Zola Jesus
CAMP Basement, September ‘10

Earlier this year I went to see Zola Jesus play, just about the point at which the hype was about to boil over and people who weren’t really interested decided they needed to have an opinion, I suppose. I had to get up really early the next morning to catch a plane, nobody wanted to come with me, and I wasn’t drinking. It was a pretty heavy show, but I’m very glad I went.

Befitting the broadband-era culture-tripping escapist aesthetic this music has grown from & thrived in, it was like some worried parent’s idea of a ‘contemporary underground music happening’. Poorly lit, peeling-white-paint concrete basement beneath some kind of East End art gallery; sparse, motionless crowd grimly staring at their feet, wincing at the bass feedback as the sound-man ruthlessly pushes the volume on some mix CD of monged out ‘witch house’ type music. Funny, I’d never really thought about the possibility of listening to that stuff loudly before. It’s always been background volume, computer speaker music to me. I dunno whether this kind of weight improves it or not, but it at least helps this potentially bland, style-over-contenty sound achieve a reassuring level of obnoxiousness, hitting some combo of pummelling, sleepy and intimidating with requisite discomfort.

Presently, two serious-looking dudes stand behind keyboards – big old Yamaha, Casio ones, like every kid in school used to have. That’s fine, but the complete lack of pedals and backline amps unnerves my rockist sensibilities. Is some straight DIed fucking 1989 Christmas present really gonna make the grade here? It feels like I’ve been standing on this hard floor for about, like, eight hours or something, sipping this bottle of tap water, waiting for something to happen. She’s a big famous act now after all, this Zola Jesus, I’m sure she knows how to deliver.

The guy with the keyboard rig on the right is really something. Greasy hair, severe side parting, aura of total aggressive concentration – sort of a conquering nerd in triumph. If I remember right, he’s wearing a tight leather jacket over tight primary-coloured t-shirt… maybe even with a bandana tied ‘round the jacket-arm? (I can’t be sure on that last point – he’s merging in my mind with about a thousand fuzzy thugs from ‘80s movies.) Doesn’t sound like much I know, but the way he wears it constitutes one hell of a look. Icing on the cake though is the glasses – again, I can’t quite describe ‘em properly (wish I’d had a chance to write this fucking stuff down closer to the time – bloody life), but they were… y’know, the perfect glasses for the surroundings, the kind he’d never have found by accident – heavy white moulded plastic, with a continuous line running across the top – like those torch-glasses Orbital used to have, only without the torches, maybe? Standing behind his Casio like he’s preparing to unleash the sound of utter cosmic death (#21, synth-trumpet setting), this guy is modelling his whole scene on a middle-aged man from 1983’s idea of what the future might be like, staring us down as if daring us to even suggest that’s not the normal, sensible way for a bad-ass synth-punk keyboard player to dress circa 2010. Isn’t that great?

I was thinking up shit like that in my brain before the metronomic drum loop started thudding, and our man and his brother-in-keyboards start pounding out the ominous, elegiac sustained chords that begin “Night” (although it could just as easily be any of the dozen or so inexplicably gigantic, overwhelming monster-songs Zola Jesus has recorded over the past eighteen months). As when I listen to the recorded version, something clicks to ‘OFF’, and by the time Nika / Zola J herself appears, my mind is pure and empty and defenceless.

I don’t remember what she was wearing – just a baggy white t shirt and tight jeans or something I think. No big entrance, nothing affected or theatrical going on here beyond keyboard-guy’s Escape From New York stylings – just a straight, dead-pan, deafening performance of music.

I do recall thinking her new straggly, bottle blonde new un-hairdo was really cool – great way to instantly wrong-foot all that ‘new saviour of Goth’ claptrap that seems to have stuck to her largely on the basis of a few regrettable press shots from a couple of years ago. Time moves fast between nineteen and twenty-one, especially when you become an almost-pop star in the middle and people in newspapers start calling you ‘the new saviour of Goth’, or so I’d imagine. (Just flicking through videos on Youtube for this post, I found ‘goth-psyche queen’, ‘post-goth icon’ – forfuckssake, I don’t know about you but I certainly never heard any “goth” that sounded much like this…)

