This summer has been awfully quiet on the music front, if it wasn’t for the Proms then there really wasn’t a lot going on.
Instead, here are two great musical film moments from the end of summer. First, the band The Clash at Demonhead (well really Metric but this is the version from the film) from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Though I’m not really a Metric fan, this songs makes me wish that I was still an indie disco dj, just to hear it loud in a dark room.
The other is a film featuring Chilly Gonzales, Tiga and Peaches. Called Ivory Towers, the film features Gonzales and Tiga as brothers, both rivals in chess and fighting over the same girl, Peaches. While the love triangle is a bit unconvincing, the film is full of great one liners and Tiga pretty much steals the show.
So, instead of writing about those shows attended so far this summer, a better way to sum up the music for this Summer so far is in writing about the songs that Last.fm says I have been listening to.
One thing that I’ve been struggling with over the last 12 months is in the search for new bands to listen to. The old avenues of mp3 blogs don’t seem to be as great as they were during the heydays a few years ago and it takes a lot of time and effort to sift through them all to find the great songs. Meanwhile, the recommendations coming from the radio and even online magazines aren’t that interesting, much of it surrounded by hype. With gigs getting more expensive, and the effort in travelling across London, sometimes it’s not worth heading out to see something that I know nothing about. However, when I do make the effort, I am reminded that it is worth just heading to the odd random show from time to time.
One such example was the Parenthetical Girls and Former Ghosts show at the Luminare in June. Before heading to the gig, I knew almost nothing about the acts and was rewarded by one of the most entertaining shows I’ve seen this year (that even includes going to see Flight of the Conchords). Whilst Parenthetical Girls were perfectly entertaining, it is the Former Ghost album that I find myself listening to every week since that gig. There’s emotion and intensity that you don’t normally experience in an album, and the live show was so emotional that at points it was quite difficult to watch. Nevertheless, even after that show I can’t wait till Former Ghost are over again later this year.
Sometimes it seems that Hugo Manuel can just sit there and write music at any moment. From back in Oxford watching his band the Modern, through Jonquil and now Chad Valley, there really hasn’t been a bad moment. With Jonquil changing their direction over the last year or so, it now seems that Chad Valley is the route for Hugo to write those songs if Jonquil kept going down their initial path. They are dreamy, layered and the perfect thing to listen to on warm sunny days.
Like the Former Ghost album, the most recent Owen Pallett album is another that just keeps pulling me back everytime. It’s one of those where I end up pressing ‘play’ again the instant the album reaches the end. This obsession is pretty bad, I should really stop soon. Or well hopefully stop by the time the next album is due.
The random appearance of a single TV on the Radio song from four years ago is all down to its appearance in Phonogram and making me wake up one morning just wanting to listen to this song on repeat. I listened to it for 3 or 4 times before getting on with anything else. Sadly there is no online link to show the context of the song in the comic, but I really recommend checking out Phonogram Singles Club if you have a chance.
One thing about a busy month is that it means I am even less likely to write about those shows until much later. (I used to be good, and did these on returning home right after a gig.) So my excuses for not writing anything in May is as follows:
Tuesday 11th May – Pavement and Wooden Shjips at the Brixton Academy
Friday 14th May – Tate is Ten: Jeffrey Lewis at the Tate Modern
Monday 17th May – Boris at the Garage
Wednesday 19th May – The Bundles and Misty’s Big Adventure at the Union Chapel
Saturday 22nd May – Former Ghosts and Parenthetical Girls at the Luminaire
Monday 24th May – Holy Fuck and Sbtrkt at Heaven
Tuesday 25th May – Flight of the Conchords at Wembley Arena
Thursday 27th May – Jóhann Jóhannsson, Nils Frahm and Greg Haines at St Giles in the Fields
Sat and Sunday 29th May – Brainlove Festival 2010
and in June I went to these too. I was going to write about them all, but it’s been so long that I’m just going to be lazy and not.
Tuesday 1st June – Beach House at Heaven
Monday 7th June – Menomena at Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen
Wednesday 23rd June – Tune-Yards and Trash Kit at the Scala
It’s been a while since Gonzales, and so here’s a post about the shows I went to in the rest of April. The next post will cover all the gigs I went to in May (a lot).
Monday 19th April – Wegottickets 10th Birthday party with Jonquil at the Bull and Gate
Apart from those gigs I went to in the States during my trip up the West Coast, this has possibly the longest journey I’ve made for any gig. Before the weekend, I had been in Copenhagen, arriving in Denmark before the volcano cloud struck. The journey back from there to London took me two days, four trains and a ferry arriving back at St. Pancras via the Eurostar at 8pm. An hour later, I was in Kentish Town watching Jonquil. Unsurprisingly, I can’t remember much of the detail of the show now, but like their support slot a couple of weeks before at the Youthmovies gig, they played a set consisting of entirely new songs. Taking a less mellow outlook than before, it really showed the band shifting up a gear to focus on breaking through properly. It’s a shame that they don’t play songs from the Lions era anymore, but then when they moved on from Sunny Casinos I probably said the same thing. What’s interesting is to see what they do next.
Wednesday 21st April – Efterklang at the Shepherds Bush Empire
Since seeing them with at the Barbican last year, I’ve grown to like Efterklang more and more. To such an extent that I almost considered going to see them while I was in Copenhagen even though I already had tickets to see them a few days later in London. In the end my bank account won out and I only went to the London show. To start with, it was a bit of an odd show. The venue wasn’t full, the atmosphere was lacking and there were far too many drunk young Scandinavians chatting their way through the set. It took a while for the show to really get going, but when it did, it showed why Efterklang just require your full attention. Eventually everyone was under the spell, and Casper even managed to create a moment when everyone in the audience and the band were silent. I guess that doesn’t happen in the Shepherds Bush Empire very often.
