Truck Nine: Five bands you cannot miss
Two-zero-zero-six brings Truck Festival number nine. Its not-quite a decade of existence has seen the festival grow from the tiniest roots to a heavyweight headliner-wielding juggernaut of musical fun... »
Articles
Rrrachel has written the following articles:
Tom Brosseau at London The Abbey, Mon 24 Sep
Talk about intimate: a room, an outhouse even, just a few chairs, enough space for 20, but only if we're happy to sit with arms and legs brushing each other. Tom Brosseau stands dead centre, flanked by microphone stands numbering two, but using neither. Amplification is unnecessary, a reverent audience and a crystal clear voice leaves technology obsolete...»
Optimo, Bonde Do Role, Diplo, Radioclit, Os Mutantes at Kentish Town Forum, Camden Town, Fri 27 Jul
In 1993 Kurt Cobain tried to convince Os Mutantes to reform for a one-off reunion show. They declined. Here, they do play, alongside Bonde do Role, Diplo and more...»
Post War Years, Metronomy, The Teenagers at London Buffalo Bar, Thu 28 Jun
There are two main types of music that make me want to contort myself - brash, smack in the face beats and rainbow-brite colours, good old cut-out-and-keep dirty sleaze, or the (near) opposite - mind-fuckingly intelligent mash and melange of time signatures and cut-n-paste melody fragments. In other words, the wonderfully dumb and the wildly creative. »
The New Pornographers, Immaculate Machine at London Borderline, Tue 19 Jun
The New Pornographers play full steam ahead, right from the off. They've always been labelled as power-pop, the tag is deserving. It's hard not to crack a smile - this all being wonderfully free of pretension. It's wave after wave of melody - not unpredictable, perhaps a little overtly nice, but most certainly memorable. »
NME Indie-Rave Tour at London Hammersmith Palais, Thu 22 Feb
If CSS's songs boil down to a base desire for messy drunken kissing, hands groping in the dark and a an overtly silly party, then Klaxons are in a way completely opposite – instead, trying to reach for an apocalyptical unreality far, far away from basic human desires... »
Benjy Ferree - Leaving The Nest
When I proclaim that Benjy Ferree’s Leaving the Nest is a solid album, please ignore the unspoken code, as I mean it not in that sense. Rather, this is the kind of hardened oak, four thick legs and slab of stone solid – the hand-me-down furniture that will see out six generations at the very least...»
Jeremy Warmsley - The Art Of Fiction
Many bands are praised for ploughing their own furrow - taking a stylistic direction and resolutely, stubbornly sticking to it without stray for an hour's album length. This is not the approach of Jeremy Warmsley - whose desire to do everything and anything (musically) at once would create the equivalent of ploughing furrows to mimic the Hampton Court maze...»
Midlake - Head Home
Midlake's 'Head Home' effortlessly sent my mind out, regurgitating memories and stepping into their outlines to live them again...»
Shearwater at London The Luminaire, Fri 20 Oct
Shearwater are one of these bands that seem to create interest without any gimmick, just musicianship and a trickling source of melody that, throughout the gig tonight, does not make a start in drying up...»
Various - Plague Songs
Imagine the premise: "Mr Wainwright, Mr Walker, Mr Eno, et al, we're making a compilation of original songs to depict the ten Biblical plagues. Anyone fancy writing a song about flies? How about livestock? We want your harrowing accounts of Biblical ruin!"»
(Review of nothing)
Jamie Stewart, central force of Xiu Xiu: no-one could accuse him of a half-hearted effort. The Air Force has much that we so often lament the lack of - intensity, awkwardness, lushness, no compromise - but these features are so weighty, music so laden with effort, histrionic emotion and multi-instrumentation, that songs nearly break at the backbone under such a load... »
Field Music - In Context
These jesters of music have made something unexpectedly twisted – a song that revels in producing unexpected about-turns and loop the loops...»
Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye
Junior Boys make the beats for a city that doesn’t yet exist – futuristic, cold and a vacuum of any human emotion...»
James Yorkston - Steady As She Goes
Listen to the smallest hidden details, not the attention-seeking showmen that wage petty fights over your attentions: James Yorkston would never stoop so low...»
The Divine Comedy - To Die A Virgin
If one thing can rescue an otherwise tired and tiresome song from complete indifference, it's a humorous, slightly-mismatched rhyming couplet or two. 'To Die a Virgin' is a case in point - "Bird-Flu" and "I love you" is a couplet to cause laughs in amongst a song that hardly registers on the interest scale...»
Guillemots - Through the Windowpane
Just think of it: the very best scenes that were never made, from the very best movies that were never conceptualized. Those critical turning point moments, the headiest cocktails of regrets, uncertainties, thrills, throes of despair. Despite these concepts having never progressed past the mind of the unconscious dreamer; past the hands of the unartistic finance director refusing necessary billion-pound budget; muted by the statically fake acting, Guillemots conjure them from thin air - no pictures, limited dialogue but enough sound to create a whole world, worthy of a cinema screen.»