I also remember being impressed by the way that, although she’s a very small person, she seems to generate a sense of hugeness around herself. As the music would lead you to suspect, she’s a pretty intense presence really, with a touch of Patti Smith about her maybe – that combination of mad, determined stare and nervous, self-conscious movements, y’know what I mean? Not coolest-woman-in-the-world early ‘70s Patti though, more like Easter-era Patti, when everything was starting to unravel, getting a bit crazed and bombastic as she drove her untouchable rock star mystique further onto the rocks like some doomed lifeboat…

Which is appropriate, cos more than anything in the past year or so, Zola J. sounds like some vengeful ghost rising from a thousand burning copies of “Because The Night”, a song she MUST get around to covering sometime, surely, if only in private, for a laugh. And I keep thinking there’s a lot of Springsteen lurking in what she does too, believe it or not. Hidden deep in the undergrowth somewhere, waiting to leap out and scare us with some butt-rocking power-ballad about a workin’ man searching for meaning on the endless highway or whatnot. I mean, who could possibly be more goth than The Boss? Think about it. [Nods sagely.]

Why do I like this music so much, anyway? It’s not like any of the stuff I usually listen to. I don’t feel any emotional connection to any of these songs, I have no cultural baggage tied in with them. All this pomp and darkness and this art studenty girl yakking in interviews about avant garde opera and ‘transgressive’ noise acts – not really my sorta thing, is it?

But, as per The Boss, clearly I like it because I’ve not been given a choice in the matter. I mean, you didn’t think this new world of grand, Wagnerian girl group synth-angst would be a democracy, did you? This is music that saps you on the back of the head and drags you into its cave. The monumentally simple, direct songs Nika Danilova has hammered out since she embraced ‘clean’ production and verse/chorus pop structures last year do not ask questions or seek advice. They’re like alien laser-stares or speeding trains – get out of their way if you must, but if you hold your ground, resistance is futile.

Every one of these songs is the kind of breathtaking fucking awesome, overblown song that plays when people run out of a burning building in slow motion or dissolve into the neon rain in a (yes) ‘80s movie. If you’ve ever spent time pausing the bleary song credits at the end of the video, trying to figure out who the hell that one incredible song was by and decided it was probably by some act with a completely lame/unpronounceable name who subsequently turn up a blank on allmusic – don’t worry. It turns out they were lying to you. All those songs are actually by Zola Jesus.

A few times towards the end of the set, maybe just to try and make it a ‘show’ y’know, or to justify some perceived desire for a bit of ‘craziness’, Nika does the long mic-cord thing and ploughs a path through the crowd and back, mid-song. I’d be perfectly fine if she didn’t to be honest, but ok, whatever. Returning from her peregrinations as the last song begins, she’s clutching an empty coke bottle by the neck like a weapon. Uh, ok. That’s cool. But somewhere in the back of my head, I’m reflecting on that scary/contrived look in her eye, thinking, we here in London don’t really know where we stand with this rather singular just-post-teenage girl of evidently immense talent who’s just had notoriety and global kinda-fame thrust upon her on an internet-accelerated timespan and started touring the world playing alarming melodramatic synth pop songs every night and…. there’s only a very short list of reasons why someone would suddenly decide to wave a bottle around like that in public, y’know, and none of them are very reassuring….

The song starts to grind to a halt with a series of hammering, martial fake-drum rolls and ecstatic/agonising howls, and on the final programmed beat, she brings the bottle down SMASH against an unused mic stand – perfect aim, perfect timing! Sound vanishes (no amps, so no feedback), show’s over. No encore. Wow.

Labels: live reviews, videos, Zola Jesus

Frightwig.

Ok, so I wasn’t really planning to leave that last dumb post at the top of the page for more than a day or two, but life got in the way, etc.

To give you a taste of the kind of urgent investigations that have been consuming my spare time when I should have been writing new stuff here, here’s another dumb video post.

Specifically, here’s a band called FRIGHTWIG, who’ve previously escaped my attention, bringing sloppy, f-ed up downer-punk and unhinged singing-drummer mania to Berkeley, California, 1987.



It’s a shame they didn’t have ladyfests back in 1987 - these guys’d hit the joint like a cheesegrater.

A brief survey of their later (presumably ??) recorded output on Youtube reveals ‘the grunge sound’ and a lot of immoderately applied wah-wah, but no matter - this video shreds.

