Shabazz Palaces – Madam JoJo’s, London – Live review

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

Photography: Matt Wash

Shabazz Palaces are packing heat. But few would have thought that their inaugural show in the UK would have sweat dripping from the ceiling a mere few songs into their set. The release of their debut album proper, 2011’s Black Up, was something of a loaded gun forced to hip hop’s temple. A rude awakening for a genre that has, in recent, sat back on its laurels and subscribed to a formulaic routine of chartable hits and resulting pop icons. The Seattle-based outfit held a mirror to its peers and questioned their integrity and myopia while offering something different in return – a visceral, listener-focus record that was as much informed by jazz’s freeform movement and expression as hip hop’s heaviness and flow.

And similarly to their record, their live show is focused, lean, muscular and progressive. From the opening snaps and loping beats of ‘An Echo From The Hosts That Profess Infinitum’, their slow and queasy analogue sound is equally as dark and dense as it is luminous and light. Palaceer Lazaro on the mic taunting the hip hop “Kings at leisure time”, “Who do you think you are?” repeatedly with his battle cry.

Better known as Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler of former Grammy-winning act Digable Planets, Palaceer has found a new path fronting Shabazz Palaces’ leftfield leanings. And with Tendai Maraire in cohort, their unity and sense of direction through a set of darting and disparate sounds is mesmerising. Little about their music will even cusp the mainstream sphere of listening (which is part of its overriding glory), and something Palaceer acutely points out amid the oscillating, low-end bass whomps of ‘Free Press and Curl’: It’s “Catchy yes, but trendy no.”

But in hop hop’s current sea of mediocrity, Shabazz Palaces are floating on a slipstream of artistic integrity. With psychedelic beats for paddles and chatting poetic breeze for flow, the audience struggle to bounce in time with their off-kilter nuances, but can’t help but nod in agreement with their crusading direction away from convention. Again, a consensus of arms going up with the outfit’s rhetoric during ‘Youlogy’: “Let me make a toast with champagne to all the years that thuggin’ went mainstream, where stars rise and fall like organised regimes.”

Shabazz Palaces are packing heat. But the only thing that they are unloading on are the doors to hip hop’s perception and pedestrianism in a very brilliant way.

Death Grips – Old Blue Last, London – Live review

Originally published: NME

Hip hop has always been about selling out. It’s part of the game. But 2011 has caught many of its big hitters with their pants down, fingers lifting from the till and filling their trunk with easy money and own self-worth. With Jay-Z and Kayne West’s ‘Watch The Throne’ flatlining, the record’s artillery became solely that of its alliance’s notoriety – two key players that have helped shift the hop to pop, commercialism and cash over credibility.

While these heads of state have taken their eye off the sovereignty, the genre has seen reluctant messiahs like Tyler, The Creator stepping forth to preach from the gutter and claim its crown. But California’s Death Grips spot frailties in all of those that have declared rank and royalty. They’re not here for the taking of authority and thrones – they are here to rob from the rich and sodomise their unholy remains.

Their street-like demeanour is not simply confined to that of the lyrical mania that lashes from MC Ride’s acerbic tongue – he is merely the one wielding the axe with which they sonically bludgeon. What drives his psychosis is the hybrid noise that Flatlander (production) and Hella’s Zach Hill (drums) infect with their musical malady: horrorcore, IDM, black metal, industrial, futurism, post-techno. As a unit they are muscular, compact, concise and cutthroat; a by-product of the streets of Sacramento from which they have survived, scraping at a loaded barrel of macabre influences and infirmary. Their debut mixtape entitled ‘Exmilitary’ (a free download) pulled an incendiary trigger on something new, fearless and soulless in the same vein as HEALTH, Salem and Odd Future.

Bare-chested with a penitentiary physique, the lawless MC Ride rips and curls over their bastardised sound with a masochistic and depressed minefield of lyrical shock therapy. From self-assessment in the Charles Mansun-inspired ‘Beware’ (“I am the beast I worship”), to the prison cell screams of ‘Klink’ and political corruption in the klaxon-driven ‘Thru The Walls’, Death Grips are as energised and awe-inspiring as the sub-atomic particle which they grasp and rasp at in ‘Takyon (Death Yon)’. Death Grips are fighting a war of attrition, and they are holding a shotgun in the face of all of those opposing.

