Assistant Blog

Having obsessed over her songs for a good year now, it was a real pleasure to finally see Emmy The Great play live in Brighton last week. In fact, having waited all this time, I saw her twice in a night as she played a short, good-spirited acoustic set at Resident Records as well as her headline show at the Komedia. At both venues she was outstanding; her delicate, beautiful songs are underscored by a dark imagination and a wonderful way with words. It makes seeing her a dual pleasure: on the surface, melodic and lovely; underneath – unsettling, moving. At Resident, deprived of a mic-stand, she asked a girl in the audience to hold her microphone for her, and stooped from the counter to provide spine-tingling takes on ‘First Love’, ‘The Hypnotist’s Son’ and ‘City Song’. For the latter, her final number, she conjured a moment of awed, shocked silence, as the closing lines rang oppressively round the shop: “they pulled a human from my waist / It had your mouth, it had your face / I would have kept it if I’d stayed”. As we walked away from the shop to grab a beer before her gig-proper, Dan posited that “she sounded like she could be Canadian”, which coming from him is the highest praise – even if she actually sounds like she comes from Primrose Hill.

At the Komedia – where myself, Dan and Sam met up with Lyndsey and a lovely friend of hers whose name I have predictably forgotten – the first act up was Younghusband, the three-piece fronted by Euan Hinshelwood, who plays guitar for Emmy. His songs are really good; hypnotic, mid-tempo indie somewhere between Teenage Fanclub and the Lemonheads, and songs about Woody Allen. Whereas on record the songs are delicately arranged, live Euan plays them in an agreeably straightforward, pure way, with little in the way of effects or complex playing. Once or twice he steps on a pedal and produces a minute or two of controlled, mannered grunge rock, but most of the subtleties derive from his winning way with a vocal melody. ‘Mass Kiss’ is a particular highlight. In a way, his refusal to crank the songs up, or cover them with ornaments, makes his songs less instantly impressive, less powerful than they might otherwise be. But the key is that the tunes stay with you, and that appears to be – and should be – quite enough.

Ex-lovers, on next, are a quite different proposition. Musically their sound is cut from a similar cloth – more hints of melodic US indie, as well as hints of C86, shoegaze and Postcard pop – but they go to lengths to create a busy, rich musical palette, most notably in their drummer’s varied, precise contribution and their lead guitarist’s ability to ring out gorgeous, descending guitar lines in the manner of a young Peter Buck. They’re at their best when they crank up the volume a bit and let go, and their worst when they’re too studious and considered. But I thought they were very promising indeed.

By the time Emmy took to the stage, myself and Lyndsey have allowed ourselves to get a bit over-excited, and an earlier conversation about how much we wanted to be friends with Emmy soon gives way to darker flights of fancy, and before long we are planning a fairly detailed sequence of events, which involve slinging Emmy into the boot of a car, and we are only brought to our senses by the fact that it suddenly becomes apparent that her family are sat right in front of us, doubtless listening in horror. Feeling a bit crazed, we accept that locking Emmy in the attic might not be the be best idea in the world, and sit in embarrassed silence waiting for her to play.

So, relieving us of our imaginations, she takes to the stage and opens with a gorgeous take on ‘We Almost Had A Baby’, which is one of her most tuneful songs and a marvellous dissection of a broken relationship, and the thought that it might have endured had a child been conceived (“and I will think of you now that we are apart / I put my hand across my gut / I plan to feed it with a heart “). So begins a sequence of songs which examine heartbreak, loss and the fall from innocence. ‘M.I.A’s depiction of a car-crash is enormously powerful, where Emmy notes that “you and me are still but the scenery moves / well why would it stop, just ‘cos suddenly / there’s one where there used to be two”, and the dismissal of religion in ‘Easter Parade’ is clear-sighted and pointed (“And underneath your pastures green / there’s earth and there’s ash, and there’s bone / and there are things that disappear / into it and then they are gone”). The other side of her fiercely intelligent style, however, is that she’s funny, too – whether chatting easily between songs about her chances of winning the X Factor or singing, in ‘The Hypnotist’s Son’, “Every time that I think of you / I have to go to the toilet / can’t tell if this is love / or a stomach disorder.”

Musically, her band are spot-on. Other fans appear to be uneasy with the way that her songs are arranged on her album (First Love, out today), preferring her songs when her voice is accompanied only by her quiet guitar picking; but I think the full-band arrangements are both dazzlingly pretty and textbook exercises in restraint. At all times her songs remain the centrepiece, her voice clear and recognisable. My favourite song of the night is the gorgeous ‘Short Country Song’, which shows off Emmy’s talents so clearly. The song paints in delicate strokes the minutiae of a relationship, and closes with one of Emmy’s most beautiful, plaintive verses – one that isn’t, for once, clever, or complex, or wry – but simply heartfelt; the wonderful quality that Emmy, despite all this talk of lyrical skill, possesses in the greatest abundance.