Labels: Frightwig, lameness, spacefiller, videos

Somebody’s Mom.

For no reason whatsoever, here’s The Pointed Sticks - guest starring Linda Manz - in one of my favourite movies, “Out of the Blue” (1980).



A belated RIP to Dennis Hopper, for this incredible film if not much else.

More Pointed Sticks:



Whata group!

Labels: Pointed Sticks, power pop, punk, videos

I Like The Mantles.

The Mantles self-titled LP on Siltbreeze was the record I “slept on” most heinously during 2009, it seems. I mean, I’m pretty sure I had a copy at the end of last year. I remember thinking it was good music for exercising to. I liked the drums a lot, but nothing special. Apparently it didn’t even find a spot on my end of year top # 50. An unforgivable oversight!

Twelve months and many listens later, I see the album for what it is - a startlingly powerful collection of fiery, elegant rock music, strong of playing and strong of song, with my current record-recordin’ hero Greg Ashley at the controls, making sure the whole thing sounds about as ineffable and exciting as such things get in the 21st century – mighty, chiming guitars ringing out across a storm-blackened sky, drum kit crashing through like the desperate hooves of a galloping stallion – all that jazz. I’d bloody love to own it on vinyl.

I guess maybe I thought the whole brooding tone of the record was a bit try-hard at first – all that stern-faced romantic stuff and galloping Triffids/Jacobites melodrama. It’s a tough aesthetic to go for first-time out, with precious few non-failures amid an appropriately bleak landscape of raincoated corpses. Staying focussed, staying low-key and keeping the amps up loud, never over-stepping the mark into pomp and never slackening the pace…. to everyone’s surprise, The Mantles don’t just ride it out but practically redefine it for all time. Whoa.

Nonetheless, they’re a difficult band to write about in yr standard scene-setting/comparison terms, managing to create a music that skims across the surface of a whole gamut of vague underground rock notions without fully embracing any of them, a music with no distinguishing marks, no giveaway slip-ups, just a sound and songs that are familiar yet different, solid and GOOD - like finding a hand-carved wooden object inside a machine, serving it’s purpose perfectly in place of a mass-produced equivalent.

No, I don’t know where that metaphor came from either, but uh… let’s leave it in and move on.

This year’s follow-up EP, ‘Pink Information’ on Mexican Summer, sees The Mantles reversing the natural trajectory taken by a lot of groups, stepping back from the ‘dark, sweeping drama’ approach of their LP in favour of a scrappier, more elemental pop angle, somewhat reminiscent of The Clean’s early material – a pretty encouraging turn of events, I’m sure you’d agree.

Happily, the EP also finds the band’s songwriting (the LP’s weakest hand, relatively speaking) hitting a whole new level. I mean, what can I tell you – “Cascades” and “Situations” and just some of the most compulsively listenable songs I’ve heard this year, twisting and chugging, dead-pan and sweet and cool and… well, just perfect, really. Perfect in a way you never realised was ‘perfect’ until you heard it. There's a wildness here that there wasn't quite enough of on the LP; that bit just before the end of "Situations", where he exclaims "in the laboratory, the midnight hour..." before aborting the verse and ploughing straight back in a final chorus just blows my mind.

“Lily Never Married” is even better, sounding like one of those songs about unhappy family members and cloudy days that Ray Davies used to stick in the middle of mid-‘60s Kinks albums like morbid cries for help, catapulted back to our attention via a flawless Velvets groove and unbearably simple/poignant chord progression – a sad, humane song, using a few chords, a rhythm, a handful of repeated lyrics, to carry the quiet sorrow of an ordinary, wasted life into a place of real transcendence. "Now she's old / what can you say? / People just don't do / that anymore...". Fitting those magic notes and words together, like Ray or Lou Reed used to be able to do every now and again. Five minutes passes in the space of, ooh, two and a half, easy. It’s really, really great.

I don’t like the song “Summer Read” quite so much as I used to, since I clocked the title and realised the opening line isn’t “TREAT ME LIKE A SUBMARINE”, but it’s still pretty good.

After some reflection, I think The Mantles are one of the only American “indie-rock” bands – in the sense of being unaffiliated with the conventions and fandom of garage or pop or punk or noise or psych or whatever else – whose output I really care for at present.

