My head's been getting rather full of thoughts recently, such is the problem with the periods of bulk contemplation in which I find myself every now and again. So what better to do than release some of them to this lovely binary page eh?! (After all, it does have a lovely background.) As a result, here is the first installation in a series of my thoughts / learnings regarding music, art, life and whatever else strikes me as interesting, I hope you enjoy it!
This week's chat concerns current vs. old music. Yesterday I went to see a band called Warpaint at the O2 academy, Bristol. They put on a great, if a little one-dimensional show, a beautiful cloud of delay, reverb, haunting vocals and some fat dance influenced grooves underneath. If you haven't checked them out I'd recommend doing so - their track 'Elephants' is so so good. But enough reviewing for now, I was just so refreshed and happy to be enjoying some current music for a change.
You see for the past few months as our band's music has evolved so have our tastes in music, and whenever I'm chatting about what I'm listening to at the moment I end up talking about bands from the 80s at the latest; I'm a posthumous appreciator it seems.
At this point I find it appropriate to address a common failing in our language, the use of 'old-school'. I hate this phrase, it's as if using 'old' simply isn't good enough any more. "Man, that band sounded sssooo old-school!" No they didn't, they sounded old. Unless literally talking about the place we used to learn subjects such as Mathematics and Food Technology I will simply use the phrase 'old'.
Anyway, these old bands have dominated my music player, recently the most-played has been 'Cut' by The Slits. Buy it now. They're a British girl band from the late 70s - early 80s, and they will change your conception of what a song has to be. As they put it; they couldn't play the 12 bar blues stuff, so they just did what the f**k they wanted, and the freedom, attitude and comedy in their songwriting - the lack of convention at every level - blew my mind.
It's also quite funny that, though they were a girl band when they played live, the drummer on the album was a guy. Yeah, take that feminists! But you can see why, Budgie (Peter Clarke) was a damn revolutionary! He's best known for drumming with Siouxsie and the Banshees (I'll get to them some other time.) With the rest of the Slits on the edge, Budgie's drumming holds it together but still manages to feel like it's pushing everything over, or at least falling down with it. He's my drummer of the moment, and I hope my playing can reflect some of his influence, that has to be a great thing.
So coming back to Warpaint, my main inspiration this week has been to look harder for some great current artists instead of falling back on the safe obvious ones of the past, and they're out there; in fact since discovering Warpaint I've found out about a band called Suuns. Granted, they didn't win the 'least pretentious name of the year' award, and it must be a right bugger to try and describe to people at a gig, but their music more than makes up for it. They ride the fine line between dance and rock so well - they'll start up like a dance band and drop some huge guitar riff right into it!
It would also be rude to mention the Warpaint gig without talking about the support - Connan Mockasin, who I also dug. He was really minimalist up there (he was wearing a polo neck - which I don't endorse by the way - and he wasn't even sweating) and his vocals were crazy and light, but for some reason his set really pleased me - I think he just set out to be strangely ominous up there, but it came across, and in fact he's inspired me to try something new out with a new tune NIFE's working on.
I've actually been listening to a rehearsal recording of the scaffold of that new tune on loop while I write this, and am feeling well up for trying some stuff over it, it's a shame I live in a flat with tracing paper for walls and neighbours with ear trumpets placed right next to them, but that's Bath Life!
Oh wow, when I started this blog starting the first sentence took ages, now it feels like I could write a thousand more. But I won't, so until next time, adieu.
Howie Gill
