TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING SIX

So, end of the year again, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. They’re just flying by aren’t they…? Hurtling toward the end of these ‘00s or whatever, and we haven’t even got our head around what to call them, let alone got the hang of living in them. Just think, if this was the ‘60s, we’d now be up to ’67; culturally, politically, musically, shit would be well and truly on the move. Ho hum.

It’s strange to note that just about all the weblog/forum/magazine end-of-year music retrospectives I’ve read thus far (and I’ve been bored, so I’ve been reading a few) have made a point of either noting that the writer in question felt disconnected from the main ebb and flow of music this year, or stating flat-out that it’s been a dull or disappointing year for album releases or pop hits or whatever.

Now the idea of a “bad year for music” is a ludicrous conceit, and not one I would wish to propagate when there is still guaranteed to be at least one bunch of good people kicking out some jams somewhere along every street in the goddamn world, but nonetheless I’m afraid I’m gonna have to add my voice to the belated choir, and say that, for various reasons, the vast majority of music I’ve been listening to this year has been old stuff.

Despite my critical approval of the records I’m about to list below, it’s safe to say that only the first three or four have really managed to touch my soul to any degree; the rest made a pleasant distraction in rare moments when I felt like doing some relaxed, impersonal music listening, rather than needing a hit of the REAL stuff to get me through the day/night.

Back in December 2005 I took a short visit to Glasgow and bought Skip Spence’s “Oar” and Big Star’s “Third / SisterLovers” from the absurdly well-appointed second hand rack at Mono, an event which in retrospect is so loaded with dread synchronicity it boggles the mind. I was feeling quite cheery round then, and so swiftly filed both away for appreciation at a later date, that date arriving half-way through the year, when the near infinite beauty of both discs have taken them to the top of my list of soul-savers. But enough of that.

I began the year safely in thrall to the sounds and aesthetic of the sprawling new international drone/noise/psyche/weirdness underground, but recent seismic shifts in my music taste have left me increasingly disillusioned with that whole kinda scene, as the initial mysterioso appeal of elusive CD-Rs hand-decorated by covens of improbable weirdos creating pure transformative sound and reclaiming the appearance of a genuine subterranean counter-culture has worn off as the groups involved have started to break cover and revealed themselves more often than not to be obnoxious, self-satisfied camp-followers gooning it up behind their distortion pedals at arts council sponsored hoedowns for the jaded and desensitized. Were any of these guys with me when I needed to turn to music for solace and reassurance? Were they fuck. Some switch has flicked in my head and I can’t help but see this genre or scene or whatever heading far too quickly toward the same kind of bankrupt state that the mainstream of hippy-rock was approaching circa ‘69/’70: terminally infected by the ugly sneer of the Eternal Hipster, networking, plotting, judging and formalising. I can see it drifting toward becoming the latest and purest manifestation of an unfortunate musical tendency which over the past few decades can be traced through the less gifted exponents of prog, metal, electronica and (ugh) post-rock: that of boys too scared to show their true feelings hiding behind their machines, blaring out senselessly negative sonic abstraction because it makes them feel big or important. Well more often than not, it is tedious, inhuman and hurting – fuck that shit, I don’t need it.

Here comes a raging spell of hypocrisy though, because this rather severe view is of course far more of an amorphous personal feeling than a diss against particular artists, and I retain my respect for all of those who got me into this stuff in the first place. Charalambides have grown to be one of my favourite groups in the world, Magik Markers remain an inspiring reclamation of the punk spirit, and Birchville Cat Motel, Pelt, Double Leopards, Mirror, Fursaxa, Matthew Bower and Richard Youngs are all still producing an incredibly effective/affecting sound which I love. So, yes, it’s a fine line, but new pretenders be aware: from now on I’m taking things on a case by case basis, and if I feel like it I’m gonna be calling time on all this Emperor’s New Clothes nonsense currently clambering over the fence. No personal animosity intended, but if I’m not feeling it, I’m not gonna waste my time.

