’ll be worth the ticket to hear that alone. Opening proceedings will be their mate Martyn Joseph doubtless taking the opportunity for another reminder of current album, Deep Blue with its response to the world under Bush and Blair; How Did We End Up Here forthrightly referencing prisoner abuse, rigged elections and the economic agenda behind American foreign policy and Yet Still This Will Not Be addressing political self-interest and the ‘nurturing child soldiers with the munitions from our factories’.
With a set likely to include old favourites This Being Woman and Dic Penderyn alongside his riff on What If God Were One Of Us and his staple live cover of U2’s Stuck in A Moment, this is guaranteed to be as classy as ever. 7.30pm. £15.50. Warwick Arts Centre
Monday November 13
Despite shifting some two and a half million copies of
their debut album in the UK alone, some may have felt the
outfit were a bit of a novelty fun pop act who’s struck lucky
and wouldn't be able to pull off the same trick twice.
However, follow up Ta-Dah (Polydor) firmly silenced any
doubters, repeating their Leo Sayer meets the Bee Gees disco
parlour trick with kick off No 1 single I Don't Feel Like
Dancin' featuring Elton John on piano and echoing the man
himself on She’s The Man and Lights. 7.30pm. £23.50. NIA
Monday November 13
Hailing from Epsom, they four piece have been ticking around since 2000, taking a further two years before making their live debut. Four years later, they hit the tour bus in company with their first single, That Much Better (Island), a chirpy little pop number that, along with the sunny English jaunt of In My Arms, bears witness to such influences as The Beatles, The LAs, Teenage Fan Club and The Kinks. Well worth giving them the time of day. 7.30pm. £5. Bar Academy
To My Boy
The Liverpool futurist electro-pop duo are patently in thrall to Sparks if new single The Grid (Abeano) and B side Mono are anything to go by with their staccato rhythms and the Mael-like vocals, though it’s possible that beneath the poppity computer sheen you might also hear a hint of The Undertones too. Not original perhaps, but undeniably infectious fun. 7.30pm. £5. Little Civic
Briefly big in the mid-80s when they were snapped up by
Columbia and released two albums worth of ska driven funk punk
nailed to skateboarder humour and social commentary, the ‘bone
have slipped off the rader in the past couple of decades. Even
so, they’ve now notched up a quarter of a century in the
business and, after a hiatus of six years, return now with
their 8th album, Still Stuck In Your Throat (Ter a Terre). |
