list.co.uk/music Reviews | MUSIC
ALT ROCK/POST-HARDCORE DESAPARECIDOS The Arches, Glasgow, Sat 9 Feb ●●●●● MATH ROCK GALLOPS King Tut’s, Glasgow, Sun 10 Feb ●●●●●
Desaparecidos are arguably most famous for featuring Conor ‘Bright Eyes’ Oberst in their ranks. After only one album – 2002’s Read Music, Speak Spanish – and a few shows, Desaparecidos (Spanish for ‘disappeared ones’) lived up to their name, disbanding and pursuing in other projects. Their legend loomed larger with each year of inactivity, before they reunited last year to a cacophony of mid-20s gasps. For their long overdue Scottish debut, it’s clear,
from the echoing opening twangs of ‘Greater Omaha’, this is more meaningful that your average nostalgia-fuelled cash cow. The band’s core themes of frustration at the ruling classes, banks and government are as apt now as ever. All in, it’s a solid, if not mind-blowing performance (admittedly, the booming main arch turns their caustic anthems into a murky, distorted soup). But the identifiable choruses of ‘Man and Wife, The Former (Financial Planning)’ and the red raw closer, ‘Hole in One’, cut through enough to enjoy a passionate singalong. Time will tell if the band outlives its own nostalgia, but this is a pretty good start. (Ryan Drever)
Sundays are the graveyard shifts of live music. Make it a bitterly cold February in Glasgow and you can understand tonight's lack of attendance. But much praise goes to the brave few who give Gallops a (metaphorically) warm welcome. With more electronics than a Maplin window display, Gallops are immediately engaging, fusing a loose- limbed energetic performance with the calculated logic and smarts to engineer their barrage of booming, hardcore prog. The Wrexham collective’s debut album, Yours Sincerely, Dr Hardcore, set an experimental and rhythmically-strong aesthetic, and saw them dubbed ‘Wrexham’s answer to Battles’. Hardly slander, it’s likely far from helpful either, even if ‘Jeff Leopard’ and ‘G is for Jaile’, with their frenetic rhythms and jerky melée of buzzsaw guitars and electronics, do draw attention to the similarities. But it’s clear there’s more to Gallops than easy comparisons. Man of the match goes to drummer, Dave Morait, whose explosive, almost metronomic skills form the iron-clad backbone to Gallops’ free- roaming soundscapes. (Ryan Drever)
COUNTRY/ ROOTS JOHN C REILLY & FRIENDS St Andrew’s in the Square, Glasgow, Tue 12 Feb ●●●●● WORLD SALIF KEITA & BWANI JUNCTION The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Fri 1 Feb ●●●●●
’We got the Death Star to work for us,’ laughs John C Reilly, actor, singer and star of Disney's Wreck-It Ralph, explaining the novel approach to global publicity junkets he talked the megacorpration into. Instead of the usual paid-for assistant and stylist,
he reasoned, ‘what if I just brought the band?’ Not the full 8-piece with which he exercises his love of country music (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story wasn’t a million miles from real life), but as a skilled guitar/voice trio of Reilly, Becky Stark and Tom Brosseau, clustered round an old-style mic, performing country standards with spirit and soul. The trio take turns to sing, and their gently
amusing chatter belies three skilful talents. Reilly is possibly the least capable of the three, but his voice still has a raw and pleasing Merle Haggard twang, and his stage-working ability is supreme (comments in favour of Scottish Independence win big cheers). The chirpily eccentric Stark has a fallen angel’s voice on Dolly Parton’s ‘My Blue Tears’, and the shy Brosseau sounds positively otherworldy on a cover of Lonnie Johnson’s ‘St Louis Blues’.(David Pollock)
Is any genre safe from the beige hand of indie? There’s the odd trace of Nigerian high-life and Soweto pop in Edinburgh support act Bwani Junction’s guitar and vocal lines, but fundamentally this is stodgy indie, more Arctic Monkeys than Talking Heads or Dirty Projectors. Throughout his career Malian superstar Salif Keita has sought to extend the range of his sophisticated Afro-pop, and for this year’s Talé he joined forces with Phillipe Cohen-Solal (Gotan Project) to add hip hop, dub and disco-house into his sound. Cohen- Solal’s production comes from a naff millennial realm of Carhartt jeans and chill-out lounges, but live, it benefits from a powerful PA system, giving the infectious Bamako beats presence and weight. While there are reflective moments, such as the gorgeous ‘Yamore’ from Keita’s 2003 masterpiece, Moffou, most of tonight is aimed at the dancefloor; a laptop DJ brings beats, bass and samples, and the band provide calabash, electric guitar and calele n’goni (Malian lute). Then there is Keita himself, whose golden voice, flecked with grit, cuts through it all to glorious effect. (Stewart Smith)
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ROCK/POP NME AWARDS TOUR 2013 Academy, Glasgow, Mon 11 Feb ●●●●●
’People of Glasgow,’ whoops Vincent Neff, Django Django’s representative on earth today, ‘are you gonna come up with us?’ And we do, making a self-fulfilling prophecy of Neff’s declaration early in the band’s NME Awards Tour-headlining set that ‘Monday night is the new Saturday night’. There are four pretty good bands here, as there are at each of these jaunts celebrating the music mag’s most-tipped names for the coming year, but Django Django (above) are the only ones to inspire full-on euphoria rather than the gentle warmth of approval.
Leaving aside the depressingly familiar sight
of one bunch of white boys after another bouncing onstage, all involved could count tonight a success, with the less interesting acts (anyone without a ‘Django’ in their name) benefitting from a larger stage and the sense they are grabbing a potentially career-making opportunity with both hands. Birmingham’s Peace satisfy with a sludgy but somehow upbeat variant on cider-sticky 1980s student union indie rock melded with the ubiquitous careening guitar of Vampire Weekend, while the sullen but interesting Palma Violets are clearly this year’s most deserving mob of Camdenite pretty boys. God love Miles Kane – at age 26, with careers
in The Rascals and The Last Shadow Puppets behind him, the industry veteran of this bill – who takes a sound outdated even by the time the NME figured out putting Oasis on the cover sold more copies, but amping it up to new levels of vitality and freshness. Wearing a leather jacket, feet planted apart to anchor against all the overexcited guitar solos, his set is uniformly loud and laced with compulsive pop choruses on ‘Rearrange’ and ‘Inhaler’. And he looks really happy to be here, emphasising ‘I don’t wanna leave this fuckin’ stage but we’ve gotta at the end of “Get Closer”.’ So to the Djangos, who take all the good
feeling in the room and magnify it through a most non-indie cataclysm of veiled Morricone soundtrack references, classic synthesiser beats and Neff’s oddly effective channelling of both Alex Kapranos and Flavor Flav (listen for his yelped hype commands, you’ll see what we mean). The experience is a classicist’s fusion of obscure rock and primal dance to remind this writer of the first time he saw LCD Soundsystem play live. (Paul Little)
21 Feb–21 Mar 2013 THE LIST 73