Same applies to most of the unfeasibly weak, whiny, preening crap that's been passed off as critically acclaimed indie-rock/pop this year too (no names mentioned).

So despite the fact that they don’t make an appearance in my 2006 albums list, I would above all else like to dedicate this year’s weblogging to Neil, Jonathan, Skip and Roky, to Chilton, Westerburg, Van Zandt, Mould & Hart, Mingus, Shepp, Thompson, Childish, Lewis and Fahey, to Iggy, to Bert, to Karen and Chan, to the VU, to Ray & Dave, to Mr and Mrs Coltrane, to Loren Connors, PJH, R.L. Burnside and Mississippi John Hurt, and to everybody else whose music has come from the heart and seen me through the year.

And, lest I forget, R.I.P. to Syd, Arthur, Nikki Sudden and Grant McLennan; we’ve lost some good ones this year.

Now, without further preamble, my traditional Top 10 of new records of 2006:

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Comet Gain – City Fallen Leaves (Track & Field)

The best albums are always the ones that are hardest to write about. Some may sneer at Comet Gain, with their occasional clumsy, stumbling, too-close-to-the-bone lyrics, their obvious, thunderous chords and botched attempts at harmonies, their indie hipster battle chants and their unashamed devotion to the gospel of the TV Personalities and the Go-Betweens. Most probably don’t even know they exist, given their complete absence from any kind of media.

But, unlike the po-mo shit clogging up a lot of end-of-year lists, the point is, Comet Gain make an impression. And what they do essentially amounts to soundtracking and romanticising the triumphs and failures of my own life, to the extent that it’s often unnerving, although not entirely unwelcome. So if you’re a disgruntled indie diehard with a taste for ‘60s Godard, cultural authenticity, red wine, record shopping and the wreckage of riot grrl, a similar effect is guaranteed. Tribalism is a disgraceful contagion, but fuck it, Comet Gain are My People. Their last album, ‘Realistes’ was a masterwork of statement-of-intent, power of music, optimism, but this one’s altogether bleaker; it’s kinda bitter, heartbroken, skirting despair. But not quite, because whatever they’ve lost between records, they’ve still got passion, intelligence, poetry, beautiful guitars, punk rock fury and voices that weren’t made to sing trying for all they’re worth and daring you to believe. In good times or bad, their spirit and their songs mean a lot to me. So Album of the Year by a mile.

The Mountain Goats – Get Lonely (4AD)

As you may recall if you read my review earlier this year, this one didn’t immediately win me over. Then I got lonely. So, I may not have been a teenage runaway in 2004, or trapped in a self-destructive marriage in 2003, but this year The Mountain Goats made an album especially for me.

Charalambides – A Vintage Burden (Kranky)

The two Charalambides live performances I have been lucky enough to witness this year have got me convinced that Christina and Tom Carter are drinking from a well of heavenly yet human beauty, resulting in some of the most moving and inspired music currently being produced.

But although they’ve all been thoroughly satisfying in different ways, none of the duo’s studio albums have so far revealed a definitive statement of aforementioned beauty. As such, the conventional Low-ish acoustica of some of the tracks on ‘A Vintage Burden’ is initially underwhelming, but repeated listens reveal aforementioned beauty quietly burning through, and ‘Two Birds’ in particular is one of the finest expressions of the group’s existential cosmic blues to date.

The Thermals – The Body, The Blood, The Machine (Sub-Pop)

Third album in from the most invigorating punk rock band of the modern era. This time round though, they’ve lost their kick-ass drummer, and as befits a punk band that’s made it through three albums, they’ve given way to worrying developments such as shiny production, keyboard and lead guitar bits and songs that are actually, like, 4 or 5 minutes long and mid-tempo. It’s also kind of a concept album about fighting against, and escaping from, a fundamentalist totalitarian regime, with a few love songs thrown in for good measure.

So is it any good…?

“I carry my baby,
I carry my baby,
Her eyes can barely see,
Her mouth can barely breathe

I can see she’s afraid,
That’s why we’re escaping,
So we don’t have to die, we don’t have to deny,
Our dirty god, our dirty bodies!”

