The Bohicas

Back to the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds we go. It wasn’t packed on a Sunday night but I was the holder of ticket 1A. I got my ticket months ago because I know The Bohicas are going to be big.

Support came from the uniquely named Peace & Love Barbershop Muhammad Ali. They are apparently named after a barber shop near Moss side in Manchester.  The band features a bassist with a ginormous afro and a Guitarist/singer wearing a Lou Reed t shirt.

Oh no…another band that are more style than substance was my first thought. However with some cool vocal effects you wouldn’t have guessed it was their fourth ever show.

The keyboardist may be a virtuoso for all we know but she plays about two notes per song but that works with their style of music.

At the start they were asking the ‘stubborn Yorkshire folk’ to come closer to the stage to stand up and dance. At the start only the singer’s girlfriend was interested. By the end of the set a lot more people were paying attention.

Now to The Bohicas. According to the urban dictionary the band name is an acronym of bend over here it comes again. If that is the case then you should let your orifices enjoy the immediacy of some great guitar songs.

Picture courtesy of Kirstie Wright.

I first discovered them through the radio station XFM’s Great X-pectations website list at the start of  2014. The other new picks included bands that have massive breakthroughs like Royal Blood and Jungle.  I realised they had formed from the ashes of Swanton Bombs. A band I had considered seeing at Live at Leeds back in 2010 but decided against it. The Singer/Guitarist Dom McGuinness is also the brother of solo artist Eugene McGuinness.  Five years of gigging shows with Guitarist Dominic wearing the type of hat only a rockstar can pull off.

They leave the best until last with the double whammy of ‘XXX’ and ‘Swarm’ at the end of the set. The latter even managing to have a Guitar riff that manages to resemble a swarm of bees but in a good way. Other songs like To Die For’ are worth checking out and ‘Where You At’ has recently been receiving airplay on Radio 1.

Their debut album ‘The Making Of’ is released on Friday 21st August through Domino Recording Company.

Menace Beach/ Seize the Chair

How much would you think it would cost for the opportunity to watch 5 good local bands in one of the best music venues in Yorkshire?

£2.20 with my e-ticket booked in advance. Tickets were still only £4 on the door. My pint cost more than that. As did my bus home. It was a bargain and it showed with the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds being nearly packed on a freezing Sunday night.

Firstly I must apologise to the first band Grawlix as I missed their set completely. Judging by seeing the attendance steadily grow I dare say I wasn’t the only one. From listening to them online it also shows that the bands got steadily heavier throughout the night.

The next band Bruising seemed a bit flat. I could not hear a word the female singer/guitarist was singing. The vocals were meant to be soft but the balance was not right. The main problem seemed to be the fact that the other guitarist would ask the sound guy to make him louder as well as asking for more bass.

Middle of the bill were Colours of Spring. This was a band with potential and had a dash of the Cribs in their sound and the frontman’s mannerisms. They are also clearly influenced by bands like My Bloody Valentine.

Seize the Chair

 

The most impressive band were Seize the Chair. Fresh from the experience of supporting Drenge at the same venue a couple of weeks previously. They included touring member of Menace Beach Nick Chantler. In Menace Beach he is in additional guitarist. However, it is here he really came to the fore. With time, Seize the Chair could be mentioned in the same breath as bands like Drenge and Royal Blood. They have a rocky sound but would not be alienating to a more mainstream audience. There was also a bit of repetitive synth-playing that gave a new dimension to a bill full of guitars. The highlight was definitely ‘I Just Want To Sleep’ which you can listen to below. Fast, frenetic and full of catchy riffs. Expect to hear more about this Sheffield band in 2015.

