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"Dankuwel!" says Deerhoof's lanky drummer, Greg Saunier. "Dankuwel met... slagroom?!" Thankfully, what Deerhoof lack in Dutch proficiency (he just said "thank you with whipped cream"), they more than compensate for with their hyperkinetic stylings. Before 'Twin Killers', pocketsized singer Satomi Matsuzaki and goofy guitarist Ed Rodriguez ape the primitive artillery of Space Invaders, 'Basketball' is a Hallowe'en bastardization of a cheerleading routine, and they reinvent aerobics on a fervent 'Panda'. Bounding around as if the stage were made from flubber, the calmer, vocal-led numbers are sweetly benign, but merry pandemonium re-errupts as Matsuzaki leaps to the floor to put the proverbial cherry on top too.
Originally published at TLOBF "I can't see the future but I know it’s got big plans for me,” sang Annie Clark on Actor, her latest record as St Vincent. Judging by the coy smiles and avoided looks as we ask her about collaborations and film soundtracks, it’d seem that the musical world is now her oyster, but frustratingly, she’s not allowed to spill the beans. However she’s more than happy to discuss R Kelly’s oeuvre, preconceptions and community with Leah Pritchard and Laura Snapes on a rainy afternoon prior to her phenomenal show on Bristol’s Thekla. We heard you soundchecking earlier with some crazy vocal warm ups, and your voice live sounds pretty different to on record. Do you have to work hard to keep it in shape? I do vocal warm ups, just so I can make sure I get the whole range. I took a couple of singing lessons in Dallas when I was about 20, from a gospel teacher, but earlier I was just riffing on an R Kelly song – R Kelly and Sparkle, from the late, mid 90s? [1998] It has typical R Kelly style, the funniest most ridiculous lyrics. We were riffing on Real Talk too, it’s them in the studio fighting – it’s so hilarious, he’s singing along to the record, the words are just special – “Bitch I wish you weren’t wearing my clothes!” I think it’s pre-Trapped In The Closet. ‘Sex in the Kitchen’ is another good one to YouTube, it’s incredible! Have you ever thought of doing some R Kelly covers in your set?! Oh man…! I might work up that song he did with Sparkle. It’s a male female duet, so I’ll have to find someone to do it with me. Did John Congleton have a lot of influence on the sound of your record? His stuff with The Paper Chase is really intense, using scissors as percussion and so on, and to a certain extent that comes through on your record, but it’s a lot more toned down. We certainly had dialogue about all the sounds, he’s so fast at getting sounds and so creative at sound, it was very effortless sonically. He’d say, “that’d sound cool”, and it did! I think everyone should make a record with John Congleton, he’s the best. So was the process a lot quicker than when making Marry Me? Yeah, Marry Me was made over more time. All told, minus me doing some days on my own with woodwind, and little bits of tracking, I think altogether we had about 30 days including 10 days break. So we did about 20 days of studio time, which is not a lot. We had to break it up ‘cos of John’s schedule, so we’d have six days here, three days here. He’s the busiest bee on the planet. I’ve never met somebody who works as hard! He fit me in every day he could. Did many of the songs change a lot from their Garage Band origins? Oh yeah. I could pull up MIDI files right now on my laptop, of like, the clarinet parts in ‘The Strangers’, or all of the notes in ‘Marrow’ I have sketched out, but it all got transposed and rearranged and given to different instruments. So they were more just notational templates as opposed to sonically fleshed out. Are the sound limitations of recording like that frustrating? Well, John was instrumental in making the music tangible, because it was very esoteric for most of the writing. He’d talk about songs feeling good to play, or sounding good but not feeling like anything. So he brought it to life. Your technique of soundtracking Disney movies on mute has been referenced a lot. What do you make of the whole new wave of CGI, 3D Disney animation, in comparison to the romance of the films from the ‘30s and ‘40s that inspired Actor? You know, I saw ‘Wall-E’. Is that Disney Pixar? I cried at ‘Wall-E’. It was so good, right?! “Wall-E! Eva!” Other than that, I don’t really have much of an opinion on them, the ones from the ‘30s are my favourite brand of cartooning, but yeah, I cried at ‘Wall-E’, so there’s some emotional resonance there! Did you get any offers as a result of showcasing for people who commission soundtracks? The next Michael Bay movie, right? Got my fingers crossed! I think if I did have something in the works, I couldn’t talk about it…! Ohh! Well moving on, are the people in the songs intentionally characters? Haha… [looks down]. Umm… Yeah, I found it was helpful to be a little bit…not removed, but to try to look at a situation from a lot of different sides, and often in the writing of the new record, even if I’ve experienced something emotionally similar to what’s going on in those little stories, I’m not necessarily the narrator. I might be the antagonist… With the darker lyrics especially, do your parents ever worry about you? My mom used to be cute about it. “Are you ok?” [sulky teenage voice] “Shut up mom, it’s art…come on!” I never tell my mom to shut