Of course it’s fucking good.

Metallic Falcons - Desert Doughnuts (Voodoo-Eros)

Bought involuntarily from their merch stand long before I had any idea this was tagged as a Coco-Rosie side-project, all that matters is that Metallic Falcons = immersive, timeless psychedelic music of the best possible kind. It has moments that on other records would be somewhat affected and irritating, but who cares when it all flows so sweetly.

Remember that time you were driving through Death Valley in a 1970 Dodge Challenger, and you broke down, and these two weird Manson girls arose from the sand and took you back to their shack and danced in the twilight to ancient, bizarre gramophone records, before they fed you that strange broth from an Indian prayer bowl, and then that zeppelin turned up and you all took a ride..? – well this is the soundtrack.

Silver Jews – Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City)

For expansion, look up my previous weblog post on this album’s opening track, ‘Punks in the Beerlight’. I loved that song straight away, but was underwehlmed with the rest. By now though, the other songs on ‘Tanglewood Numbers’ have proceeded to win me over one by one with their peculiar grace and zen-like wit and trashed suburban romanticism. Silver Jews creep up on you sideways like a crab.

Comets on Fire – Avatar (Sub-Pop)

By far the most structured / accessible Comets outing to date, this is like a master-class in how to make a really kick-ass cosmic rock album the old fashioned way. It’s like, I dunno, Blue Oyster Cult on the best drugs in the world, getting wild on Mars. In a very profound sense, this is ROCK, the way you always hoped it would be.

Pelt – Skullfuck / Bestio Tergum Dergero (VHF)

The first half of this disc is an absolutely jaw-dropping extended drone-raga reworking of Jack Rose’s ‘Calais to Dover’ – the most intense devotional psyche workout I’ve heard this year, and enough to give all the delay pedal abusing potheads stumbling onto this scene’s bandwagon the aneurysm/orgasm they deserve, as Rose drives his faster-than-the-human-eye string picking thing toward the edges of the known universe, backed by a veritable galaxy of unearthly scrape and skree. Second half is a bit of a comedown, with a suite of Double Leopards / David Lynch style menacing, low-level hum that in itself is plenty good.

Blood on the Wall – Awesomer (FatCat)

Perhaps the first recorded example of a pure ‘90s retro band, these happy young NYC folks are unashamed of their obvious debt to the Pixies, Breeders, Sonic Youth, Royal Trux, Superchunk et al, and revitalise the best bits of their influences with snappy, ramshackle charm, chaos, energy, admirably few notes and the kind of hooks that’ll see them frying up a big, juicy haddock every night through the long winter months. It’s kind of a rough n’ ready album, and some tracks are pretty forgettable, but ‘Heat from the Day’ is a stonecold classic 90 second blast with the coolest one note guitar line ever, ‘Mary Susan’ is the best song Black Francis ever forgot to write down, and ‘I Want To Take You Out Tonight’ is the purest soothing, heartbroken fuzz guitar bliss-out I’ve heard in many a moon. It’s only indie-rock, but I like it.

Oneida – Happy New Year (Jagjaguar / Rough Trade)

For one reason or another, this one hasn’t grabbed me as much as Oneida records usually do. Whilst it’s a touch dense and forbidding though, I can still recognise it as a fine, fine album, heavy on Oneida’s brooding, evocative techno-medievalism rather than their acid-fucked future-pop. It has a certain spirit of resigned defiance, and makes me think of the Knights of the Holy Orders marching forth on another doomed, bloody crusade to the far ends of the earth as the chronicler sprawls out in the woods in an opium haze, mind on higher things.

Sticking out like a sore thumb though is ‘Up With People’, a hyper-positivist floorfiller that would be an era-defining 12” club hit in a any decent world; it’s the full realisation of Oneida’s long held ambition to play euphoric dance music on live instruments, twisting drum kit, organ and guitars out of their usual orbits to create a perfect facsimile of some kinda totally awesome early ‘80s New York disco / proto-house dancefloor smash: you got to get up to get free!

