The Art of Writing a Concert Review

right!
I wrote a review once and very deliberately avoided mentioning song names but my editor inserted the names of a couple of the band's greatest hits without telling me. D'oh!

He _completely_ the point.

You don't have to even mention song names at all, as far as I'm concerned. If there were any that made you jump up and down and go "Yes! Yes! I can't believe they're playing < Song X >" then that's notable. But I hate lists of the bands hitz that they played unless it's a review for a fansite or something where people care about that shit.

Feel free to criticise. In fact _please_ criticise!

Alec Empire - The ICA, London, December 7th

The Institute for Contemporary Arts has a gift shop in its foyer, beautiful people bar staff and what can only be described as a bistro. Follow the white corridor that leads into the black concert hall and you'll pass a display of contemporary art: diagrams of cheese, Raymond Pettibon sketches, a photo of a man's thumb tattooed black - this is a great place for a bit of pretentious insanity.

Openers Capitol K are boring boys with guitars and laptops. They've got a song called New York and their girlfriends love them. Headliner Richard H. Kirk was in Cabaret Voltaire and now plays out 75% dub, 25% techno and miscellaneous.
The dub is bass heavy and repetitive even by dub standards and all the better for it, with scary loud metallic clanks to stop you dozing off before you get into the groove.

The meat in the sandwich is Alec Empire, here to perform a rare electro set. But how can electro be 'performed'? Surely it's a studio bound genre of careful tweaking and drum machine programming? Is there really room for showmanship in fader manipulation and the occasional sample trigger? Easy:

Step 1: be German.

Step 2: the entrance. As you walk on don't acknowledge the audience whatever you do. That would be not-cool. A single wave at the end is all they deserve. Take your position behind the keyboards, mixing desks, filter banks and children's toys necessary for this sort of thing and be sure to keep a straight face.

Step 3: wardrobe. Black leather boots and belt are a given. Black leather trousers? Okay, calm down, remember you invented Digital Hardcore after all and you're some kind of underground over ground wombling scene-god. Anyway, you're German. Naked from the waste up - you've got muscles now, let them breath.

Hang on a minute, he looks a bit shiny. Yes, he's definitely glinting. Oh my god he's painted his entire upper body SILVER! He's melding with technology to become a higher bio-mechanical life form, he's channeling his artistic emotions through machines and HE'S PAINTED HIMSELF SILVER! And he's not laughing, although Atari Teenage Riot team-mate Nic Endo might be, so he orders her to the back of the audience with a stern finger.

Step 4: Bleepy bassy blippy goodness ensues. Black German noise via black America. There's authentic electro, all hi-q pings and rigid Linn drum rhythms, some manic breakbeats straight outta the Digital Hardcore manifesto and bursts of inhumanly intense techno. All highly danceable. Unfortunately there are also directionless stretches of ambience decorated with silly zip zap squirts and plinky plonk that would embarrass a five year old who's just got a My-First-Synthesiser for their birthday.

Even during the low points Alec just about pulls it off because he stays in character. Rooted to the spot, face in blank concentration, fingers dancing efficiently from one machine tweaking task to the next. Every gesture and nuance just so. During a superb ten minute Nintendo Gameboy solo (using the Nanoloop sequencer) he stands motionless except for an almost imperceptible twitching of thumbs on the controls.

Alec so nearly lost it back there. In a few months he went from incendiary ATRiot to Goth industrial hodge-podge that all the wrong people liked for all the wrong reasons. Tonight at least he looks and sounds fantastic. He's making cyber-techno-electro-magneto-thingamabob music with machines and he's wearing leather and paint. He is made of bullets. He still takes himself way too seriously but if he didn't he wouldn't be half as much fun.

-----------------------------------

Remember the future?

No, really, remember Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, shiny silver jump-suits and pristine space-discos filled with jive robots and hipster aliens that made the future look like such a happening place in 1982?

If you believe laptop screengazers, this is the future of music, bleeps and squelches and octave-hopping disco basslines all chopped up with Speak N Spell samples and snippets of Kylie Minogue anthems. I have to hand it to Printed Circuit - her giddy mix of electroclash synthpop and chattering IDM is whimsical and entertaining and - gasp - fun! I do not doubt her technical mastery or her ear for a catchy pop tune. What I doubt is that this is the future of music.