 

 

Menace Beach

The headliners were Menace Beach. There has been a lot of hype due to being affiliated with Matt “MJ” Johnson of Hookworms, Rob Lee of Pulled Apart by Horses and Nestor Matthews of Sky Larkin. There has also been favourable reviews from NME and BBC 6music of their debut album ‘Ratworld’. This was a gig celebrating the release. There was very little gap between each song in their quick set. There is a mix of 90’s Indie styles and the band manage to sound fuzzy and dreamy at the same time. Grunge & shoegaze are two buzzwords of the 90’s that will inevitably be mentioned. This doesn’t really do them justice and songs like ‘Tastes Like Medicine’ and ‘Tennis Court’ stand out in their own right. However, unlike some of their influences the music has an upbeat and positive side. It will be interesting to be how their sound develops.

 

 

LA Priest – Oino

Calling all Late of the Pier fans. Go to http://earth-window.org for a very cool and innovative way of revealing a new song from frontman Sam Dust. It appears his new project is called Earth-Window-O. This was found after being asked to say ‘Hi’ to an email address from Late of the Pier’s now barely used Facebook page. A reply was received almost instantly with a crudely drawn animation.  Clicking this brings you to a web page filled with more strange drawings and soundscapes. Your aim is to click through several trippy screens while listening to the equally weird sounds. Eventually you are directed to a private Soundcloud link of a song called LA Priest. It is only just over two minutes long but is still full of potential. It is quite chilled out but still sounds inventive and different. If you want to skip the fun part of discovering the song then please try the link below but it may not work.

Earth-Window-O

Late of the Pier were one of the most underrated bands of the last decade. Fans are still hoping for a reunion after only one amazing album called Fantasy Black Channel released back in 2008. It is hard to believe that was 6 years ago. After revealing stand-alone single ‘Best in Class‘ in 2010 they seemly disappeared. Their synth-lead pop is greatly missed and songs like ‘Space and the Woods’ still sound great.

*UPDATE* It turns out the band is called La Priest and the song is called Oino. They have signed with Domino and you can listen to the full length song on soundcloud now.

Splashh

It’s been a while but I managed to get to another gig this week. I got two tickets for free but not because of my high standing in the music journalism world but thanks to a little competition on the Facebook page of the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds.

I saw headliners Splashh open for Spector nearly exactly a year ago and they were raw, shaky and far too keen to emphasise their stoner coolness. This was typified by how one of them was struggling to play a couple of notes on the keyboard to accompany their fuzzy guitar tones. After seeing the other support band Swim Deep at the same venue earlier this year I felt obliged to see if Splashh had also made the step up.

It was a more composed performance but it still felt something was missing. Most of the crowd just stood still, politely nodding their head and stroking their newly formed beard. Songs like ‘All I Wanna Do’ clearly show they have potential. On a couple of the tunes, they elongated them to try and prove their psychedelic credentials but in reality it just made the set drag on a bit. With songs titles like ‘Sun Kissed Bliss’ and ‘Vacation’ it is not surprising to learn that the band consists of members from New Zealand and Australia as well as a Brit. When frontman Sasha Carlson sings ‘I wanna go where nobody knows’ on the latter, there is a bit of menace there and this was a feature throughout. The vocals are a bit gravelly but this doesn’t mean it should be compared to a certain frontman from Manchester called Liam. It is clear that this band gets their influences from a number of different places. The set is catchy but still feels a little dirty which in rock bands is not necessarily a bad thing.

Unfortunately this cannot be said for support band Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs. I had read about them, seen their name mentioned in NME so was full of expectation. What appeared was a band more bothered about their seventies haircuts, ultra skinny jeans and black turtlenecks. The sound was poor but not as bad as their crowd banter ‘Hi….erm yeah that’s about it’. The crowd was quite small as the gig was on a Monday night but it was largely full of students. Their lack of enthusiasm and general mediocrity was disappointing from a band signed to a trendy record label like Heavenly Recordings.