Venn Festival 2006
Venn 2006 was three years old - the festival first brought experi(mental) joy to this corner of Bristol in 2004. Venn is based around existing venues in the Stokes Croft and St Pauls area of Bristol, many of which are literally next door to each other, making long walks non-existant. The venues are as diverse as the area housing them - Casablanca is a morrocan themed shisha bar, the Malcolm X centre is a polkda-dotted hall with jamaican lager-slash-beer, the Full Moon is a punkish pub. Diversity applied to the musical line-up too, dub-step to hip-hop to shouty girl punk; the linking factor being the high quality of everything on offer. Despite the intense sunshine and the presence of premier pie shop 'PieMinister' in Stokes Croft, DiS made it to gigs. In fact, we made it to many gigs. The musical policy at Venn was so all-encompassingly fantastic, that weather and food paled into insignificance with the excitement of bands weird and wonderful in venues small and large. Now our ears throb, our eyes squint and our legs ache from dashing from gig to gig, but we're still here to comment on our quite incredible findings.
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The Automatic - Monster
If it was you who requested this to be played on the radio, you have my sympathy. Are you so stupefied that you find this ditchwater enthralling? Are you so brainwashed that you believed this was exciting? Do you have any sensory judgement at all?»
Venn Festival Preview
Venn Festival is three years old this year. If you follow the playground adage of “first the worst, second the best”, this will be the Venn with a hairy chest. A festival with a hairy chest is not all that much of a proposition, but to peruse the line-up, would suggest this year will be ‘third time lucky’, so delectable is the extensive list of bands, persons and machines involved.»
Psapp - The Only thing I Ever Wanted
The Only Thing I Ever Wanted is a true album, a coherent trail of interlinked melody and domestic adventures. Like the Books, Psapp meld acoustic sounds into tales of modern life, like Tunng there is a sense of mystery and intrigue imbued into each echo. She of Psapp will ensnare you too, she will lead you to where “it is green, it is damp / by the burning lamp” right into the dark old house which neighbours fear and their whispered urban fables are centred around. »
King Alexander, Male - Soap / His Nibs
Split singles work best when the sides are complimentary, at the very least share some aesthetic similarities. Good news here then – both duo Male and trio King Alexander exhibit post-punkah minimalism laced up with brewing black magic.»
Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken
You see, for Tracy-Anne to take a stand, to make a decision or to move out of a Jane Austen or Bunty magazine fantasy, would be breaking all the rules of Glaswegian indie-pop; where girls swoon and boys worry. Yet, there is a distinct and definite charm to this ditty, achingly poised, richly orchestrated»
Blood Red Shoes - ADHD
“I’m so / I’m so Distracted / Can’t concentrate on anything at all” sing the terminally twitching youths, fed on a culture of short attention spans and attention-seeking behaviour. But you, audience, how could you not concentrate on this?»
Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast
I imagine Matmos, locked away in an underground bunker, behind three sets of numerically locked doors, working intently, secretly, scientifically. Beady eyes strapped away behind shatterproof plastic goggles, bodies wrapped up in stark starch-white laboratory coats. Their secret project: the collection of sound – unusual, high fidelity, high disgust sound. Their final intention – the appropriation of aforementioned sound into functional musical style models.»
Voo - On The Return
A beautiful exercise in polyphony; ‘On the Return’ somehow plugs into a timeless life observation point, circular and cyclical patterns of music looping around the statued observer. »
Polysics - I My Me Mine
Powered by zinc-chloride batteries for longer lasting energy, wired up back to front. PVA sticky recorder solos fight for space against gibberish chatter and itchy-scratchy, brittle guitar noise.»
Adem - Love and Other Planets
Love and Other Planets inflates love and all love’s facets, to a scale of universe-like proportions. In the same way, it reduces all the light-years of distance between planets to the inches between freckles on a loved one’s arm. In ‘Spirals,’ ever so tenderly, Adem sings of tectonic shifts in his chest, feeling vaster than the Milky Way, as a partner traces the galaxy onto the inside of his arm.»
Jeremy Warmsley, Frànçois, Rose Kemp at Bristol Croft, Tue 18 Apr
Tonight, although his is the name up in lights, Jeremy Warmsley is the foreigner in the room, the only one to hail from the city of smoke. He is the only one without closest supporters fawning from the aisles, and so, he takes on the role of the travelling minstrel; bringing his plush, sumptuous songs to audiences new, towns provincial.»
Clayhill - Halfway Across
It’s never good enough to play a below-average song nicely - even if your singer’s voice is as intuitive as the breeze itself, or even if musical detail matches that of a fractal pattern.»