I've Got The Perfect Needle.
So I got to the Queen of Hoxton (just Industry with a shite paint job) quite early, in order to nab a booth, so I could sit down and draw if the support bands turned out to be shite. Although I did get quite a bit of sketching done, this turned out not to be necessary.
I wanted to hate Maribel when they first came on, all indie haircuts and headbands. Indeed, the first song was dutifully boring, a hypnotic thud and feedback like a kindergarten JAMC - and then suddenly the drums kicked in, and the bass kicked off and the band... took off. Pretty melodies under plumes of feedback, 2 and even 3-part boy/girl harmonies, a stand-up drummer pounding shit out of a minimal kit - yes, this has my name all over it. And then they speak - ah, they're from Oslo. What is it in that Norwegian water that makes their dronerock so good? Serena Maneesh, Je Suis Animal, The Lionheart Brothers, they just seem to be incredibly *good* at this stuff, the mixture of noise and beauty, of heavy darkness and spinning light. Sure, it was a bit derivative, but what's wrong with doing something old incredibly *well*? At times they even reminded me of a lo-fi Medicine, which is the highest compliment I can pay.
The next band, 93MillionMilesFromTheSun, well, they were a bit of a case of style over substance. They started out belching smoke, with the lights behind them like a bargain basement BRMC - until the fire alarm (ah, so that's what that really interesting drone noise was. A shame. I like bands that duet with fire alarms - see also FreeLoveBabies) forced them to play without the atmospherics. Thing is, they had all the right sounds - the huge Marshall and Ampeg stacks, the boards full of pedals, the little boy lost vocals - but did utterly nothing with them. I mean, obviously, they had a decent band in there somewhere...
...however, that band was, actually, The Telescopes. For that was the point of the night - to get Stephen Lawrie up onstage and fronting a band and singing actual *songs* again instead of just rolling about a stage interrogating amplified violins with electrical powertools, and the other sorts of noize he's been pedalling lately.
And god... FUCK YES. Stephen is skinnier than ever, hollow cheeked and dead-eyed, clinging to the mic stand for dear life, but the noise seems to rouse him. When his eyes open to slits, they *twinkle*.
The Telescopes were originally part of that first wave of drone bands, after the Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 and Loop and My Bloody Valentine. And this is what they're doing tonight, songs from Taste, not that lovely filigree baggy-shoegaze hybrid of the self titled album that everybody loves. Songs reduced to the simplest of riffs, riffs reduced to drones, repeated over and again until transcendance is achieved. "It hurts too much to be where you are, it hurts too much to be where you are," Stephen repeats over and over before slamming into the decisive putdown "I've got the perfect needle for you..."
The songs are about boredom, suffocation, frustration that leads to rage. Stephen is crumpled to his knees, down on the floor, banging at the guitarist's pedalboard to make it go louder, before finally making his way back to the Marshall stack to turn the volume all the way up, thrusting his vocal mic into the onslaught to make it louder, almost louder, the sheer volume of sound like a physical presence - this is the point of all those eardrum-wrecking live shows. The strangely soothing effects of overwhelming noize on the human nervous system. They last about 3 songs before degenerating into an all-out noise-fest, but, stretched over the relentless pummelling drumbeat, it makes sense. The girls down the front even dance, that wild kind of freeform hippie dancing of the truly fucked.
And then it's over. Stephen, bored, lunges off the stage, and makes a beeline for the door - the loo, the smoking area upstairs, who knows? There is no encore, despite the girls howling for "High On Fire". How could there be?
I wanted to hate Maribel when they first came on, all indie haircuts and headbands. Indeed, the first song was dutifully boring, a hypnotic thud and feedback like a kindergarten JAMC - and then suddenly the drums kicked in, and the bass kicked off and the band... took off. Pretty melodies under plumes of feedback, 2 and even 3-part boy/girl harmonies, a stand-up drummer pounding shit out of a minimal kit - yes, this has my name all over it. And then they speak - ah, they're from Oslo. What is it in that Norwegian water that makes their dronerock so good? Serena Maneesh, Je Suis Animal, The Lionheart Brothers, they just seem to be incredibly *good* at this stuff, the mixture of noise and beauty, of heavy darkness and spinning light. Sure, it was a bit derivative, but what's wrong with doing something old incredibly *well*? At times they even reminded me of a lo-fi Medicine, which is the highest compliment I can pay.
The next band, 93MillionMilesFromTheSun, well, they were a bit of a case of style over substance. They started out belching smoke, with the lights behind them like a bargain basement BRMC - until the fire alarm (ah, so that's what that really interesting drone noise was. A shame. I like bands that duet with fire alarms - see also FreeLoveBabies) forced them to play without the atmospherics. Thing is, they had all the right sounds - the huge Marshall and Ampeg stacks, the boards full of pedals, the little boy lost vocals - but did utterly nothing with them. I mean, obviously, they had a decent band in there somewhere...
...however, that band was, actually, The Telescopes. For that was the point of the night - to get Stephen Lawrie up onstage and fronting a band and singing actual *songs* again instead of just rolling about a stage interrogating amplified violins with electrical powertools, and the other sorts of noize he's been pedalling lately.
And god... FUCK YES. Stephen is skinnier than ever, hollow cheeked and dead-eyed, clinging to the mic stand for dear life, but the noise seems to rouse him. When his eyes open to slits, they *twinkle*.
The Telescopes were originally part of that first wave of drone bands, after the Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 and Loop and My Bloody Valentine. And this is what they're doing tonight, songs from Taste, not that lovely filigree baggy-shoegaze hybrid of the self titled album that everybody loves. Songs reduced to the simplest of riffs, riffs reduced to drones, repeated over and again until transcendance is achieved. "It hurts too much to be where you are, it hurts too much to be where you are," Stephen repeats over and over before slamming into the decisive putdown "I've got the perfect needle for you..."
The songs are about boredom, suffocation, frustration that leads to rage. Stephen is crumpled to his knees, down on the floor, banging at the guitarist's pedalboard to make it go louder, before finally making his way back to the Marshall stack to turn the volume all the way up, thrusting his vocal mic into the onslaught to make it louder, almost louder, the sheer volume of sound like a physical presence - this is the point of all those eardrum-wrecking live shows. The strangely soothing effects of overwhelming noize on the human nervous system. They last about 3 songs before degenerating into an all-out noise-fest, but, stretched over the relentless pummelling drumbeat, it makes sense. The girls down the front even dance, that wild kind of freeform hippie dancing of the truly fucked.
And then it's over. Stephen, bored, lunges off the stage, and makes a beeline for the door - the loo, the smoking area upstairs, who knows? There is no encore, despite the girls howling for "High On Fire". How could there be?
Labels: club ac30, dronerock, maribel, spacerock, telescopes
posted by Masonic Boom | 1:43 pm
2 Comments:
i think you probably missed the point with 93MillionMilesFromTheSun. If you enjoyed The Telescopes so much, 93MMFTS were playing with them and now official members of The Telescopes.
No, I think you missed my point. They had all the right elements, but didn't combine them in a way that I found interesting. However, playing someone else's songs, they suddenly became amazing. That *is* the point.
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