Beirut – Brixton Academy, London – Live review

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

Photography: Sebastien Dehesdin

It’s a wonder how Zach Condon’s Beirut has become so popular with the general public. With his music drenched in influences ranging from Mexican and Balkan folk to French chanson, it’s hardly the stuff that you’d think could strike a populist chord, let alone garner enough support to sell out Brixton Academy. But the band’s three-week tour of the UK — their first return to the isles since their biggest show supporting Arcade Fire during the summer — has seen Beirut’s esoteric sound greeted with open arms by those seduced by its strange tongues and alluring sentiment.

It’s precisely these qualities with which Condon embraces the audience right from the start, opening with ‘Scenic World’. “When I feel alive I try to imagine a careless life, a scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking,” he warbles, his vocal not so much sung into the mic as beyond it and onto some higher, idyllic plane illustrating a woozy nirvana. Buzzing like bees around a pint glass with excitement, the crowd offers a chorus of drunken grunts and groans as it sways in time.

Beirut’s third full-length album, The Rip Tide, has seen Condon return with a direct, more conclusive sound that still pulls at the thread of its quirky, brass-led predecessors. Its influences and outlines are more polished and absorbable, flirting with pop’s ease of attainability, yet maintaining all the nuances for which the band is famed. The likes of ‘Sante Fe’ and ‘East Harlem’ sit like snug compatriots alongside the far-flung references of ‘Postcards From Italy’, ‘Nantes’ and ‘My Night With The Prostitutes From Marseille’; Condon appearing more at ease on topics closer to home than the cryptic and perhaps fanciful world in which first crafted his career.

Although little is said between the songs, the music’s rhetoric is engaging enough in its own right. Not that Condon would have noted the whites of everyone’s wide eyes staring at him throughout: instead, he chooses to look down at his shoes, shoulders arched like a child being told that they’ve been misbehaving. Even so, the Santa Fe-born singer exerts a Pied Piper-like influence over band and audience alike, spearheading the clarion call of the brassier sections with his trumpet, and steering the vocal melodies and harmonies of the six-piece like a crooning David Byrne.

Touching renditions of ‘Goshen’ and ‘Carousels’ carry a raptured crowd into the encore. But as the band departs at the end of ‘The Gulag Orkestar’, and the lights go up, Zach remains with his ukulele in hand. His eyes coyly evaluate the room for a brief second before he clears his throat: “I’m not ready to leave you all just yet.” And with a soft thrum, ‘The Penalty’ begins, his vocal filling the auditorium and the glazed-eyes of all those in attendance.

Grimes – ‘Geidi Primes’ – Album review

Originally published: NME

Despite the esoteric veneer of this bedroom-born debut, Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) has packed ‘Geidi Primes’ with enough ideas to make for an instantly accessible and intimate listen. Blending genres like paints on a palette, the Montreal-based artist’s chameleonic approach sees her switch between oriental pop (‘Sardaukar Levenbrech’), chillwave (‘Zoal, Face Dancer’), and post-rock (‘Venus In Fleurs’) with attentive ease. But it’s tracks like ‘Feyd Rautha Dark Heart’ and ‘Avi’, where the 22-year-old cavorts in a similarly darker and beat-driven vein to Zola Jesus and Austra, that Grimes’ celestial vocal and her ear for a hook really draws you in.

Grimes – The Haunt, Brighton – Live review

Originally published: Clash magazine

Images: Stephen Fourie

When you buy fish and chips in Brighton, you are sent away with a warning: “The seagulls’ll have that, lad, if you’re not careful,” explains the assistant, who looks like he has used the chip fat to craft his sleek hairstyle. I’m but a third of the way through my delightfully battered lunch when I take to the pier, stepping onto its frangible structure and into what can only be described as a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’. Shrieks of “Mine! Mine! Mine!” descend from above, and in one fatal swoop and a flash of white and grey feathers, my food is being taken out to sea. The grimy, briny bastard.