It has been suggested that us rockist types are, well, retro-fetishistic to the point of being dinosaurs on the cusp of bloody extinction at the hands of the electro-revolution. But if this is the future, why does it sound - and look, as the elegant chanteuse with the asymmetric blonde bob gets up to do her Don't-You-Want-Me-Baby routine - so much like the Eighties? Retro-fetishism is retro-fetishism whether the past you are glorifying is The Beatles and The Stones or Giorgio Moroder and the Human League. Hello pot, my name is kettle, that's a nice tan.

As Marshmallow Coast take the stage, I am hopeful. It's all the same folks as re-arranged my atoms the previous night as of Montreal, but oh what a difference a songwriter makes. The scent of overwhelming niceness wafts through like stale incense and peppermints. This is shallow, bland stoner-rock, as inoffensive as Bread. Even an ironic Sabbath cover cannot save them.

So far, it's Electronica 1, Rockists 0. Are Capitol K going to make me eat my leather trousers and burn my Velvets records?

Well, not exactly. The last time I saw Capitol K, they were two blokes with a table covered in bits of electronic clobber. Tonight, a guitar case serves as a stand for a laptop sporting a Nirvana sticker; in fact, there are more guitars onstage than computers. Both of them sport shaggy rockboy haircuts, and good god, is that a live rhythm section? There's a guitar-lick whose heaviness would put Deep Purple to shame, the glitchy stutter of Max/MSP booting up, and within thirty seconds, my rockist ass is off its seat, as I pump my fist in the air, shouting "Yes! Yes! Yes! This ROCKS!" And even my IDM-loving Warp-employee housemate is headbanging his dreadlocks around like Beavis to my Butthead.

It's electronica, but electronica as made by LONG-HAIRED DENIM-CLAD GODS FROM PLANET RAWK!!! iMacs and Marshalls in perfect harmony, felching ARP keybass and 7/4 time signatures that would melt the mind of any hip-hop loving disco bunny impressed by a "Funky Drummer" sample. I keep expecting Keith Emerson (ask your granddad) to leap on-stage and start playing laptops with a knife. Because, that's what ELP and King Crimson and all those prog "rock dinosaurs" would have been doing in 1972 had the technology been available.

See, my problem with electro-techno-bores is not even a stylistic one, but a question of philosophy. They imagine a pristine future, a future without dirt, a future without the "past". But we're living in the future - a space age run by computers - and it doesn't look like the shiny glittery Brave New World of Star Trek; it looks like the dystopic steampunk vision of Brazil or Blade Runner. The future has not eradicated the past, it has grown up alongside it side-by-side. Walk through a modern city and you see ultra-modern Bauhausian skyscrapers next to ancient Gothic cathedrals on roads following Medieval streetplans.

This is Capitol K's approach to technology and to music, coaxing theremin noises from emulator software with an old school videogame joystick in a joyous culture-jam that makes The Prodigy look like Jesus Jones. Just listen to Pillow, possibly the single of 2002, a perfect collision of stuttering IDM beatz, lush shoegazer texture, gargantuan monster-rock guitar riffs and fey indie-boy vocals. This is the *real* Future Pop.

I think the worst thing that I said about Capitol K was that I said so little. That was really because of space constraints and because I found them so uninteresting.

I'd never heard anything by them before and I think the name is rubbish. Did you hear them live first, or on a recording? If you hear a recording then see them you can pick up a lot of things I'd have missed.

The rest of the audience were pretty uninterested too and that's a vital thing. Also C-K themselves didn't really seem to be getting into it. I think the audience and atmosphere are usually overlooked in live reviews.

I'm much better than average at going mad about a band even if it's only me that likes them there and I look like an idiot. On the other hand I can be made to enjoy something I otherwise wouldn't if I'm with friends or even strangers who are into it.

Having said all that your description is so enticing that I'd give them another go, especially if they were playing to their own audience. What you wrote also makes them sound like an ideal support for Alec Empire, which they weren't for some reason.

Richard H. Kirk was technically headline and he was good but it was obvious most people were there to see Alec.

Holy crap, brilliant. Do you write for a magazine or website or something? Id like to buy a million billion copies.

fit the gibberish around the structure and you've got ICONIC, baby. I follow a simple structure and maybe do some cut-ups to something that is relevant in the press.