Kaiser Chiefs New Drummer

Last weekend was very busy for me as the night before Delphic me and my girlfriend went to the NME Awards Tour at the O2 Academy in Leeds. We had won a Spotify competition to win tickets to see Birmingham band Peace, the over-hyped Palma Violets, Miles Kane and headliners Django Django. It was a good gig but I have never seen so many people leave during a headliners set with a portion of the crowd obviously just coming to see Miles Kane. His new songs did sound promising but a few sound like he is trying to sound like Kasabian, one of the bands he is has recently supported. Palma Violets were disappointing after reading about how they are supposedly the next big thing. Peace were OK and the potential is clearly there and are part of a group of new bands coming out of Birmingham. The next gig we are going to are Peace’s good friends Swim Deep at the Brudenell Social Club which is another great little venue in Leeds. We saw them support Spector a few months ago and they are another band destined for bigger things in 2013.

Anyway, previous NME tours have had some amazing line ups. One that sticks out is the 2005 line-up which featured Kaiser Chiefs, Bloc Party, The Futureheads and The Killers! Yes you read that right and it seems crazy to see Kaiser Chiefs were opening that tour but the opening slot is coveted in music with Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, Franz Ferdinand and The Vaccines all having that role throughout the years.

Eight years later, the Kaiser Chiefs drummer and songwriter Nick Hodgson announced he was leaving the band which was widely reported in the media. However the announcement of his replacement has been rather more muted and I can only find the tiniest of articles on the Yorkshire Evening Post website as the Kaisers are famously from Leeds. When I saw who it was on  the band’s Facebook page, I knew I had to write a blog post about it even if it is a bit late!

Club Smith playing outside Jumbo, Leeds

For their upcoming tour, Kaiser Chiefs have recruited Vijay Mistry as their new drummer. The name might not mean anything but he was the drummer in Club Smith, another Yorkshire band. They have supported Kaiser Chiefs in the past so the link is there but I had the pleasure of seeing Club Smith play live in unusual circumstances. They were one of the bands playing at a student event in St. John’s shopping centre in Leeds in October 2012 along with This Many Boyfriends and Galaxians. They played outside the great Jumbo Records shop but once the students got their freebies they left. This only left a few people including myself to witness the bands play which was a great shame. I had researched the bands and was impressed enough to buy the This Many Boyfriends album (before the official release date) as well as the Club Smith album Appetite for Chivalry. The album has some great artwork and I approached Vijay to get the album signed. He was so down to earth and seemed surprised that I wanted them to sign it. The ironic thing is that if that album was released around 2004/2005 the band would surely be getting a lot more attention with songs like the stomping ‘Lament’. I would like to congratulate Vijay and hope the Kaiser’s fans give him a chance to blend him and not automatically think it isn’t the same without Nick who also sang lead vocals on songs like Man on Mars. It is quite a jump and in a few months Vijay Mistry has gone from playing an empty shopping centre to playing around the world and also in the newly-built Leeds Arena in September 2013!

Delphic

I went to see this great band play live at the Cockpit in Leeds on 10th February. I first had the pleasure of seeing them live at the trendy Nation of Shopkeepers bar where for French record label Kitsune they performed a mini tour in October 2009. The band supporting that night were a little known Northern Irish band called Two Door Cinema Club who as I think everybody knows have since become a massive deal. Ironically that night TDCC made fun of Delphic’s lighting show by having a tiny disco ball and I daren’t think how sophisticated their lighting show is now!

Delphic have a habit of having great support bands and since TDCC have had bands such as Everything Everything who recently scored a top 10 album with their second offering Arc. Another worthy examples are Mirrors whose synth-pop deserves a much bigger audience. With this in mind I was quite looking forward to finding out who was supporting Delphic only to find out that the only other act was a DJ who played unrecognisable dance tracks. When a re-edit of Delphic’s Olympic song Good Life was played it seemed to be the signal that the band would soon take to the stage. We managed to stand on a little step near the fire exit which acted like a little podium for an elevated and better view of the stage. Annoyingly, the photographers at the front quickly realised this and tried to squeeze on taking photos behind our heads for a while.