Montreal-based Grimes, aka Claire Boucher, then, is something of an aural saviour to my ambrosial robbery. The 22-year-old’s 2010 debut album ‘Geidi Primes’ has been re-released via No Pain In Pop, and is packed with more ideas than a government-based think tank; the difference being that Boucher’s work – although appearing esoteric on the surface of its pop patina – is as instantly accessible as the likes of Nite Jewel and Destroyer with whom she cuts a similar cloth.

Stood in front of a desk that props up a variety of recording, looping and sound-manipulating devices, Boucher is academic and well-rehearsed in her delivery. Circling the mic in front of her mouth like an X-Factor contestant awkwardly biding their time, she reaches ethereal and angelic vocal highs amid the pre-recorded beats that she drops at the flick of a switch. With the likes of ‘Zoal, Face Dancer’, ‘Rosa’ and ‘Caladan’ being sonically stitched into one another tonight, Boucher’s efforts are as intoxicating as a lilting lullaby.

Azari & III – XOYO, London – Live review

Originally published: Clash Magazine

Images: Stephen Fourie

The last time Azari & III where in the capital they were supporting Friendly Fires’ pre-release show for their sophomore album ‘Pala’. Little attention was paid to the dance act on the night, performing early doors to a meagre crowd following the few pieces of web-based hyperbole at the time.

Returning with their eponymous debut album in the can, tonight’s performance by the Toronto-based quartet is met with baited breath by a burgeon crowd of hedonists bouncing off each other like bees in a coke can. The buzz is understandable – and palpable – as their take on tried and tested house music stands above the vacuous bleating that the genre has often produced as a whole since its heyday.

But it’s on a live-scale that Azari & III come into their own, as the production duo of Dinamo Azari and Alixander III reel the crowd in with ‘Manhooker’ and cut them loose with ‘Hungry For The Power’. The temperature and entertainment value of their set is turned up furthermore by the confident and outlandish stage theatrics of Fritz and Cedric, a vocal-pairing that demand more attention than two queens bickering over the last feather boa and stilettos in Soho.

Their nostalgic yet dynamic take on Nineties house is all consuming, and their comparisons to the likes of Hercules And Love Affair are well deserved. Bass-driven tracks like ‘Lost In Time’ and ‘Manic’ are intertwined with syncopated beats and swirls of synth to make for a hard and heavy flowing set. Stripping down to their trousers and torso, Cedric and Fritz grope and grind a throbbing atmosphere with set finisher ‘Into The Night’, putting the ‘amp’ into their unabashed camp performance.

The Horrors – York Hall, London – 17/6/2011

Originally published: Clash Magazine

Images: Natalie Seery

There is something quite apt about The Horrors’ choice of venue for tonight’s airing of their new album ‘Skying’. The world famous East End boxing hall that has stood since 1929 was threatened with closure in 2004, only to survive thanks to investment and a new direction. The Horrors, who were dropped by Loog Records after poor sales from their 2007 debut ‘Strange House’ (a chaotic and clumsy record that thumbed blindly at rock music’s sharper edges), would return with their second album ‘Primary Colours’ in 2009 to a critically acclaimed reception and a Mercury Music prize nomination for their efforts.

One theory is that they let out the seam of their jeans by an inch; another is to do with the album’s all-star production (Craig Silvey, Geoff Barrow) and creative team (Chris Cunningham); another is that they stopped doing photo shoots and went away and did their homework, instead of being branded a style of content act. Whatever they did, it worked, and The Horrors continue to flourish with their third album ‘Skying’.

And as the sky rings every last droplet out from the clouds above, The Horrors open with ‘Changing The Rain’ – the opening song of their new album. It’s a ruminating track with a steady Stone Roses swagger, cascading synths and a rousing key change that seeps seamlessly into ‘Scarlet Fields’. Any peace that it may have instilled into the audience is stolen, though, as the alarm bell ring of ‘Three Decades’ rushes into action at the snap of a snare drum and the sound of guitars being swung around like chainsaws.

Tracks from ‘Strange House’ are left firmly locked in the cupboard, as The Horrors continue to distance themselves from their style over content debut. Instead, their set is dedicated to the best of ‘Primary Colours’ and the auspicious future of their new material.

