MUSIC | Previews 82 THE LIST 4 Jun–3 Sep 2015
ROCK FAITH NO MORE O2 Academy, Glasgow, Sun 14 Jun
Faith No More were always an odd proposition. They took a few years to really hit their groove (Courtney Love and Chuck Mosley fronted the band in the early years) but it was the addition of vocalist Mike Patton that sent FNM into the mainstream. Their fusion of funk, metal and hardcore on ‘Epic’ and ‘From Out of Nowhere’ saw them transformed into unlikely MTV stars. Follow-up Angel Dust was even more frantic and eclectic ranging from the death metal screams of ‘Jizzlobber’ to an easy listening cover of John Barry’s ‘Midnight Cowboy’. Two more albums followed but Patton quit the band in 1998. Then in 2009, Faith No More announced their return. The Second Coming tour looked like it would be a final victory lap. ‘When we split up, we explored what we could do on our own,’ explains bassist and founding member Billy Gould. ‘During that time, we each developed what was a natural part of ourselves. Now, coming back, we have a wider perspective so we can do things we didn’t even think of back in the day.’
The band have defied expectations with an incendiary and inventive new album, Sol Invictus, in which they have explored new-found freedom by producing themselves in Gould’s studio. ‘When we were kids, there was a producer in the room with us, but now it’s just us doing it. We don’t need anybody else: it’s empowering. Hypnotic and gothic, we’re coming back to where we were with our first album: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Roxy Music. Then Patton being Patton, there’s crooning, screaming, with a bit of soul underneath it all. We’ve always taken strange influences and smashed them together.’
This mini-tour will be the first chance to hear Sol Invictus live. ‘We have chaotic shows,’ says Gould. ‘We invite chaos, it actually becomes normal after a while. Your threshold for insanity goes up a little.’ (Henry Northmore)
HIP HOP EARL SWEATSHIRT O2 ABC, Glasgow, Mon 8 Jun
It’s hard to believe that five years have passed since Earl Sweatshirt rhymed about sticking trumpets up girls’ butts on his debut mixtape ‘EARL’. Then, he was just 16 and his own cheeky bottom was about to be packed up and sent off to military school in Samoa. It was like some sort of Bill and Ted gag, but for real.
Unlike the wacky and at times tedious hi-jinks of Odd Future’s head honcho Tyler, the Creator and co, Earl (real name Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) has always been an anomaly within the camp. This cherub-like dark horse in a pack of dayglo-hooded wolves is usually armed with the darkest lyrical themes and the most complex rhyming schemes of the bunch. With his long-awaited and acclaimed debut of Doris back in 2013, featuring heavy hitters such as the Neptunes on the desk, the mystery of Earl was unravelled with an accomplished and well- adjusted record overall. Slightly matured, it was still snotty enough and straight-up bizarre when it had to be.
Two years on and he’s dropped perhaps his most minimal and retrospective set of tracks to date, aptly titled I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Here, he is grappling with fame and subversion at still a pretty tender age. Earl Sweatshirt does have stuff on his mind though: he’s a thinking kid's rapper without falling into the backpack multi-syllable gibberish that a lot of ‘alternative’ rap still wallows in. (Nick Herd)
ELECTRONIC FINITRIBE Poetry Club, Glasgow, Fri 5 Jun; Central Hall, Edinburgh, Tue 9 Jun
When Edinburgh’s electronic dance pioneers FiniTribe returned to active duty in 2014 with a set of remixes of their 1980s acid anthem ‘DeTestimony’, it marked the low-key resurgence of one of the most eclectic operations to ever emerge from a club culture. FiniTribe emerged from Edinburgh’s post-punk scene in 1984 to release material through Wax Trax, One Little Indian and FFFR, also subverting the nursery rhyme ‘Old MacDonald’ to wind up the ubiquitous hamburger joint en route. Irvine Welsh declared himself a fan: ‘more than any other act, FiniTribe defined my love of dance
music and provided the soundtrack to my social life. These weren’t the songs I grew up to, they were far more important than that; they were the songs that I refused to grow up to.’ Since their 1998 album, the more downbeat Sleazy Listening, former member Philip Pinsky has become a successful composer for theatre, and the current lineup of fellow originals Davie Miller and John Vick is now known as FiniTribe With A Finiflex Production in a nod to their old studio base. Upon their return, they've played with fellow clubland auteurs 808 State, and are steadily
becoming key players in an underground scene personified both by Glasgow’s Poetry Club and by Edinburgh’s mixed-media night, Neu! Reekie!, where they'll share a bill with Young Fathers and Andrew Weatherall. Like Weatherall, Miller and Vick are constantly reinventing themselves to remain a vital pan-generational force of experimental beats produced to seduce to. (Neil Cooper)