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So that’s that – have a happy xmas and new year readers, and stay tuned for more self-absorbed, vindictive ranting in 2007!

TRUTHS & CERTAINTIES
November London Music Diary Part 2

So Everett True (legendary maverick British music journo and founder of the Careless Talk / Plan B empire – yes, I hate these bracketed career summations too, but it has come to my attention some people do not know this stuff) is doing a talk / signing/ whatever of his new Nirvana book at Borders on Charing Cross Road, and I’m there sprawled at the front feeling and looking exhausted having just got off god knows how many hours of work.

As an aside, I’m currently reading a disintegrating ex-library copy of ET’s *old* Nirvana book, ‘Live Through This’, picked up on the recommendation of a couple of good people who absolutely swear by it, and whilst I have absolutely no interest in reading another book about Nirvana, fuck me if the opening section is not one of the most impassioned, moving and tragic testaments to the power of music and the tarnished ideals of punk rock ever set down on paper – seriously. Like many of his ‘outsider’ musicians he champions, Mr. True can often come across as self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, clumsy, repetitious and just plain wrong, but never doubt that he’s fighting the good fight, and when he’s on form (and ‘Live Through This’ is the benchmark) he comes straight from the fucking heart and justifies the capital letter at the start of his adopted surname in a very profound sense. Shame it rather tails off into a series of workmanlike round-ups of anecdotes about getting drunk with every vaguely popular ‘90s rock band, categorised under headings like ‘pop-grunge’, ‘art-grunge’ etc... what the hell is up with that dude, when you started the book off so well?

But I’m here to trawl through bands, not books about bands, so for our current purposes the point is that Everett has asked some of his pals, the three polite and gloom-eyed middle-aged chaps who comprise Bitter Springs, to play a short acoustic set, and they’re alright. Comfortable, subdued, genuine. Frances Morgan clocks them in the new Plan B as “sounding like a big empty South London pub”, and I can’t really fault that. A good place to go for a pint of Guinness and a read of the Guardian on a sunny Saturday lunchtime, until you remember that the world sucks and your life is a ruin. Today this realisation arrives in the form of shifty skeletal figure who blows some mouth organ and sings in a haunted, cracked Jandek voice, taking things a few steps beyond the Bitter Springs man’s rather slick, drab delivery as they launch into a long, tormented number about burning down your workplace, killing your family and driving yr car off Beachy Head. Trouble a-brewing.

Now; Who gets my ‘show of the month’ award for November? The Thermals. What was the best show I’ve seen this year? The Thermals. Who are the best punk rock* band of the modern era? The Thermals.

It feels good to be certain about a few things now and then, and god knows, The Thermals’ worldview certainly brooks no room for uncertainty, so I’ll do them the same courtesy. After a show this good, there’s nothing to be done but to can this crap of trying to write witty, well-composed sentences, and just go for the big gush. So from a 1am email:

“OK, you **HAVE** to go and see The Thermals... They just played hands down the BEST show I've seen this year (and I've seen some good ones).... y'know how when you've kind of got your own perfect idea of what a band should be like in yr head, and when you go to see them play you're kind of aware that to some extent they won't live up to that and will disappoint you to some extent..? Well no worries of that here; they were just MAGNIFICENT... just a solid hour of awesomely powerful songs about everything that matters, blasted through with huge, amazing sound, energy, commitment, absolutely no weakness, no fat, no bullshit: in a tiny, packed room, kids leaping around, yelling along to all the lyrics; they played all the hits, and yeah, you could even hear the words!! It was as perfect as I could possibly have imagined.... like, the complete embodiment of Punk Rock and everything that makes it as vital as it is. You hear a band like this at full power and just think, well, why the fuck would anyone want to make music that DOESN'T sound like this?? As I think I said of them back when "Fuckin' A" came out, it's the kind of music that makes you feel like you can charge through a brick wall, grab the girl you love, turn all the guns into flowers and fly straight into space... Back on earth, myself and Pete actually hung around the back to get the band to sign things and generally tell them they were awesome... something I haven't done in a loooong time... :D . A big fat man jumped off the stage for some reason and smashed my glasses to pieces - fucking retard; people like that shouldn't be allowed inside buildings. But it's ok, I have a spare pair. Phew. I’ve Got to get up bright & early for work tomorrow.”