It may be a future that they look into with a sullen, forlorn expression, but their music continues to step forward with a maturing gate. ‘Endless Blue’ opens with a lysergic-glaze of soft percussion and simmering synths, only for a Stooges-esque riff to smash headlong into its stillness like a hammer on glass. Similarly, the juddering pace that electrifies ‘I Can See Through You’ takes on a vicious life of its own.

Until ‘Skying’ has time to seep into the public’ consciousness, it’s the likes of ‘Sea Within A Sea’ and ‘Mirror’s Image’ that continue to animate the crowd on the night. But with ‘Moving Further Away’ building and brooding for an exhilarating eight-minutes of experimental orchestration, The Horrors continue to prove they are on fighting form and unified over their musical identity.

Bonjay Interview

Bon Dieu! Multicultural Toronto is the perfect dancehall for Bonjay

Photography Erika Wall

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

Sitting on a park bench in Highbury Fields, London, Bonjay vocalist Alanna Stuart waves her hands in an excited, preacher-like fashion. “Bonjay! Bonjay!” she cries in a smooth Caribbean lilt. At the same time, a schoolgirl runs by pushing her father supportively on his bicycle as he snakes down the path at a cautious speed. They both pause for a brief second and giggle at each other’s actions before carrying on as normal.

“Bonjay is Grenadian slang for ‘bon dieu!’, which means ‘good god!’ in French,” she explains of the dancehall duo’s moniker. “It’s something my family would say when they were excited. It just seemed to fit.”

For all the hand-flapping and hyperbole, Toronto’s Bonjay are something to get excited about. With multi-instrumentalist Ian ‘Pho’ Swain at the production helm, the pair’s UK debut, double A-side single ‘Stumble/Creepin’, takes their dancehall roots and firmly plants them in today’s bass-laden electronic scene.

They met in their hometown of Ottawa in 2005 at an open concept night Pho helped put together called ‘Disorganised’. Held in the loft of an Italian restaurant in the capital’s China Town, its eclectic mix of music and tempos brought an equally all-embracing crowd eager to be part of it. “It was the perfect breeding ground for the Bonjay sound,” acknowledges Pho.

“It wasn’t the warmest of receptions, though,” Alanna explains of their introduction.

“Well you did break the cardinal rule of DJing,” continues Pho, “and that’s not to interrupt the DJ while mixing.”

At the time, Alanna was making a fast exit from the commercial R’n’B world where she was tipped to be the new darling of the US urban airwaves. “I guess I wasn’t quite urban enough and my name wasn’t quite quote-unquote ‘black’ enough,” she explains.

“I was driving home from school and heard the song on the radio. Then the announcer said: ‘That was ‘Ring, Ring Call Again’ by Donna Boogie.’ I was fucking mortified, because who the fuck is Donna Boogie? The management and producers had changed everything about who I was.”

Having left her label, the pair became intent on making more forward thinking, collaborative music, and the ‘Disorganised’ parties acted as perfect playground for their formative steps. Their party pieces including covers of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ ‘Maps’ and TV on the Radio’s ‘Staring at the Sun’, where Pho’s bionic dancehall riddems held the dancefloor while Alanna’s St. Vincent-esque vocals captured hearts.

Their move to Toronto in the fall of 2006 brought an end to the ‘Disorganised’ parties, but “Bonjay started to take on more of a life of its own,” explains Pho. Between work, studies, and their time at their campus community radio stations, they went on to produce two EPs (2008’s Gimmee Gimmee and 2010’s Broughtupsy).

“Toronto was a pretty dull place until the immigration explosion in the sixties,” explains Pho. “People risking it all to move there and start their lives again. And I guess we took inspiration from that.”

Alanna continues: “Because it is so new, there is room for you to create something for yourself and call it your own. It’s the perfect place for Bonjay, and as a place it wants to support that.” Sounds like the kind of place where you would want to learn to ride a bike.

Dark Dark Dark Interview

Dark Dark Dark saw the light by jacking it all in for music

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

If their name were anything to go by, Minneapolis’s Dark Dark Dark would have you believe that their music was of a gloomy disposition. You imagine that if you uttered those three words in front of a mirror one tempestuous eve, all manner of unearthly spirits would emanate from the grave to haunt you for the rest of your listening life. Luckily, this is only a half-truth.