up, by the way. I don’t really get asked by them any more! On Actor, domesticity is presented under quite a bleak light. Do you miss the vagabond touring way of life when you go back to that? I don’t miss domesticity at all. I like touring. I was home in New York for about seven days after the US tour, just a little time. I didn’t even really unpack, just did the laundry. We recorded Letterman in that little window. How are people responding since Letterman? Well I don’t get followed or anything! I was eating dinner in New York, and a guy came up and said, “I saw you on Letterman, I loved it so I bought your CD,” which was really cool. No one has yet come up and said, “I saw you on Letterman. It was terrible, I did not buy your CD!” With people like you, Bat For Lashes and Beyonce, there seems there’s a lot of negativity towards women who take on alter egos. How do you find people respond to your pseudonym? I find that sometimes when women who go under their own name there’s more preconceptions, but if you hear…I’m trying to make up a name…“Jane… Whatever!” that carries a different sort of connotation, that that’s going to be an acoustic guitar, I feel like that’s on a lot of people’s minds. Aside from getting asked over and over where the name comes from, there’s no backlash to it. I read Marnie Stern saying that often when she goes to play shows, a stool is put out for her ‘cos they think she’s going to play acoustic guitar! Aww! She can shred people’s faces off… I wanted to ask about ‘Chinese Democracy’, I heard you were playing it a lot in the studio because it was so bad. Did you seek out a barometer of bad taste to work against?! Yeah, John and I were talking about it, whether we’d heard it or not, so he put it on, and we were listening through really nice hi-fi speakers, and you can just hear this huge digital mess! I’m not a digital/analog snob or anything, but it sounds like somebody let this man play with a hamster until it was dead. It sounds modern and confused, like they didn’t make any decisions anywhere. I’m gonna get hate mail from Axl Rose, I’m sorry! It’s tricky. We listened to the whole things a couple of times, and usually you can say, “sing me that tune!” and get some idea of melody, but I don’t know what happened, it was so confused! Axl Rose is gonna hate me! All of it was terrible. And I’m not a hater, but it was remarkably bad. Have you been back to Texas or Oklahoma since the Bush administration’s been over? Yeah, I was there for Christmas. Dallas went for Obama, Dallas is blue! With songs like ‘Jesus Saves, I Spend’, if you find yourself playing in the Bible belt, do you have to adapt your set at all? I think on the first tour it happened a couple of time, people gingerly asked, making sure that I wasn’t being irreverent. So much of that is word play, not that it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s subtle enough. The idea of preconceptions about names reminds me of Queens of the Stone Age, they got sued by a group of deaf people who thought that ‘Songs of the Deaf’ was an album of vibrational music. Ohh! I was wondering about that actually, because when we played Bonnaroo my sound engineer asked if I wanted someone interpreting, signing the words of my set! I was thrown! But that was awesome. I don’t remember if we actually had the person doing it. But it would have been very cool. Is there a particular movement or group of bands that you associate or align yourself with? A lot of the people you’re compared to don’t actually sound at all like you, like Grizzly Bear or Dirty Projectors. I’m glad to be thought of in the same vein as them. The Dirty Projectors are probably my favourite band ever. I think there’s something really vital happening in New York with Grizzly Bear and the Dirties. How do you find NYC as a place to live in terms of music, the way that trends come and go? Or is it quite supportive? It’s wonderfully supportive. My friend Bryce Dessner, who’s in The National, he’s like a powerhouse. He curated ‘Dark Was The Night’, he’s a mastermind, doing stuff with Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, he’s kind of a genius. He has his hand in this established New York minimalist compositional thing, and he’s also in a fucking great rock band. Nico Muhly’d be in there too. This new wave minimalism! It’s really sweet – you don’t think of it as such a scene, but these are friends or people you’re friendly with, they’re all so talented and “wow!” that we all want to do stuff together. Do you have any exciting collaborations coming up? I do! But I can’t say! But it’s a very exciting time to be in New York.
Originally published in NME
If there’s one thing more sickening than the recent deluge of jaws agog at the notion that two X chromosomes do not an insuperable musical deficiency make, it’s the fact that some of the most innovative and crucial female musicians remain underrated in favour of certain mould-fresh synth-poppers. Step forward Annie Clark, the chaotically coiffed Oklahoman who goes by the name of St Vincent and sounds nothing like The Human League, Kate Bush or Björk – suck on that, pigeonholers! Yet despite the near universal acclaim of her equal parts 1930s Disney OST and King Crimson-inspired second album, ‘Actor’, it’s comparatively quiet aboard Bristol’s Thekla this evening, and there’s the sweet scent of schadenfreude in the air for those who are missing out.