And I did. And thanks to The Thermals, it even felt GOOD, if you can believe that.

Recipient of above email didn’t go and see The Thermals.
Bet you didn’t go and see them either.
Your loss.

Having been there a couple of times now, I have decided that the kinda music / club space at the LSE Student’s Union is a really rather unpleasant place – it’s big and dark and it just radiates bad vibes. Maybe it’s just the dehumanising aspect of the stern, anonymous, huge Holborn buildings? Maybe it’s the steel-cold irony of basement cultural happenings going down under the auspices of an exclusive academy of fiscal scumfuckery raised from the ruins of 18th century slum clearances? Maybe it’s just because it’s across the road from my dread place of work? But if I ever drunkenly collar – what’s that guy’s name? who wrote all those dim-witted Ian Sinclair rip-off pastiche books? – oh yeah, Peter Ackroyd. If I ever run into him I’m gonna try and sell him on the idea that the room was once a place utilised in the ritual suicide / sacrifice of failing accountancy undergraduates as part of some kind of degradation/power based arch-capitalist cult of Mamon, or something. Some bad psychic stuff zinging around.

ANYWAY, before I get off the point, I went to this insalubrious place to see some kinda Ladyfest affiliated gig – had a good poster, looked DIY, might bump into some interesting people, see some good stuff, that sort of thing.

Opening band Wet Dog are the only act on the bill who could really be said to fit into my world. And they’re fucking great – an off-beat and hard-rocking female power trio riffing straight off the blueprint laid down by the Raincoats – great stuff! No violin, but they’ve got that “you call us ‘amateurish’ because we haven’t learned your rules, but we know we can play really fucking well” thing DOWN. In a way though, maybe they’re a bit TOO Raincoats… y’know, like maybe they are to the Raincoats what Franz Ferdinand are to Orange Juice; a 20 year old marginal style grabbed wholesale with the fun factor amped up and the rough edges filed off. But fuck that, it’s thinking too hard; I don’t think I’ll ever have reason to complain about a band who sound like The Raincoats. Go Wet Dog!

And so more people start to arrive, and in some subdued, deathly sense, a party is on some level started. Ladyfest? Jaded media twat karaoke bollocks fest more like. OK, OK, that was uncalled for, but when it comes down to, isn’t it…. hold on a minute, ye gods, what is this that stands before me…?

No Bra is the chosen stage-name of a tall, pale, fucked up looking girl with a moustache who stands motionless at the front of the stage wearing nothing but stockings, knickers and an SS armband. She speak-sings in a flat, nasal voice about the usual ugly sex / self-abuse stuff backed by guileless pre-recorded backing tracks that occasionally sound like Suicide but mostly just sound like Casio pre-set drumbeats. Why is this happening? Is anyone being challenged here? Or entertained? Am I standing in a room with people who actually see elements of their lives reflected in this sort of thing? Fucking hell.

By far the best thing here is the fact that, because this gig is happening in a student union, the venue obviously forms a route from the gym to some other parts of the building, so people in karate outfits or carrying tennis rackets keep walking past the front of the stage as No Bra performs. It is utterly surreal, and the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks – all the more so since none of the intruding athletes seem remotely interested or taken aback by this strange, half-naked person’s ‘confrontational’ shtick.

By contrast, I don’t particularly enjoy Shimura Curves set, but with such innocence and fun on display, it would take a truly evil person to hate them. Four misfit-looking teenage girls with 90% pre-recorded backing and a few token attempts to play instruments, they sing sugar-overdose karaoke pop in a joyful, shambolic and home-made fashion. They have a lot of ‘funny’ lyrics about soap operas and websites and the like which largely go over my head, although some people in the audience seem to appreciate them. It’s really sweet when they try to do synchronised dance routines and all end up doing different ones. I guess I’m not really a big ‘pop’ guy (not in the giggly, singalong Abba sense anyway), and their tunes are a bit too lame and campy for my liking, and I fear there may be a degree of the dreaded irony at work here too. But I wish them well and hope that they have loads of fun being in a band and get to do some cool stuff.