“The name started out as a joke — for the kind of darker folk music that we were playing — and we just took it to the extreme,” explains frontwoman Nona Marie Invie. “There is a lot of this kind of music coming out of Minneapolis; there’s a real community of amazing unsigned artists whose music is really accessible. And there are a lot of opportunities to play with different performers and to be inspired by them.”

The word ‘community’ comes up a lot in conversation with the softly spoken Nona and her co-frontperson Marshall LaCount when discussing the troupe’s background. They met in Minneapolis five years ago and then, they say, “travelled around collecting people that we got along with”. Soon, individuals of a similar disposition from as far away as New Orleans and New York, as well as from Minneapolis, came to form the sextet as it stands today. Then their local community became a global one as they promptly skipped town and wandered the continents searching for influence and education.

“People hold on to their college and day jobs and say, ‘I wish I could go on tour and travel but I can’t,’ and we just went and did it,” says Marshall. “We essentially volunteered to not see any money for four years, not live anywhere, only play music, never get a job, never do this, never do that, and we have forced it to work. We don’t have a mortgage or children; we sacrificed on it, and gambled.”

The gamble paid off, it seems, and Nona maintains that the band are content with their nomadic life. “The body and mind can’t be stagnant,” she attests. “We meet so many amazing people on the road and get to hear so many bands that we certainly wouldn’t get to hear if we had stayed home.”

Experience and a sense of spiritual freedom weigh heavily on their second album Wild Go (debut The Snow Magic was released in 2008, also on Supply And Demand Music)  a breathtaking mix of pop, southern swing, traditional American roots music, chamber folk and Eastern European sounds. It’s an esoteric blend of influences gathered like kitsch souvenirs, only to be arranged to form a singular, evocative whole.

“We’re bigger hippies than we appear,” says Marshall. “We just tend not to dress and act like it.”
 Is that why you, Nona and cellist Jonathan Kaiser appear naked on the front cover of the album?

“I think the meanings are layered and open to interpretation and I appreciate that,” he responds. “I like that it is revealing and intimate, but not too much so. I know people see it as daring and I also appreciate that, but I don’t see it myself. I think we bare a lot more than that in our music.”

Koreless Interview

It’s hardcore mixing studies with producing, says Glasgow-based producer Koreless

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

Lewis Roberts, aka Koreless, is the latest producer looking to find an alternative discourse to dubstep’s classic boom boom clap womp womp aural signature. “I’m trying to not pigeonhole my music into anything particular, like post-dubstep,” he says of the deep and captivating 2-step sounds that are found on his debut double A-side single release ‘4D’/’MTI’. “But I see it as a kind of electronic soul… Well, something like that, anyway.”

The 19-year-old Welshman says his previous attempts at forging a musical path under the pseudonym of Nadsat (the fictional argot used by the teenagers in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange) led him to “pretty much rip-off Burial”, although he still cites the mysterious producer as a major influence: “Listening to him on all the different levels that he works at got me excited, and made me want to have a bash at music myself.”

As Koreless, he has found a sense of space and ambience within his music that transcend general preconceptions of so-called post-dubstep, and stand in perfect contrast to the sounds he remembers from his hometown of Bangor: “Poor reggae, bad drum’n’bass and really dodgy, wobbly dub nights.”

Roberts now resides in Glasgow where he’s a second-year student of naval architecture (“I come from a long line of naval architects,” he jokes). And it’s in Glasgow that he’s discovered a city open to his musical ideas, not least since Rustie and Hudson Mohawke’s headed south to London. “I tend to concentrate on my music for a week and then my studies for another,” he explains. “But it’s pretty mad in the last few months. It’s a nice little scene here where everyone is together, speaks to each other and shares ideas.”

The immediate future looks more than promising for the young upstart and the capital has already been calling with the likes of Gilles Peterson, Benji B, Huw Stephens, Jamie xx and James Blake all giving him his props. There’s also forthcoming collaborative work with Sampha and Lone in the pipeline, plus he’s looking to get his head down and finalise a live set in time for summer.

With regards to making an album, Roberts says: “I’ve been listening to a lot of jazz — not as a direct influence, but more for the rhythms and movement… I’m looking to make a flowing piece of musical unity, where it can take the listener somewhere.”

Now that would be a discourse with a difference.