I won’t give you a diatribe about what a hopeless quagmire of nothing all that stuff I shall irresponsibly generalise into the realm of beardy, pitchforky type “indie rock” has become (I refer you to Andrew Earles here for an update on that), but let’s stick to the positive and just say that The Mantles, somehow, are drawing a line straight back to the source, making music like the kind that taught us to love this stuff with all our hearts and souls way back when, before everything on Matador started to sound like the 21st century equivalent of Chicago XIV or whatever – songs that are ragged and noisy and pulse-quickening, but also elusive and grand and dazzlingly beautiful, the same way that Yo La Tengo or Dinosaur or Galaxie 500 used to sound, the first thousand times we heard them.

It makes me want to grab all those people who listen to all their favourite bands from the ‘80s and ‘90s and moan that everything’s gone to shit since people younger than them started releasing records and say LOOK! The Mantles are doin’ it! Right now! Not some weird, badly-recorded punk that you SIMPLY REFUSE to pay £6 for an import 7” of, but all that good shit that you love so much. And they’re not even a bunch of middle-aged guys from New Zealand either! Now get to it already.

Plenty o’ good tunes on their myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/mantles

Labels: I like, The Mantles

I Like Overnight Lows.

Overnight Lows are a three-piece band out of Jackson, Mississippi, rocking that ever-popular husband/wife/drummer configuration. Their album “City of Rotten Eyes” came out on Goner Records earlier this year, and it totally destroys.

That’s about all you need to know really, and this music makes me feel like being BRUTALLY CONCISE (some hope), but it’s the least I can do to at least try to use words to sell you on a record I’ve listened to all the way through about, say, five days out of every seven for the past couple of months.

Comparable in both form and execution to the spirit of that first Thermals album, crossbred with an accidental nod or three to the “world’s fastest strumming average” ideal of Reis & Froburg’s Hot Snakes, Overnight Lows play punk rock stripped of all fat, devoid of bullshit – twelve loud, memorable, breakneck-paced songs about being angry and hating stuff. Five of them make the two minute mark. Not a clunker in the bunch, and not a slow bit or room to catch a breath either. Best walking to work music ever.

Drummer Paul Artiques plays about as is humanly possible without lapsing into hardcore/metal double kick drum territory – hi-hat going like a metronome and heavy on the ride cymbal. He is a great drummer! Marsh and Daphne Nabors correspondingly lay into things with a crazed ferocity, rather akin to the spirit of a guy on super-charged two-stroke motorbike, randomly hurling dynamite and trying to overtake a train. Recording quality is pretty good, but with everything in the room mixed WAY UP, rough edges in the playing swallowed by the feedback… and by the next verse, which has probably finished before you’ve even clocked what the hell is going on.

Like most great punk rock, each song here begins as a monomaniacal tirade about some aspect of singer’s life that s/he feels is simply intolerable and, well, just sort of continues as one really. “You’re well read / big words stuck in your tiny head / you’re well read / can’t understand what you said”, shrieks Marsh Nabors at some scholarly antagonist in ‘So Well Read’. Wait dude, what's so bad about reading books? Nothing, obviously, but if you read books and you're a JERK, well - fair game. “When I kiss your lips / all I taste is lies / I know what I’ve gotta do, and that’s sad”, responds Daphne in ‘Static Scars’. After a few dozen listens, both singers’ lyrics stand out as genuinely excellent – direct, imaginative and dryly funny, however random and unprovoked the fury with which they’re spat out may seem.

It’s funny, I could spend all day listening to contemporary albums by bands of musclebound guys effortlessly playing ‘punk rock’ music of similar volume and velocity to this, but none of it would hit me like the Overnight Lows record. What we’ve got here I think is he sound of people who WEREN’T born to play music like this, straining themselves to the nth degree to keep up the pace and take the damage, sounding like they could fall apart any second – which is fantastic, and exhilarating, and yeah – punk rock.

Seeing as how they’ve got character and intelligence and no visible tattoos, the bastards’ll probably file them under ‘indie’. C’est la vie.

Oh yeah, also not to be confused with the other band of the same name, who seem to have monopolised web searches for ‘Overnight Lows’, and are pretty hopeless.

For the avoidance of doubt, I’m talking about these Overnight Lows;

http://www.myspace.com/theovernightlows

Labels: I like, Overnight Lows, punk rock