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.