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Music LIVE REVIEWS
ROCK THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN The Garage, Glasgow, Fri 5 Aug ●●●●● INDIE FOLK POP ADMIRAL FALLOW Liquid Room, Edinburgh, Sun 14 Aug ●●●●●
The Dillinger Escape Plan deserve every single penny they make out of tonight’s gig. Their onstage energy is so unrelenting, you wonder if they’ll collapse post-show and perish in a putrid pile of sweat. West coast duo Over the Wall are first on at this a sell-out gig, powering through some excellent Postal Service-inflected guitar pop as guitarist/singer Gav Prentice dances about the stage.
For the uninitiated, their music probably sounds Kid Canaveral too are bursting with energy,
like four grizzly bears fighting while ten toddlers ‘play’ the drums – but to fans it is curiously compelling experimentations with the boundaries of heavy music. It’s the more melodic cuts however that impress tonight, with ‘Black Bubblegum’ a gritty, juddering salvo infused with electronic swagger, whilst ‘Milk Lizard’ is ripe ground for a giddy singalong. It’s through their atypical fare, short blasts of pure blitzkrieg math-metal, when things really get going – ‘Panasonic Youth’ sees them chuck their bodies and instruments around like a ballet troupe gone absolutely bananas. Indeed, their live show – and music – is often so unpredictable, it’s a wonder that these five men are in so much control over all of it. It is a spellbinding performance, regardless of your musical persuasion, firmly reiterating what a must-see live act they are. (Chris Cope)
rattling through their set with cheeky between- song plugs for their album, and managing to squeeze in a cover of King Creosote’s ‘Missionary’ while they’re at it. Again, it’s well-crafted, infectious pop music, and not over-quick in its pacing – although they’re racing off to Cellardyke afterwards to play another gig the same night.
Headliners Admiral Fallow – formerly Brother Louis Collective – choose a different tactic, starting off slow with a view to building up the energy gradually – a tactic which unfortunately backfires slightly. The flowing folk musicianship coupled with frontman Louis Abbot’s (pictured) endearing openness are as compelling as ever, but even the more upbeat numbers such as ‘The Paper Trench’ (their forthcoming single) fail to elicit more than a few appreciatively nodding heads in the audience. (Niki Boyle)
RAP/ POP EXAMPLE Picture House, Edinburgh, Mon 15 Aug ●●●●●
As Mike Skinner’s sometime protégé, it’s easy to pigeonhole London rapper Elliot Gleave as the new bearer of the crown soon to be abandoned by The Streets. Yet what he does is subtly different – both men are outright crowd pleasers, but Skinner’s playful introspection was here forsaken in favour of a party spirit straight from the 4am dancefloors of Ibiza. When Gleave dedicated ‘Sick Note’ to ‘all the people calling in sick tomorrow,’ the cheer that went up suggested there were plenty of people who intended to take that as permission. Playing with a full band including keyboard,
drums and guitar, this is a show which reaches the stature Example has achieved as a recent number one artist, a proper big name pop star putting on a set worthy of a big hall. Every other song has been a hit or sounds like it’s waiting to chart, including the hard electro grind of ‘Sick Note’ itself, the club reggae of ‘See the Sea’ and ‘Two Lives’ cheery pop. He writes anthems of all sorts, from ‘Stay Awake’s tribute to ‘the messed-up generation’ to the boisterous ‘Hooligans’ and his biggest hit ‘Changed the Way You Kiss Me’, with a quality and energy to his performance that suggests there’s plenty more to come. (David Pollock)
PUNK ROCK JELLO BIAFRA AND THE GUANTANAMO SCHOOL OF MEDICINE ABC, Glasgow, Tue 9 Aug ●●●●●
Slinking onto the stage in a bloody lab coat, Jello Biafra is a gurning, over-acting spectacle from the get-go. As parts of the country still smoulder in the wake of August’s widespread rioting, it doesn’t take the former Dead Kennedys frontman long to lunge into a series of typically scathing and blackly comedic tirades, often edging into broader condemnation of tax-dodging phone companies and clueless political leaders – dubbing David Cameron the ‘twit from hell’ and dedicating the sneering ‘Forkboy’ in his honour. At their best, these lengthy interludes,
interspersed between rampant bouts of old school hardcore and twisted surf-rock, are a catalyst for chaos with Biafra and rest of the Guantanamo School of Medicine tirelessly working the crowd for every last minute of the set - which clocks in, encores ‘n’ all, around one and three quarter hours. Truth be told, you’d struggle to find another man in his 50s this side of Iggy and of such doughy physique that can move as consistently and as recklessly as Jello Biafra, albeit with the ageless, ballsy voice to back it up. (Ryan Drever)
25 Aug–22 Sep 2011 THE LIST 111
CHILLWAVE WASHED OUT Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, Sun 14 Aug ●●●●●
Okay, we might be calling it ‘chillwave’ up above, but that’s not actually what we were hearing at this, a set which lovers of below-ground music had been hotly anticipating at this year’s Edge festival. Where Atlanta, Georgia’s Ernest Greene makes
sparse but epic and emotion-drenched electronica in his home studio, his live show is an altogether different proposition. Unlike Oneohtrix Point Never, another American artist whose music pushes at the edges of what one producer can do with as little equipment as you can stow under your seat on an Easyjet flight, Greene has decided upon the full works for his live show.
Daniel Lopatin (aka Mr Point Never) had divided the crowd when playing the same venue at the same festival exactly one week previous, turning up with a lone laptop show which was beautiful to listen to, if not exactly fearful of inertia. Here, Greene’s set had a similarly divisive effect. By touring with a full band which on occasion stretched to six people on stage, he’s crafted a proper live show – with musicians and eye contact and human interaction and all that kind of stuff – albeit one which essentially shifts the focus of his music.
Where the on-record Washed Out is shimmering and ethereal, the on-stage version is upfront and in your face by comparison. Not that they’re noisy or hyperactive or anything like that, but there’s a solid definition to their music that might not necessarily be approved of by all their avowed fans. Take ‘Eyes Be Closed’, the first track from the recent debut album Within and Without, for example: both the recorded and live iterations remind of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, although the latter owes more to the early-90s warehouse rave overtones of the record.
In songs like ‘Beyond’ and ‘Far Away’ there are
hints of both New Order and MGMT, a retro- futurist memory of club music as both emerging underground phenomenon and nostalgic concern, with the dots carefully drawn between the sounds of a three-decade history which exists outside the confines of the mainstream. It is, in short, a great and fluid dance music set which will excite anyone who takes it on its own terms, with the feeling being that Greene’s happy to get out of the bedroom. He gees the crowd, telling them how much he loves them and their city and insisting that they ‘take it up a notch’, emphasising the suggestion that maybe this is the kind of set he always intended to play. (David Pollock)