Delphic at the Cockpit

Their live set was mesmerising with hardly any gaps in between songs creating a dancey feel and the odd muttering from James thanking the crowd for coming out on a Sunday night. The new songs off recently released second album Collections sounded great. The album has been harshly criticised by critics for trying to  dip into too many genres and become trailblazers rather than following the musical trend. The album is definitely a grower and starting off with recent single Baiya, the band seamlessly switched back and forth from songs featured on their debut Acolyte, which I reviewed for Music-News.com. Memeo is surely a contender for next single thanks to it being as catchy as  older songs like Halcyon or Doubt. One of the gig highlights has to be the crowd singing ‘Let’s do something real’ from This Momentary.

Annita with James and Rick after the gig.

After the gig, James and Rick took the time to have a chat with me and my girlfriend and have their photo took as well as signing the new album which capped off a brilliant night. I managed to mention this blog to them and my girlfriend is now their official Twitter fwiend and proud owner of a Delphic t-shirt.

Born Gold

I went to a free gig at the brilliant Brudenell Social Club in Leeds the other week. The headline act were from Canada. Born Gold are for fans of Grimes and Purity Ring playing experimental electro pop. The live set featured a jacket which the singer put on and when he moved his arms about made a sound. When it worked it looked cool but it just ended up being a gimmick. He was dancing manically and his vocals seemed to be drowned out by the synths and the drum pads which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were so many samplers etc it was hard to work out what was actually being played live although there were a few mistakes thrown in for good measure. It is certainly something different and Born Gold are sure to get a decent following of fans. He thanked the crowd for coming out as he understood that coming out in the snow was more difficult in the UK as it is in Canada! Click on the link above for a free album of music if you so choose.

They were supported by local band Galaxians who are an instrumental duo featuring live drums and analogue synths. The songs are repetitive but really that is a compliment to their musical skills as it sounds like a computer. It is rather apt that their name is from an 80s video game as the music would not be out of place in a video game of some sort.

Acollective

#13 Acollective 

Israel is the next destination in this musical adventure. In an attempt to melt brains, please try and decipher this statement from the band themselves describing their music.

“Acollective is the resonating echoes of quacking ducks in a sealed room, a dual-headed machine of construction-yard-nihilism consuming everything in its path, from banged-up Folk to burned-down Middle-Eastern-Funk, breaking hips and shaking hearts along the way.”

Can you make any sense of that? To anyone concerned, their music does not sound anything like ducks or any other kind of animal for that matter. Instead there is a hypnotic blend of genres with a bluesy twang that make this seven-piece from Tel Aviv a very exciting prospect indeed.

Adding instruments like a saxophone, harmonica or even glass bottle percussion could be a warning that the band are trying too hard to create an authentic sound. Fortunately, the songs on album ‘Onwards’ are very well-crafted and there doesn’t seem to be a single note out of place.

Before starting this blog there was an in-built kind of snobbery regarding music quality. It was presuming that music from other countries might not be at the same standard if they aren’t well known for musical exports. It is bands like Acollective that have changed that view. It isn’t really an epiphany as the possibility has always been there. It really is just the case of finding these hidden treasures. The expectation was that it would be a bit rough around the edges due to the fast-paced nature of songs like ‘Simon Says’. The below live video shows how this isn’t the case and shows how their live show quickly gathered a reputation in Tel Aviv. Lyrics like ‘Better do what Simon says ’cause Simon says that Simon says you need an effort from me’ are devilishly simple but the rest of the song shows the band’s quirkiness and eccentricity.

The album features a number of slower-paced songs as well like ‘Working Title’ but the change of tempo does not dampen the enthusiasm. It shows a band brimming with ideas and who aren’t scared of sharing them. There isn’t one defined style and having terms like ‘folk/blues hybrid’ being thrown at them might seem daunting. Taking all this on board, it is easy to see why they have already toured the UK and France supporting artists like Okkervil River and Jose Gonzalez.

