Wilco: Live Review

WILCO
Sydney Opera House
Tuesday April 2

“We’re gonna keep the chit-chat to a minimum,” explained Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, “Because we don’t have the fucking time.” Indeed. An Evening With Wilco – or rather just the 90 minutes we were afforded – hardly seemed like long enough in the company of such thrilling musicians.

Within the first 20 minutes the six-piece band showed us both ends of their lengthy spectrum. Wistful country ballad ‘One Sunday Morning’ segued into the hot-as-hell four-guitar metal onslaught of ‘Art Of Almost’, via ‘Poor People’, which started as country ballad and ended as a feast of industrial noise – all thrashing drum pads and space-age effects. It wouldn’t have been out of place at Soundwave, but it felt just right in the Opera House’s Concert Hall, thank you very much. It was a breathtaking way to begin.

From then on we were treated to many styles in between including the ‘60s psychedelia of ‘I Might’ and the blues-rock of ‘At Least That’s What You Said’. There was no style the band hadn’t mastered. If Wilco’s back catalogue is mostly outstanding, the way they played their songs live was better.

Tweedy is a beguiling frontman even though he never seemed to welcome the attention. Scruffy in a navy blazer and light jeans, his only aim was to please through the music. His voice could easily go unnoticed given the multitudinous layers of sound that frame it, but it had a comforting quality to it, even when he sang falsetto on ‘Whole Love’. He asked with genuine concern whether Wilco’s sound was filling the hall. It could’ve filled three of them.

But it was the man stood next to Tweedy, guitarist Nels Cline, who proved most captivating. Midway through a stirring rendition of ‘Impossible Germany’ Tweedy took a backwards step and Cline launched into a goosebump-inducing solo. He looked like he was falling into a trance-like state as he squeezed every last drop of tenderness out of his six strings. Complete strangers in the audience turned to each other and acknowledged the wonder of their mutual experience. Epic doesn’t describe it.

Article published in The Brag, 8th April 2013
Photo by Guus Krol

Cold War Kids: Interview

“There’s a weird struggle, a weird conflict: how can we do something that’s really pure for us at this moment in time when we really want to break through and have a bigger audience?” This, according to lead singer Nathan Willett, is the question Californian band Cold War Kids posited when making their recently released fourth album, Dear Miss Lonelyhearts. It continues the expansion of the band’s style from the “blues-based spastic minimalism” of early singles ‘We Used To Vacation’ and ‘Hang Me Up To Dry’ which announced CWK as serious challengers to The White Stripes’ blues-rock throne in 2006.

When he chatted to THE BRAG, Willett and his band had just returned home to Los Angeles from a hectic SXSW Festival where they played six shows in four days. “[The material] has been really well received,” he says. “We’ve [also] been playing a bunch of shows closer to home in smaller venues… just working out how to play the songs live.” You can understand why that might be a challenge – certain tracks have been completely overhauled in post-production.

“We’ve been listening to a little Depeche Mode, a little New Order. Bands that are still very much bands but use those electronic elements,” says Willett. A change of personnel was crucial to the new approach. Out went guitarist Jonnie Russell (“He wanted to pursue some other stuff… and we’d run our course. Creatively and with the work we were doing it was time do go our separate ways,” explains Willett) and in came Dann Gallucci, formerly of The Murder City Devils and Modest Mouse. He brought with him plenty of new ideas and even volunteered himself to produce the entire project.

Willett describes how Gallucci changed the band’s attitude to experimentation: “When you have a new member you gain somebody in the room to say, ‘What if we used this keyboard?’ and we might look at each other and say, ‘Well that’s just not something we do’. When you allow that person the space to question why… If it sounds good and everybody likes it, why not do it? We’re not beholden to being this stripped-down minimal bluesy band.

“Once we recorded a song we did take more time with it, particularly a song like ‘Loner Phase’: we recorded it with just bass, piano and drums and it ended up becoming a much more electronic production.” Although he’s pleased with the outcome, Willett hints that the writing and production process was not all plain sailing: “We’d all say what we liked and didn’t like. There is tension in the process of doing that and I think it’s good to make yourself uncomfortable and ask yourself why you’re feeling uncomfortable. There was definitely some of that internally.”

The album’s title is taken from a 1933 book by Nathanael West about an advice columnist who realises he cannot truly help his readers unless he first examines himself. So did Cold War Kids have to re-examine themselves after nearly a decade in the business? “Yeah, I think there’s a certain amount of that,” admits Willett. “[Four records in] you think about why you’re doing what you’re doing. In a way you’re not in a place where you’re just writing songs for yourself, obviously. You’re in a routine, you know the game. So it’s impossible to be totally private. But at the same time we’re not just writing songs that we hope the people will like. So we’re in the space between… In some ways [in the past] we’ve probably catered to ourselves too much and not enough to fans.”

Willett no longer feels the need to use characters to disguise autobiographical stories in his songs, as he did most notably on first album ‘Robbers And Cowards’, but it seems certain topics of discussion still make him uncomfortable. On spirituality and whether he now feels freer to discuss God and religion, Willett is hesitant as he carefully considers his response: “Let me see. I don’t know how much that has changed. You know, the songs, even when they’re character driven or more abstract, always contain a struggle for meaning and purpose. As far as spirituality is concerned there’s always a seeking there that is on all the records.”