That was a bit patronising wasn’t it? Sorry. Whatever has become of me.

Well all else aside, I’ve got to admit that headliners Ebony Bone kick one hell of a lot of ass. Consisting of three wild and terrifying black girls in full voodoo street carnival regalia complete with airhorns and rattles on joint singing/crowd-rocking duties and backed up by a pretty tight (male) garage-rock band with a devastating drummer… holy shit. The three front-women have more energy between them than everyone else in the room put together. They do a song that starts with a chant of “No blacks! No Irish! No dogs!” and then rips the hook from Delta 5’s ‘Mind your Own Business’ over recycled Sonics riffs. They only play for 15 minutes. Did I just DREAM this…?

Assuming I didn’t, then Ebony Bone genuinely ARE some kind of racially inverted punk rock girl-group from hell. I have a vision of them tearing the Pipettes to shreds Piranha style in about 3 seconds flat. It’s a subdued, work night atmosphere here tonight and obviously their set is curtailed for one reason or another, but I’d imagine seeing them on full form letting rip at a party would be a sight to behold.

Not that I will behold it, because I don’t go to parties.

I never have any fun.

People get scary when they’re having their decadent urbanite type ‘fun’. I don’t understand. It’s horrible. Whatever happened to the other sort of ‘fun’, the good sort?

Guess I’m just a miserable sod.

Christmas? What? – fuck that.

See you in December! Oh, hang on, it is December.


*Just to clarify: that's punk rock as musical genre. I'd like to think most of the bands I like are punk rock in spirit.

INTERMISSION;

One Short Poem About “Thirty Short Poems About My Favourite Black Metal Band”

Link>> Check it out.

Modern poetry is bullshit
Apart from Billy Childish
And maybe some other stuff

I’ve been meaning to write about it
Sometime, whenever I got a minute

Poems died when the Beatles recorded
‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’
And touched more people, more quickly
Than this crap ever could

People who insist on being ‘poets’
Are disgruntled arts journalists
Who lock their truth in mazes
And think we won’t notice
If they press ‘enter’
All the fucking time

Darnielle is a genius though,
A great man, blah blah
I’ve said it before
I’ll say it again
In my end of the year albums round-up
So I guess he’s changed my mind

People might think he’s really gone off the deep end with this one
Others might think it’s a gag (it is pretty funny)
But they’ll never understand

Go straight to the ‘Archive’ and read from number one onwards

Eleven is the best

But even if you’re truly moved,
Don’t let this distract you from the dreary reviews I posted yesterday
And will post tomorrow

As above, so below
I need love too

Hail Satan, tonight

GUITAR I HATE YOU
November Music Diary, Part 1

Words, huh? Isn’t it terrible when you feel like blurting something out to express some singular concept and you’re so dulled by the colour-drained sensory overload of modern life and the slothful workings of your steam-powered brain that all that springs to mind are warmed over, clumsy clichés and you may as well not have bothered to open yr mouth? Words alone – a difficult business, disappointing.

Far better to look to guitars for your satisfaction. In the right hands, they can always get to the bottom of things, and they really help with the words too; shout any old half-written crap over some guitars and sound like you mean it and things’ll turn out just swell.

But hold on, I have a guitar. When I reach for it, all we get are wobbly, poorly played clichés and a sound kind of like David Berman being beaten with a phonebook.