And you say “Somewhere in my body
is a hole without an end”
And I say “Come and let me see it.
It is something I can mend.”
And you say “Somewhere in my body
is a hole without an end”
And I say “Come and let me see it.
I can fill it up again.”

This is a bit late, but I’ve not been to many gigs lately so feel I should blog about the ones I do go to; consequently here’s a brief review of a recent outing, albeit one which is probably fuzzy round the edges as a consequence of disintegrating memories…

Jay Reatard has garnered a lot of column inches this year and some pretty decent reviews off the back of his recent singles collection for Matador. Without knowing an awful lot about him, Ant and I headed down to the Engine Rooms in Brighton a couple of weeks ago to watch him play with a couple of British bands, local boys The Pheromoans and Nottingham’s Lovvers.

On first, The Pheromoans were terrific. Peddling an artless, lackadaisical and nonchalant take on the Swell Maps / Fall / Pavement sound, their sound was obviously familiar, but none the worse for it; short, daft songs riding four note basslines and enlivened by a droll singer and a guitarist fluffing occasionally melodic surf-riffs. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that they are self-conscious art students playing badly on purpose (in which case I withdraw my affection), but I’m happy to play along with the idea that they’re stoned chancers, short on ambition and fired with a love for simplicity and fuzz. So I thought they were grand.

Lovvers, on the contrary, were incredibly tight, focused and forceful. Their sound was abrasive, energetic, full – and yet they were painfully awful; a sequence of yawnsome redundant cliches and dead-eyed ambition. Only when their macho, show-offy punk slowed down for some churning, slower numbers did they lift themselves out of the mire, but by that time I’d retreated to the back of the room. Bewilderingly, the crowd responded enthusiastically, so perhaps it’s just me that can’t bear their masculine, heartless hardcore. Ant was more enthusiastic, but not much.

Wondering if the problem is just that I like quiet music, I headed back towards the front for Jay Reatard, who quickly dispelled that notion by playing a set of fiercely enjoyable, high-octane punk rock, fusing the volume of The Melvins with the hooks of a young Evan Dando. Barely pausing between (cracking) songs, his performance is all about speed and energy, excitement and power. All were much in evidence as Reatard provoked a sea of grins and a wave of slightly apologetic headbanging from a reserved audience, perhaps mindful of Jay’s unpredictability. And the good news is that, for all that my record collection is getting folkier and folkier, I still like a bit of furious punk. As long as it has pop choruses.

Just saw Steve Malkmus at the Komedia. Wow.

Amazing gig, as expected. His playing is electrifying, and his band terrific; Janet Weiss drums about as well as Steve plays guitar, and the interplay between them was a joy. The music was astounding, obviously – ridiculously complex and ever changing, a big, sprawling combination of stoner rock, prog, indie-pop and English psychedelia. He played some super, silly new stuff, some stone-cold classics, and about 8,000 guitar solos. Then trashed his guitar. My ears are ringing. Yes.

Since I saw them at the Freebutt supporting Scout Niblett a month or so ago, I’ve been obsessing over the five songs I own by the marvellous Peggy Sue and The Pirates, but I felt slightly worried before they took to the stage at the Komedia, recalling other times a band blew me away on the first encounter and then failed to make good on those tentative promises. At the Freebutt the band – Rosa and Katy – were engagingly messy, extremely charming and incredibly impressive, their slight, romantic songs soaring courtesy of some stunning harmonizing. Their songs, occasionally acapella but generally accompanied by acoustic guitar and an assortment of toy instruments, seemed to marry a disregard for convention with an innate appreciation of pop, and their unforced style and vocal gymnastics put a new spin on the unmannered anti-folk groups they’ve been lumped in with. After that show I bought a CD from Katy and she apologised again for their shambolic set. I told her that all my favourite bands are a shambles, which is pretty much true. But I did wonder if they’d turn in a more polished performance the next time round.

And, at the Komedia, they sort of do, although they’re every bit as likeable and unpredictable. And – to my relief – they’re still comfortably my favourite band at the moment (with the possible exception of The Wave Pictures), their songs just as good as I remembered, their voices just as pretty. They play eight or nine short songs and, buoyed by the first appearance of a new, snake-hipped drummer, a couple which, in their own words, stray into epic territory: in other words they last three of four minutes, rather than two or three.