For thousands of years, the heated debate between creationists and those of us with bloody common sense has raged; is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution the reason we’re all here living and breathing, or was woman created from Adam’s rib and let loose in a garden of riches only to cause humankind’s eternal condemnation? (If you’re having trouble deciding, you might not want to read much more). However, tonight at Cornwall’s majestic Eden Project, a surreal and disturbing rewriting of the time/space/belief continuum is occurring as Neanderthals invade the verdant former clay pit to see Kasabian become the least fitting band to grace a stage since John Mayer at MJ’s funeral. Crowd highlights include a chap wearing a t-shirt wondering “Is it necrophilia if it’s still twitching?”, blokes comparing how many midgets they know (two apiece, apparently) over their respective six pint trays of cider, and hordes of delightful types dropping empty beer cups and fag ends in the sweet pea patches. If we’re searching hard for silver linings, at least they’re ignoring The Hours, whose dulling tones make it seem plausible that Kasabian might actually provide some sort of musical relief.
Please, someone pinch me. As Kasabian strut on stage seemingly in order of self-perceived importance, the only relief they could offer might be to an stratospherically obese person thinking about getting back into exercise, as they demand that we put our hands in the air for the first of more than 20 times in a 15 song set. The command constantly spills from Tom Meighan’s lips as if he has attention-seeking Tourettes, joining his messianic spread arms in an hubristic display that’s embarrassing to watch. They boom on with ‘Underdog’, the opener of ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’, which psyches up the crowd with pithy sentiments like “lost in a moment” and easy to grasp expansive concepts such as “sky” and “future”. Profound. The empty sentiment omnipresent in their songs forms a vicious circle live – they sing about “doing it for the people”, who in turn respond with unabated glee (throwing nine pint cups per minute due to the wanton abandon that Kasabian provoke), spurring Meighan’s foolhardy ego on. It makes pooping back and forth forever look appealing…
By second number, ‘Shoot The Runner’, it becomes pretty clear that this is The Tom Meighan Show – the lesser band members know their place, occasionally twitching like press puppets yet utterly unresponsive to the crowd, without a hint of interaction or intuition between them. Whenever it’s not Meighan’s turn to take the limelight – during an instrumental part or song led by Serge’s nasal tones – he disappears offstage. You can only hope it’s a sign of inner band strife that’ll cause them to split within a few years.
“This place is fucking like Tracy Island,” contributes Meighan by way of the obligatory wonderment bands must show at playing in front of the two space age biomes. “Like Thunderbirds.” Jolly glad you cleared that up for us, cheers. He misses his cue to come in on ‘Processed Beats’ yet struts on smug and self-satisfied, asking for hands in the air again, then tells us we’re “fucking empire!” (no prizes for guessing what comes next). A trumpeter appears for the mildly Baltic influenced ‘Where Did All The Love Go’, which has all the cultural nous of a football fan who’s been to Latvia once for a match, ‘Thick As Thieves’ is a note for note rip off of The Beatles’ ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, but the crowd’s swaying, men are topless and hugging and there’s a thousand mobile phones in the air. What’s wrong with people?! ‘Fire’ has the tuneless football terrace roar of 90% of their songs, a technique defended by a bloke next to us – “they don’t need words, their songs are so fucking brilliant that they can really tug your heartstrings without them y’know?” Mm. By ‘Club Foot’, Meighan’s caught on to exactly the same thing, so doesn’t even bother articulating the lyrics. To avoid the crush for the car parks, we escape the encore, but hear the notes of a cod ‘You Got The Love’ cover float up past the visitor centre (first line: “sometimes I feel like putting my hands up in the air”), the crowd roaring along euphorically. Debate over monkeys and clay figures aside, this is a cultural devolution that must be fought, defeated and crushed.
Originally published at TLOBFThere aren’t many bands that can whip a tired Sunday afternoon festival crowd into a throbbing mass of pheromones and adrenaline, but NYC by way of Sacramento gents !!! did exactly that at ATP The Fans Strike Back this May, and will undoubtedly wreak the same sexual wrath next Tuesday (7th) when they play Camden’s Electric Ballroom. Over email, exuberant frontman Nic Offer discussed a refreshing devil may care attitude to money, being grabbed in the biscuits, and whether the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act has taken any ostensible hit on the scene…
Photo by Ben Peter Catchpole www.benpetercatchpole.com
“Literally, the coolest phrase I’ve ever heard is ‘alright my loverrrs,” drawls Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes to a rammed Princess Pavilion. With the Pavilion’s quintessentially English tearoom charm usually home to such greats as the St Stythians Band, T Rextasy and Sgt Peppers Only Dart Board Band (oh yes, really) it’s pretty fair to say that the crowd and the band are equal parts bemused and enraptured by their respective cultural heritages. The look on Hughes’ face when everyone starts shouting the local rallying cry of “Oggy oggy oggy! Oi oi oi!” to pay their respects to the free love smoulder of ‘Now I’m a Fool’ is priceless – flabbergasted, yet clinging to his grizzled, snarled cool by trying to look nonchalant – and the audience’s giggles at the band’s wide-legged posturing, biker bar talk, and habit of introducing songs via rhetorical questions made out of titles (“Are you just 19?!” he leers at one front row minor) suggest just how long it’s been since our musical G-spots have been tickled.
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