Article published in The Brag, 8th April 2013
Photo by Maryanne Ventrice

Cold War Kids – Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: Album Review

COLD WAR KIDS
Dear Miss Lonelyhearts
Downtown
2.5/5

Cold War Kids release album number four at an interesting point in the lifecycle of the band. Dear Miss Lonelyhearts is a transition record; the band can’t quite decide what it is and the album suffers as a result.

Guitarist Jonnie Russell has been replaced by former Modest Mouse player Dann Gallucci, who also produced the album, bringing with him new ideas and a penchant for electronic manipulation. To quote vocalist Nathan Willet, the rest of the band were happy to run with these ideas to escape further from the “blues-based spastic minimalism” of the first two albums. Yet the band isn’t yet ready to rip up the previously successful CWK template entirely. The honky-tonk heavy single and first track ‘Miracle Mile’ shows as much and sounds great.

In conversation with THE BRAG Willet admitted that he had, for the first time, taken vocal lessons in preparation for Dear Miss Lonelyhearts and his curious voice is certainly one of the best things about it, proving most effective when it is left to shine. So it is, backed by a gospel choir, on slow blues number ‘Tuxedos’ which, in Willet’s own opinion features some of his best vocal work to date. If only CWK stuck to what they know, because the synth percussion on the otherwise enjoyable ‘Lost That Easy’ is jarring. On other tracks to heavily feature space-age sound effects, they sound like they’re (unsuccessfully) shooting for The Killers’ stadia audience (‘Loner Phase’) or, worse still, just plain lost, as with the cosmic jazz of ‘Fear And Trembling’.

The highlights are strong but a lack of cohesiveness means that Dear Miss Lonelyhearts mainly misfires. If it ain’t broke…

Article published in The Brag, 8th April 2013
Photo by Lee Gwyn

Wilco – Sydney Opera House: setlist

Wilco were incredible at the Opera House last night. You can read my review in The Brag on Monday and it will be posted here too. But until then, enjoy this playlist of their set.

Sinden: Interview

No stranger to Australian shores, Sinden is back and this time he’s brought a friend. The Essex-born, LA-based DJ/Producer behind that ‘Beeper’ song, is doing a series of co-headline shows with the oh-so-hot Brenmar. Together they will be showcasing the “grey area sounds” of Sinden’s own Grizzly label.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” said Sinden, speaking before doors opened to the first of two Sydney shows, at the King Street Hotel last Saturday. “The London clubbers are a little bit too-cool-for-school but the Aussies just go for it.” Sinden and Brenmar are back in town, playing at Chinese Laundry, this coming Saturday, while fans will also be able to get their paws on an accompanying compilation of Grizzly recordings entitled Pull Up: A Grizzly Retrospective.

Graeme Sinden feasted on a diet of home-grown underground music and US imports not uncommon to an adolescent growing up in the outskirts of London. “I was too young to go to UK garage raves so I was going to underage parties,” he remembers. “I heard a lot of stuff in the record stores. A lot of proto-drum and bass and jungle really influenced me. And as a kid I was crazy about rap music. I loved the Native Tongues crew (Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul) and Public Enemy as well”.

In the mid-2000s, when handing out flyers for a club night, Sinden met Jesse Rose and eventually fell in with a group of fellow producers and DJs who favoured a harder, dirtier brand of house and techno, among them Dave Taylor (aka Switch/Solid Groove) and Joshua Harvey (aka Hervé/The Count of Monte Cristal). Together, they started making “house music with rude basslines”.

An accidental dancefloor hit, ‘Beeper’, a fidgety, squelchy monster of a collaboration with The Count, launched Sinden’s profile into the stratosphere. “We had no idea at all that it was going to blow up as big as it did. It was originally a B-side. You couldn’t get a more accidental smash.” It found an influential fan in Annie Mac, a presenter on BBC Radio 1. She played ‘Beeper’ to death before a vocal by US rapper Kid Sister was added and the track given a proper release on Domino. However, despite the single’s success, owing to the large sample borrowed from a record by Fam-Lay featuring Pharrell it was no money-spinner, at least not for Sinden himself. “We really got rapped for the publishing. But it definitely did us good in other ways and Fam-Lay did well out of it,” he says.

In 2008, Sinden launched a record label. “I started Grizzly as an outlet for my stuff and also new artists kept asking me if I could help them.” Now it exists as “a forum to support music that sits between genres and brings a sense of unexpectedness.” Sinden and Grizzly were instrumental in launching the career of one Aaron Jerome, better known as elusive masked beatmaker SBTRKT, before he went on to bigger things.

Sinden talks proudly and excitedly of the strong core of artists currently at the label, including touring partner Brenmar. Born and raised in Chicago, Brenmar now resides in Brooklyn where he is carving a nice niche for himself by marrying the sounds of commercial R&B and the early house sound of the city of his birth. In a typical Brenmar set you might hear R Kelly and Monica cosying up next to Mr Fingers or Brenmar’s own remixes of Rihanna and Justin Timberlake. His excellent single ‘Children Of The Night’ encapsulates all of these influences and you can also hear his input on ‘One Two’, a free to download acid house track by Sinden and Brenmar.

