Music
EXPOSURE DAG FÖR DAG They’re based in Stockholm, Sweden, but American brother and sister duo Sarah and Jacob Snavely (and their magnificently-named live drummer Chuck Bukowski) have no Swedish heritage. It shows: Dag för Dag’s (it means ‘day by day’) shouty, sky-scraping pop-punk debut album Boo isn’t what you’d expect from that part of the world. Sarah tells us – why Sweden? ‘I’d been living in London for seven years, while Jake was in San Francisco. He came to visit me and said, this isn’t a good place for you. I’d been struggling; there was too much of the rat race going on, so we moved to Stockholm together. Our parents got divorced when we were young and we’ve lived all over, so going really wasn’t a problem.’ How does your music fit in there? ‘It doesn’t. Sweden is known so much for very twee pop, girls at pianos and guys bouncing their heads to pretty guitar stuff. It kinda bores us. But that endears it to me even more – it’s a nice, kind, simple place to live, where they like sweet music [laughs].’ What does the future hold for you? ‘I’m going to be having a baby in April, so I think when we play our last show in March I’ll be about eight months and one week gone. Through April and May I’ll be doing the whole mom thing, then we’ll be trying to write some more, get some festivals and I guess tour again in the fall.’ (David Pollock) ■ Captain’s Rest, Glasgow, Wed 10 Mar.
REVIEW ELECTRONICA ZOMBIE ZOMBIE PERFORM THE MUSIC OF JOHN CARPENTER Glasgow Film Festival at Mono, Glasgow, Thu 18 Feb ●●●●● REVIEW INDIE ROCK FRIGHTENED RABBIT, THREE BLIND WOLVES, DUPEC Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, Wed 17 Feb ●●●●●
Part of the Glasgow Film Festival’s Music and Film strand, the influence of one of American cinema’s most widely-respected cult auteurs hung over this event, so we shouldn’t be too picky that the band scrapped the idea of performing in front of film clips from Carpenter’s work during this specially commissioned show. For John Carpenter commands huge respect, mainly for his 70s and 80s films, like Hallowe’en and The Thing, but his legacy of low-budget scores has carved its own slash into the history of electronic music.
Before a sold-out crowd made up of Glasgow’s scenester community, these readings by Zombie Zombie – Parisian duo Etienne Jaumet on keyboards and laptop, and Cosmic Neman (also a member of Herman Dune) on drums – were faithful, while urgent and dynamic thanks to the live volume and Neman’s deft playing. Some highlights were the tense title theme of Assault on Precinct 13 and excerpts from Escape From New York, and hopefully the show caused many to revisit this exceptional body of work. (David Pollock)
Dupec arrive late and flustered. Their angular indie-rock shows plenty potential, but tonight’s set is too rough around the edges to really shine.
Up next are Glasgow’s Three Blind Wolves – indie troubadour Ross Clark’s renamed band, following his last indie outfit The Scarfs Go Missing – and very impressive they are too. Coming on like a countrified Modest Mouse, they waste no time in getting the crowd interested. With excellent use of four-way harmonies and Ross Clark’s own strong vocal, they have a hint of bluegrass about them, while not shying away from a more bombastic sound elsewhere. Boasting well constructed tunes with dynamic hooks and transitions that are clever without being smug, this is very definitely a band to keep an eye on. Headliners Frightened Rabbit are a
man down (Andy Monaghan is in Glasgow this evening), so tonight’s performance is charmingly ramshackle – with the crowd enlisted to fill in some of Andy’s vocals. This intimate show offers plenty of evidence why this outfit deserve their continued success. (Craig Dickson)
REVIEW PSYCH POP YEASAYER Oran Mor, Glasgow, Wed 17 Feb ●●●●● REVIEW INDIE THE SOFT PACK King Tut’s, Glasgow, Tue 23 Feb ●●●●●
The New York oddballs were greeted with some exceptional Weegie banter. ‘Ira, Ira, where’s your ‘tache?’, the crowd chanted at bassist Ira Wolf Tuton, referring to the long black hair and Gaucho moustache he recently ditched in favour of a streamlined under-shave and clean upper lip. The set was a little less ‘world’, with the squelchy synths and clicking drum machines of new album Odd Blood dominating. A generous portion of new material fitted snugly into the sharp, electronic vein, making a very stylish set from the band who manage to make runes, jumpsuits (guitarist Anand Wilder was sporting one) and sounding like Genesis seem cool.
‘This is by far our favourite city in the UK,’ says the Soft Pack’s guitarist Matty McLoughlin, and it’s a pleasure to hear. ‘We feel almost at home here. I hate London.’ Ouch. But then again, quite right.
Although it does seem more likely that the San Diego quartet would find some sort of spiritual affinity with Manchester. After all, their chugging, reverb-heavy guitar sound is not a million miles from the Mancunian style of two decades past and more.
It must be noted that most of the
group’s songs sound markedly similar, as if they’ve considered using a shoegazing wash of guitars, but haven’t quite gone all the way.
Wilder was star of the show, So tracks like ‘Parasites’, ‘Right &
hopping side-to-side as he sung beautifully on funky ballads ‘Madder Red’ and ‘O.N.E’. The only disappointments were that first album favourite ‘2080’ was omitted, and the psychedelic edge of other early tracks was sometimes sheared off by synths. Not that the Weegies cared, as demonstrated by one sprightly boy (‘My son from the future’, singer Chris Keating claimed) who jumped on stage to dance along to ‘Ambling Amp’. Surreally brilliant. (Jonny Ensall)
Wrong’ and ‘C’Mon’ sit somewhere in between noise and tunefulness, a mesh of rockabilly and early Factory records occasionally filtered through the lens of garage rock, as during ‘On My Time’. Singer Matt Lamkin’s vocal is artfully
sullen, and in the frenzied ‘Down On Loving’, they have one of the finest songs of the last few months – albeit one which was repeated under a different name more than once here. (David Pollock)
64 THE LIST 4–18 Mar 2010