Of the songs, its hard to pick out a favourite, especially when I hardly know any names, but I love ‘New Song’, which is heartbreaking and terribly graceful, and one song built on a refrain of “love will save the day, love will save the day, love will save the day” is met with a pay off which ties me up in knots – Katy’s baleful, half spoken reply; “if love will only stay”. On ‘Phone Song’ they pull off the same trick, managing to give simple lyrics emphasis and impact. “I hate it when the phone rings and it’s not you” is economical and unflowery, but Peggy Sue also make it seem true, which is a nice trick to pull off. Tonight’s closer – ‘Escargot’, if I heard right – is perhaps the evening’s most sumptuous moment, where Katy’s breathy, staggering voice is underlined, or countered, by Rosa’s tilting melodica riff. The pause, the micro-second gap where the latter switches her attention from her instrument to the microphone provokes a in me a shiver and gasp, one of those hair-standing-on-skin moments that make pop music so exciting.

When they finish I turn to my friends and I have that feeling I always have when I encounter a new favourite band; a kind of desperation for my friends to love them too. And I’m pleased that they do, and we argue about whether we like Rosa or Katy best (it comes out two-two), and how great and how pretty they are, and how much fun their set was. When they walk past I kind of shout ‘that was great’ in Rosa’s direction, and she smiles as if they’re still a bit surprised that people like them, but they must be getting used to it. I drink another beer and watch people sitting down by the stage, ready for Diane Cluck – who is headlining – and shout to Dan that they’re all ‘fucking hippies’ – just at the moment that Rosa walks by again, and this time she turns and looks at me, surprised, as if I tried to accost her, and I feel embarrassed and stare at my shoes.

The reason I like Peggy Sue so much, I think, is because they make me feel inspired; when I watch them I want to learn new instruments, write songs, draw pictures, make friends, wear new clothes; be generally intuitive, unhurried, open to possibilities, keen. That must be because all those characteristics, all those urges, are captured in their group, and in their songs. And that, in turn, must be why I love them so much.

I should have known better than to be fooled by the fact that Lou Barlow, whose reformed Sebadoh played a great set at Brighton’s Concorde 2 last night, arrived on stage with an acoustic guitar – I’d forgotten that he plays with so much distortion it scarcely matters what instrument he’s playing. The acoustic guitar, then, was monstrously loud and Sebadoh were Sebadoh – sloppy, uneven, occasionally rubbish and mostly utterly brilliant.

The lastest band to climb upon the reunion bandwagon (Lou’s got form here, of course – the reignited Dinosaur Jr played an amazing set at the same venue last year), Sebadoh look an awful lot more content in each-other’s company now than they did fifteen years ago. The spirit of the group has always been profoundly democratic, but they’ve always been pissy and intense onstage, so it’s odd finding them in a good mood. So much so that you wish Lou would politely remind Eric Gaffney who we’re really here to see, and pile him back behind the drum kit. Over the course of the set Eric and Jason take turns behind the drums, ensuring that all three musicians get a chance to sing their own tunes, but the consequence is that we get far more of Gaffney’s melodic but uninspiring rock than we do Lowenstein’s furious and brilliant punk. Barlow remains the main draw, of course, and songs like ‘It’s So Hard to Fall In Love’ and ‘Brand New Love’ still sound incredible, although I’m a bit disappointed to find the band drawing on so much material from their weaker later albums; although in fairness the band – and particularly Jason – make a blistering racket throughout.

Qualifications dispensed with, then, the essence of Sebadoh is thrillingly intact – Barlow’s lovely voice, ear for discordant but beautiful sounds and habit of strumming his bass are as evident as ever and the set is punctuated by extraordinary bursts of noise. I’m particularly taken with Jason’s songs, which sound astonishing. Eric’s drumming, meanwhile, remains superb, and the band clatter through over 30 songs with nary a pause for breath , although they’re momentarily dumbfounded when a few of us down the front spot that Eric is drinking real ale on stage, and start shouting ‘Bombardier’ at him. “Do we have a song called Bombardier?”, Lou asks. “We’ll play it if we do”.

Instead, they play a blistering, joyful take on ‘Freed Pig’ and finish with an even better take on the hilarious, magnificent ‘Gimme Indie Rock’, which gets a predictable roar of approval when Lou sings “Getting loose with the Pussy Galore / Cracking jokes like a Thurston Moore / Peddle hopping like a Dinosaur…”. Best of all, the sense remains – just as it should – that anything might happen – Sebadoh still sound crooked (crooked rain); stoned, furious, romantic and thoroughly unpractised.

Having them back is much more than an exercise in nostalgia; they remain one of the best bands ever. I hope they never get it together.