Well regardless, guitars have certainly seen me through better than words this month, so let’s get a move on. It occurs to be whilst watching Yo La Tengo at The Forum that, considered from an outsider’s perspective, to someone unable to fill in the lyrics to ‘Tom Courtenay’ when the band’s hesitant singing and the venue’s poor sound system and idiots jabbering at the back fail us, this show must represent the very definition of a certain kind of cliché, that of the shambolic, cultish indie-rock performance. Pre-gig build-up, good community feeling and sonic comfort render it a wholly satisfying experience to the initiated, but the woozy percussion-fests, drawn out crashes of guitar-noise and inaudible mumbling sadly remain utterly bewildering to the Man On The Street, whom I am channelling for the purposes of this review. YLT’s inherent modesty, stage shyness and lo-fi defiance can be a beautiful thing in the right circumstances, but unfortunately it spreads pretty thinly across the kind of huge halls they’re playing these days, especially given Ira Kaplan’s preference for relying on the comfort blanket of guitar noise and slow-building jams rather than taking a deep breath and engaging the audience on the transcendent, universal pop song level of which YLT are more than capable. Turning up late and standing at the back was a way bad idea. It always is. With all the good will in the world, it’s hard to love a band with a £17 ticket price who are playing songs you can’t even hear.

But anyway, we don’t want to get onto a downer here, do we? More guitars! The guest of honour at this year’s London Jazz Festival was Marc Ribot, the New York guitarist who you’re most likely to have heard playing those whacked out spidery riffs on Tom Waits ‘Rain Dogs’, or, if you’re a bit cooler, from his ‘Spiritual Unity’ trio with Albert Ayler bassist Harry Grimes, or maybe some of the other stuff he’s done. Mainstream jazz festivals tend to fly above my radar I guess, so I was pissed to discover that I’d missed Ribot’s Ayler tribute night, but we did have the good fortune to catch him playing a free set in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall the following Saturday night, leading an odd ensemble consisting of the drummer and bassist from his regular trio and a few random young British musician types through some anything-could-happen-here-folks improv adventures. And despite some wobbly passages as the unfamiliar players feel each other out, and the ‘polite’ volume level and cavernous acoustics that come with playing in a large public space, it builds against the odds into a fucking superb session, embodying all the strengths and excitement of improvised music, with none of the obstinacy or self-indulgence that serves to keep it on the musical sidelines.

Ribot is hot stuff on the guitar, needless to say, pulling off brief, blasted bursts of that real kinda brain-bending urban skronk slicing the melodic rulebook to pieces with a confidence that only a musician who’s spent many years in painstaking study of it really can. The drummer is an inventive heavy-hitter who seems like he’d be more at home behind the kit in Shellac or the Jesus Lizard, and when all else fails he and Ribot lock into tight post-punk form, startling the less rockist guest players with some hair-raising barre chord beatdowns ala Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller – yeah.

For once it’s not all about the guitar though, and Ribot is painstakingly democratic in his attempts to reign in his own flash and throw the others on stage chances to take the lead. The other star of the show is the cellist, whose name I unfortunately failed to catch; she is the only one of the British guests with the guts to really connect with the tougher moves of Ribot’s trio, mixing frantic high-end scramble with weird, sawing riffs and some extraordinarily inspired free-form vocal interjections that really raise things to a new level, as well as subjecting her instrument to some primitivist percussion bashing at one point – this lady rules, whoever she is.

We’ve also got some guy on vibraphone and various other pretentious ehtnicky percussion devices, and a turntablist / beatboxer in the corner who makes the least impression on the music (and that’s saying something when there’s a dude on the other side of the stage playing the gourd). Both of them seem a little lost within the expressionistic interplay of an improvised performance, but they do contribute to the strong rhythmic flow that’s perhaps the key to why this performance kicks so much ass; with only the guitar and cello set up to take on lead instrument duties, everybody else just concentrates on establishing and maintaining a flat-out monstrous groove of Can-like proportions that has the jazzbos in the crowd nodding heads and pounding tables, and even a few random non-jazzbo passersby drawn in for some actual, like, dancing, if you can imagine such a thing.

I could bore you stupid about this one – probably have already. It was just a really joyous, killer, fun-rocking set, and wandering into it for free with no overloaded expectations was even better. For a moment, living in London seems like a GOOD idea.

