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Music LIVE REVIEWS
HIP HOP LIL B Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, Sun 6 May ●●●●● SINGER-SONGWRITER ELVIS COSTELLO Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, Fri 11 May ●●●●●
It must be the Californian in him, but the BASED GOD, despite lyrics about eating white booty, his VIP lifestyle, and his resemblance to Jesus/Michael Jordan and Paris Hilton, is basically a hippie. Top off, shades on, tiny muscled torso covered in tattoos, the 22-year-old Berkeley boy stops his swag-talk and rhyme-spitting for a second to define what ‘based’ means. ‘It’s about being positive,’ he glows. ‘I got luh for y’all,’ he gushes, before giving shout-outs to our parents, loved ones, and to be on the safe side, ‘all the babies that ain’t even been born in Scotland yet’. Audience-love aside (he does an hour of phone photos and boob signing afterwards), his rapping leans as heavily on irony as it does on ridiculously good beats. (‘Ladies, I want you to feel this sub- bass in your soul,’ he deadpans.) He’s a true joy to watch; the crowd is near-euphoric as he comes on to ‘Ellen Degeneres’; by ‘Wonton Soup’ they’re in a frenzy, with a lone wooden spoon waved in appreciation. He’s described himself before as ‘an art history project’, and hell, it felt like history was being made. (Claire Sawers) ■ Lil B was part of Palace, see wearepalace.com
‘She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake’ – has any songwriter anticipated the career ahead of them as clairvoyantly as Elvis Costello did on Watching the Detectives? The song appeared in 1977 but its writer has spent the decades since elaborating it repeatedly.
He diversifies manfully, of course, knocking out concept albums, collaborating with string quartets and the like but, in his heart, he’s forever sobbing next to a silent telephone, struggling to find a rhyme for ‘Jezebel’. A three-hour greatest hits show, then, is a formidable prospect.
Costello is firmly entrenched now in that elder-
statesman career phase when the artist seems giddily stunned by the size of their back catalogue, and the fact that they can still manage to walk around a bit. Tonight is a frisky, kittenish affair, with Elvis bringing up audience members to spin a wheel that determines which song is played next. There is patter and showbiz anecdote aplenty, and a band who’ve been playing these songs since Elvis first had his heart broken. Thirty-five years on, old four-eyes remains a first love who’ll never run off with car salesmen named Trevor. (Allan Brown)
H S L E W S A M O H T
POP FRIENDS, WITH ALUNAGEORGE King Tut’s, Glasgow, Mon 7 May ●●●●● ELECTRONICA AUNTIE FLO Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, Sun 13 May ●●●●●
‘Come closer,’ beckons Friends’ enigmatic frontwoman Samantha Urbani, as the Brooklyn quintet make their Glasgow debut. She means it too: blink and next thing, she’s on the floor, shimmying up to an exhilarated crowd. If the intimate touch hints at a house party atmosphere, which Friends also exude through their thrift store image and laid-back attitude, it’s blown away by dazzling pop music. Fearless on stage, Urbani’s caterwauling vocal is shaken up by her bandmates: a rotating music box of tambourine, drums, maracas, guitar riffs and melodic keys. The disco-tinged set crosses several genres, on the summery, psychedelic funk of biggest hit ‘Friend Crush’, a sublime cover of 90s Ghost Town DJs ‘My Boo’, and darkly tribal tracks from the band’s debut LP Manifest! (read a review on page 105.) If there’s a criticism, it’s that it’s too brief, after 45
minutes it’s time for an aftershow ‘chat’ – but not before ‘I’m His Girl’ earns the biggest cheers.
Supporting Brit hip hop/R&B duo Aluna George also deserve a mention, in particular the soulful vocal of hypnotic singer Aluna Francis. Check out recent electronic earworm, ‘Just a Touch’, if the hype hasn’t already reached you. (Jo Bell)
It’s a foul Sunday night and getting late, near midnight before Glasgow duo Auntie Flo take their place behind trestle tables loaded down with kit and cables. The flickering projection behind them bears the legend ‘Night Music’, and what they play really is a dense, clubby soundtrack which culls the best beats from the classic sounds of Detroit and Chicago. Yet there’s more going on here, a developing world subcurrent that’s deftly handled by bandleader Brian d’Souza, the one in the techy thick-rimmed glasses. Within a couple of tracks he’s introducing a clanking synthesised steel drum rhythm and a sharp Latin horn stab, while his live partner Esa Williams batters bongos. ‘This is Esa,’ laughed d’Souza after a rare missed cue from the latter, ‘he doesn’t pay attention sometimes but I love him.’ His contention that Williams is ‘the fastest bongo player in Scotland’ was put to the test by an impressive face-off between the pair’s electronic and analogue rhythms, and then their signature tracks emerged: ‘Highlife’, an afrobeat funk with a taut steel pulse at its heart, and the shimmering anthemics of ‘Oh My Days’. It was a feast for the ears and the feet. (David Pollock)
ALTERNATIVE ROCK THE HORRORS O2 ABC, Glasgow, Tue 15 May ●●●●●
For Essex boys The Horrors, surely redemption has arrived at last. Yes, there were those of us who enjoyed the spooky frightwig garage rock of their debut album Strange House, but it left the sense that here was a band who are overstylised and blessed with just the one attention-grabbing trick. Not many would have given them much chance of prolonged survival, and yet here we are celebrating Skying, a third album recently crowned NME’s best of the year, in a commendably large and fan-filled venue. The secret, it seems, was simply to expand the scope of their pilfering so it reflects the true breadth and quality of their influences. This was both a striking, emotive show and a blissful walk through the greatest record collection most of their fans have never owned in their lives. As a striking lightshow of strobes and spotlights blazed away in the background, the strident motorway whine of ‘Mirror’s Edge’ roared through the venue, a cross-pollination of My Bloody Valentine and Simple Minds at their most icy and teutonically-influenced.
The theme continued with ‘Who Can Say’, which was
delivered by Faris Badwan in a voice reminiscent of Bowie beamed in from Planet Berlin in the 70s. The quintet themselves look like the cast of The Hunger on a night out at Max’s Kansas City, with a hint of 70s Britcop thriller from keyboard player Rhys Webb. His playing buffeted the thrilling shoegaze pop of ‘I Can See Through You’ and the dream-punk of ‘Scarlet Fields’, an anaesthetised analogue of Siouxsie & the Banshees.
Badwan’s barracking of those standing listening near
the front to move out of the way and let people who want to jump in – ‘then we’ll all be a lot happier’ – was uncharacteristic, but then the heroes they emulate were all similarly uncompromising. Besides, the very next song was one of the loudest and most animated, with ‘Endless Blue’ offering a swooning ambient false start and then a riff-heavy charge reminiscent of early Manics.
Throughout their 80-minute set, what charmed and mesmerised was both the fact they represent their many influences so faithfully and their lack of avoidance of a sharp pop aesthetic. From the careening krautrock of ‘Sea Within a Sea’ to the once-more Simple Minds echoing ‘Still Life’, the snotty, Suede-like dream-pop of ‘Monica Gems’ and the breathtaking Neu! drone of ‘Moving Further Away’, this is music to spark the emotions and live in the heart. Played before 50 people in a club basement or headlining Glastonbury, it would still resonate noisily. (Paul Little)
102 THE LIST 24 May–21 Jun 2012