I write for http://www.bleed-music.com/new/default.asp
a bit and some local mags occasionally.

If anyone wants to offer me a job...

http://www.harvardindependent.com/news/420404.html - Review
http://www.harvardindependent.com/news/420400.html - Interview
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Review

Spoon
Concert Review

By Jeff Rosenfeld
Spoon frontman Britt Daniel described their show between songs as the "biggest show we've played in Boston." Playing to a talkative but enthusiastic crowd significantly above the 18-year old minimum, Spoon impressed with a raw set that translated their deliberate and nuanced studio sound into a raucous salvo of bass riffs, measured keyboard parts, dirty guitar and Daniel's unique brand of over-enunciated vocals. Despite being saddled by a mix that left Daniel's softer vocals muddled, the band proved its significance as a potent live act.

Armed with a synthesizer to match the various keyboard tones on their albums, the band opened with "Everything Hits at Once," the opener to their acclaimed 2001 Girls Can Tell album. The bulk of Spoon's material plays like the early new wave/punk sound of Elvis Costello, especially rockers like "Car Radio," a track taken from the band's sole major label release Series of Sneaks. Taking on a faux-British quality, Daniel's vocals too sounded appreciably like Costello's.

"The Way We Get By," a bass and keyboard-driven bluesy rocker from 2002's Kill the Moonlight, proved the most popular song of the night. Daniel took leave of his guitar for the track, singing eye-closed into his microphone as rapid-fire piano filled out the acoustic space usually reserved for Daniel's guitar. Taking in the crowd's boisterous response, Daniel boyishly bragged that the track was the first song he had written on the keyboard and joked that, like the song's protagonists, he and drummer Jim Eno had been smoking in the backseat of a car before the show.

Also proving a fan favorite was "Paper Tiger," transformed from its album incarnation as a sparse track laying quiet high-register vocals over a soft reverbed synth, piano, and string arrangement into a wild noise-rock number. While Eno pounded away on the drum with mallets, Daniel crouched to play his distorted guitar directly into his 18-inch high amp resulting in an exhilarating din of feedback.

Capping their 18-song set with a fan request for "Jonathan Fisk," a raw, punk-ish number off Kill the Moonlight, Spoon exited the stage to loud reception of an appreciative and drunken crowd. The band then returned for a four-song encore that began with a tender cover of John Lennon's "Isolation," featuring a bare arrangement of piano and Daniel's vocals.

Opening for Spoon was Crooked Fingers, the new project of former Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann. The band's unusual sound matches a bowed upright bass with countrified guitar. Bachmann's Springsteen-doing-a-Dylan-impression vocals, which screamed "Look at me! I'm being sincere!" quickly grew tiresome. Crooked Fingers' 11-song set mixed somber country ballads with barn-burners that roused the support of a few fans towards the front of the venue. For the most part, however, a rather indifferent crowd talked throughout the performance, drowning out a few of the quieter numbers.

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Interview
Spoon
Interview

By Jeff Rosenfeld
Spoon has emerged as one of the most critically celebrated "underground" rock acts of the past half decade. Mixing '60s pop sensibilities with new wave and blues, Spoon has yet to develop a wide popular appeal but has garnered a significant following among the indie rock crowd. After releasing their 1996 debut Telephono the band was signed by major label Elektra only to be dropped only months after the 1998 release of the band's A Series of Sneaks. Spoon bit back with their widely acclaimed effort Girls Can Tell, which built upon the straight ahead rock of their sophomore release. Last fall, Spoon followed up Kill the Moonlight, which has provoked significant critical buzz and beat out Norah Jones's Grammy-winning record in the Village Voice's national "Pazz & Jop" critics poll. Moving away from the guitar-centered sound of their first three LP's, with Kill the Moonlight Spoon explored new sonic territory building songs around, among other sounds, a looping human beat box and a variety of keyboards tones. The Harvard Independent recently talked with Spoon front man Britt Daniel about Kill the Moonlight and his plans for the future.

Harvard Independent: Did the approach to writing Kill the Moonlight differ from Girls Can Tell?

Britt Daniel: Yes, it was more concentrated. When I was writing Girls Can Tell, it was spread out over many, many months and Kill the Moonlight was written basically in the summer of 2001 with a couple of extra things done in the fall of that year.