Also on the Grizzly roster are familiar names like Brodinski and Melé and other up-and-comers 5kin And Bone5 and Wafa. Sinden talks particularly highly of a funk-influenced Welsh duo that you might soon be hearing a lot more about: “We put a record out a couple of months ago with Bodhi, who are really cool. They’re going to be doing big things this year on a deeper, melodic, ‘90s house revival tip.”

Another Sinden signee who should already be well-known in these parts is 22-year-old Sydney indie darling Elizabeth Rose, an FBi Radio fave and triple j Next Crop 2012 pick. “I was introduced to her the last time I was in Australia, in 2011,” explains Sinden. “We went into the studio and we just clicked. There was some good material to come from that session although it did take a little bit of time to come out.” One of those tracks was ‘Again’, a lush production which makes the best of Rose’s poppy voice and ear for melody and Sinden’s darker beats. It was eventually released as a single from Rose’s debut EP Crystallise.

With the running of the label, the tour, his own productions and no end of remix requests Sinden is as busy as he has ever been but really happy with it. “I really feel like I’m in a good place right now and that’s the honest-to-God truth. I’m working on some exciting projects: me and Mykki Blanco are working on new tracks and I’ve got some things that I can’t even tell you about yet. Then I’m collaborating with lots of artists. Yep, it’s busy but everything’s where I want it to be.”

Article published in The Brag, 1st April 2013
Photo courtesy of TogetherBoston

Laura Mvula – Sing To The Moon: Album Review

LAURA MVULA
Sing To The Moon
RCA
3/5

Laura Mvula could be cynically viewed as the major labels’ latest attempt to cash in on radio-friendly soul in a post-Amy Winehouse pop market. And although she shares similarities with Paloma, Emeli et al, Sing To The Moon gives the impression that Mvula has much more to offer than a stifling need to make her music palatable to the masses allows.

It’s not a bad album by any means. Honed in gospel choirs and acapella groups, Mvula’s voice is a cut above while choral harmonies and prominent celesta and harp create a sound far more beguiling than much of the female-soul-by-numbers fare we’ve become used to. Yet, in its quest to please it feels too safe. The decision to pair Mvula with producer Steve Brown, the man behind easy-listening sensation Rumer’s first album, seems a mistake.

Take ‘Is There Anybody Out There?’. Mvula is lonely; she sings “Is there anybody out there? I won’t make it out here alone”. In the hands of Jill Scott, a stated influence of Mvula, a line like that would be rendered heart-wrenching. Here, framed by sweeping strings and The Beach Boys-esque “bah-bah-bahs” it’s less from the soul and more like a soliloquy in a Broadway show tune.

Mvula hints at attitude on ‘That’s Alright’, a track led by marching band brass and drums. “I will never be what you want and that’s alright / Cause my skin ain’t light,” sings Mvula, and later: “Who made you the centre of the universe?” She needs to get down and dirty more often.

Sing To The Moon announces the arrival of a huge talent, but let’s hope she takes more risks next time.

Article published in The Brag, 8th April 2013

Harts: Live Review

HARTS, CAMDEN, SIREN LINES
Mum @ The World Bar
Friday March 22

Given the buzz and favourable reviews surrounding Harts and his Offtime EP the back room of The World Bar was much quieter than I (and he) had hoped, but it proved well worth a visit.

Sydney four-piece Siren Lines looked like they’d just ram-raided TopMan, but their printed shirts suited their jangly guitar music. They had clearly been listening to a lot of Delays songs, which is no bad thing – everyone should listen to more Delays – except that singer Jake Smithers doesn’t have same command of his voice as Delays’ Greg Gilbert.

Camden were altogether more glamourous. For the band’s first gig in a year the immaculately groomed frontman Camden Chan modelled a sequined jacket and, like the title of his band’s single, did indeed look ‘Too Pretty For Punk’. Musically they were smart but Chan’s eerie Morrissey impersonation was annoying from the first syllable.

The purpose of my visit was to see if Harts could successfully recreate the energy on his incredible mini-album in a live setting. The set wasn’t without its flaws, but the answer was a self-assured yes. On stage alone, accompanied by just his guitar, a keyboard and drum pads, he began with ‘Vampires’, a funky ‘Thriller’ homage to which you just couldn’t remain still. Looking around the room during ‘Back To The Shore’ many of the couple of dozen people present (including myself) were singing along, testifying to Darren Hart’s ability to pen a catchy hook.

‘All Too Real’, a song that I’ve been unable to shake from my consciousness since first hearing it several weeks ago, best demonstrated Harts’ onstage prowess. He flitted between guitar and keys and punters were dragged closer inwards by his irresistible energy and easy confidence. Harts did the splits and sank to his knees during indulgent guitar solos and even got the security staff bopping along when he jumped into the crowd and played behind his neck. His set went by in a flash but those crying “More!” need not worry: this guy will be around for a long time to come. Harts is the real deal.

Article published in The Brag, 1st April 2013