Now when Marc Ribot ends up being the second best guitarist you’ve seen in a weekend, you know it’s been a good one... and so it transpires that on the one day in history when I actually WANT to go to Elephant & Castle, the Northern Line has effectively broken, and by the time I’ve sat through an interminable bus ride, navigated a series of eerie pedestrian underpasses and an abandoned shopping mall (very Dawn of the Dead) in search of the elusive Corsica Studios, the always devastating bald men’s anger management unit Hunting Lodge are coming to the end of their set in what looks to be a packed out, white-washed rehearsal room with a stage and some lights chucked in at one end; all I get a chance to witness is a throb of collapsing, muffled noise and the memorable sight of a particularly barbarous-looking Seth Cooke stripped to his underpants beating hell out of what I’m later informed is an upended kitchen sink with holes drilled through it functioning as some kinda giant cowbell. Brave new world that has such people in it.

Those of you who wake up every morn and curse the dawn for the injustice of being born too late to see Spacemen 3 play live may gain some faint satori from the next group on, The Early Years. Devotees of that particularly narcotic strain of British psyche-rock, they’re well-schooled in ponderous, droning intros, faux-earnest mono-chord chug, looking surly and undernourished, not speaking, sombrely staring at their pedal-boards as if they expect to find a solution to the Middle East crisis within, and, y’know, generally boring the fuck out of everybody. Unfortunately though, they fail to really get within striking distance of the BIG PSYCHEDELIC PAY-OFF which is rather the point of all this time-wasting, and in a bold new era when at least three continents are seething with incredible psychedelic music of all descriptions, these leaky, provincial parish churches of sound are in serious need of a fund-raising drive to get the roof retiled, or hey, why not the full-scale black metal bonfire?

Hard to really compare those dreary, retrograde meanderings with the return of perhaps the most intense pychedelic rock band in the world (any other contenders..?), so turn off your mind and float downstream for Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso UFO. Taking the stage at 11pm and playing for near two hours on the last date of a characteristically gruelling tour, this is the basic four-piece AMT line-up ploughing ahead on motor oil powered uber-biker rock form, playing hard and sloppy; rhythm section pure ketamine Blue Cheer thunder, Higashi Hiroshi bringing the obligatory whacked space noise on synth and Kawabata diving at every opportunity into some utterly unbelievable demonic Slayer-shred that’s pretty fucking mind-bending, even by the standards of the speed-guru, lest we forget amid AMT’s technicolor craziness that this lightning-forging rock n’ roll bodhisattva was also the engine behind the unholy Mainliner.

For the first time in my experience, AMT do show up their human side a bit tonight, with a few shambling, mid-song collapses, broken string / retuning breaks, poorly translated banter and rather more of bassist Atsushi Tsuyama’s zany ‘cosmic joker’ antics than is strictly healthy, not to mention a most unwelcome funk breakdown crow-barred into the middle of the sprawling ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’, but all of these are little more than momentary distractions from the main body of AMT’s typically awe-inspiring performance, forging ahead on an endless motherlode of overwhelming Holy Rock power-transcendence before opening up the sky and flashing toward eternal realms of post-human goddess-child carnal love-peace splendour.

And if you think I’m just pulling a load of psychedelic type words out of a hat to finish off this review, you’ve clearly never experienced an Acid Mothers Temple live show, or haven’t understood it. In the decades that have passed since the inspired children of the mid-‘60s first began to investigate the prehistoric electric secrets of feedback, repetition, volume and sound-hypnosis, few have really understood the rapturous, religious-beauty potential of rock n’ roll as well as these unstoppable bastards.

Kawabata wrecks his guitar at the end and throws the debris into the audience, and lacking the escalation of blind fury that precipitates similar shenanigans in the hands of frustrated teenage punks, such time-wasting “rock n’ roll” antics inevitably remain far less exciting than the actual music this incredible man has just played for us. One suspects that in the original spirit of Pete Townshend, this is more of a “no-fucking-encore-I’m-exhausted!” statement than anything, and if nothing else I guess it explains why our hero chooses to surf the universe on cheap-looking Strat copies.

Woo! Part Two coming up for you in a few days – apologies for recent weblog delay.