HI: Would you say Kill the Moonlight is more detail oriented than its predecessor?

BD: Production wise, yes, definitely. With Girls Can Tell, we recorded a song here and recorded a song there, and we threw it together when we could do it. That kind of made for it being an album that was more on a song-by-song basis. Kill the Moonlight we did in a specific period of time and kind of helped us [to be] very focused on what the whole thing was sounding like.

HI: Kill the Moonlight seems to move away from the bass-riff or guitar centered sound that marked your early material. Was that a conscious decision to move in that direction?

BD: Wasn't a conscious decision, but it happened. I don't know how it happened, but it happened.

HI: You said when you had originally done some of the mock-ups of the songs for Kill the Moonlight, you were unhappy because they were too straightforward.

BD: When we first started recording some songs from that album, we did some songs, we did a week before we went on tour and it ended up not really exciting us very much. Some of that was because the songs weren't totally there yet and some of that was because we weren't recording the songs the right way, but we realized we needed to start over again.

HI: On "Vittorio e," it sounds like it was recorded in a large room or away from the mic. What's the story behind how that was recorded?

BD: That was recorded in a big wooden room in Jim's house, well not a big room, but away from the mic. I just thought the room would help give it some character

HI: Was there a lot of experimenting done to see what sounds you could come up with?

BD: There was a good deal of "let's try this, and let's try that, and let's see what happens."

HI: Was the record recorded in a home studio? How do you afford to spend the time to get the sounds right.

BD: It was recorded at Jim's studio, which is at his home, but he's got a lot of really serious gear. It's not like recording on four-track; it's like recording in a real studio. The only limitation of his studio is that it's only one room so the control board is in the same room as you're recording everything and singing and playing instruments, so it take a while to get sounds that way - it can take a long time (laughs). But yeah, being at a home studio helped us be able to have time to mess around and not feel pressure.

HI: Do you think some of the newer material translates live differently than the older songs? For example, you redid "Paper Tiger" as a sort of noise rock thing. How did that happen?

BD: Yeah, it just happened [when] I found a pedal that made the sound of ocean waves and I kept playing with it, kept making it louder and louder

HI: Where did you develop your vocal style? Was it modeled after some heroes'?

BD: I don't know. I don't know how those things creep in. It's the same thing with influences, and I don't know what they are. I just know what I listen to a lot, and I am sure that things seep in and make me feel like I want do things like this or like that - the Beatles were a big thing, Wire is a big thing, Prince is a big thing.

HI: There's a distinctly bluesy feel to your music, especially the vocal lines. Do you listen to any blues?

BD: (laughs) I am not into blues. I am not into the blues at all. I am into new wave.

HI: Have you been listening to any new bands or new sounds that you think might have an impact on your writing for the next record?

BD: Prince, 1999.

HI: How might that record impact your music?

BD: I have no idea. I write the songs and see how they turn out. I've been really really into that album lately so I've been thinking about it, but who knows what will happen....

HI: Are there any bands out there that you'd like to tour with?

BD: (smiles) I dunno, is James Brown still touring? Prince, is he still touring?

HI: What about bands that you think logistically might work out?

BD: (pauses) Prince? Paul McCartney? I dunno. I'm really into the Interpol record. Maybe that would be a good tour.

I want to go to the Melvins, but what I'm saying is this mate has already invited me to his wedding and I've agreed and bought a present and stuff. There's no reason I can't do both, I just thought exeter might be so far away as to take up a whole weekend, I know where nothing is.

> >Who's Cameron Jamie?
>
> *shrug*
>

I'll google him.

> >(Where's Exeter???)
>
> Further away than Bristol but not as far away as Cornwall. About two hrs on
> the train (probably less by car, taking a guess).
>
> NG
>

I'll try to take the car then, if you wanna go halves on petrol. Or would train be better?

I'm going to Metros again tonight. In fancy dress. Fancy it?
Sian & Lisa r going, maybe my brother, maybe my mate roscoe, Anita Bagwhandaswotsit etc etc.

And evanescence is Sunday!!!

Afters

Anyway, funny first sentence in review and well done.

I like interviews with more of the subjects personality in ther, ket them dictate the conversation.
That's just me tho.

:-)