<~~~~~~~~ Congo Bongo

Kinshasa One Two

#12 DRC Music

Damon Albarn released yet another album in October last year but it might have passed people by. As well all the rumours of hiatuses and a possible new album from Blur, he is well-known as one of the busiest men in music. Blur are currently preparing for a massive summer concert celebrating the closing of the Olympics in Hyde Park with The Specials and New Order. Then there is his work with animator Jamie Hewlett with Gorillaz and The Good,Bad & The Queen. One of his latest side-projects Rocket Juice & The Moon featuring Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers and legendary afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, only released their debut album in March.

DRC Music isn’t Damon’s first foray into African music. He produced parts of Amadou & Miriam’s fifth album ‘Welcome to Mali’ in 2008. He had also previously released an album called ‘Mali Music’ in 2002 which featured local musicians like Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabete. It was made during a trip to support the charity Oxfam in 2000.

The album was produced in five days with a collective producers chosen by Damon Albarn. This included people like T-E-E-D (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs), Dan The Automator, Richard Russell and Kwes. They worked with over 50 contemporary Congolese musicians including Jupiter and the Okwess International, Bokatola System and Nelly Liyemge. Damon Albarn himself only sings on one song of the album ‘Hallo’. The album ‘Kinshasa One Two’ is very creative and eclectic as what would be expected when involving so many different cutting-edge music producers.

If you are going to buy one world music album this year, maybe buy this one as all the proceeds will benefit Oxfam’s work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is suffering a humanitarian crisis after years of conflict and civil war.

Some examples of African music seems rather more forced. To celebrate the transition to fair trade cocoa from Ghana in 2009, Chocolate giant Cadbury’s decided to give away some music. The band play cover songs of Girls Aloud, Dead or Alive and Elbow under the moniker ‘The Big Ghana Band’. The covers are strange to say the least and besides the anthemic Elbow track ‘One Day Like This’ seem weird choices to add some African flair.

A ‘proper’ single was actually released on Glass and a Half Full records called ‘Zingolo’. It was made by Tinny, one of Ghana’s biggest music stars. It was produced by Paul Epworth who has worked with everyone from Adele to Friendly Fires. Like the DRC music project, all the proceeds from the single went to the Care charity which works with the cocoa communities in Ghana.

It was meant to be a fun and enjoyable advert but there was some controversy surrounding the accompanying advertising campaign in 2009. It was meant to celebrates all things Ghana, its people, its rappers, its dancers, its cultural figures and, of course, its cocoa beans. Instead, Cadbury found themselves accused of racial stereotyping in the advert featuring a giant tribal mask. This is a perfect warning for companies wanting to try anything similar but as shown by projects like DRC music, it can be done well if the motives are right.

<~~~~~~~~ Libyan Rappers     Israeli Blues ~~~~~~~>

Libyan Rappers

#11 FB-17 

FB-17 stands for February 17th. This was the day that the Libyan Revolution began in Benghazi. It is a powerful statement from this group of Libyan rappers who are part of a new breed thanks to the end of Gaddafi’s reign of terror. A past blog post featured a cartoon containing Gaddafi as a Where’s Wally type character but this is the reality. Even though he has long since been captured and killed, the hardship for the people of Libya still continues.

Their album ‘No More Lies‘ (click on the link for audio) became a hit with rebel forces while the fighting was still going on. The title song features lyrics that if coming from another country might feel like a cliche. Coming from war-torn Libya, lines really do have meaning for example ‘No more silence, no more fear, no more lies, no more tears, no more violence, no more screams.’

There have even been examples of them using the sound of missiles falling close by as beats in songs. One of the members was chased by secret police for weeks after showing lyrics to someone at a Tripoli recording studio. Just from that, he had to change his name and stay in Misrata for two months in the hope of avoiding capture.

The music might be simplistic but the message is a very important one. Maybe the Kanyes and Jay-Z’s of this world should sit down and listen to this kind of music for some real inspiration.

<~~~~~~~ Arabic Rock         African Charity ~~~~~~~>