by
The inaugural Concrete & Glass city-based music and art festival took over East London last week. DiS got involved out there on the cobbles. So entangled in fact that we even had our own stage featuring O' Death, Bodies of Water and Frightened Rabbit (the latter reviewed here). When we ventured around the rest of Jack the Ripper's old stomping ground, we saw some great new music. Here're some of the best bits of what we saw...
Let’s Wrestle**
They may be sloppy, shambolic and occasionally amateurish but it’s difficult to deny that ramshackle London trio, Let’s Wrestle, have a considerable amount of charm to spare. Like a band of piped pipers for whip-smart slackers and bedroom bound dreamers subsisting on a steady diet of popular culture, the hyper-literate trio attract an adoring huddle of like-minded types to the Macbeth tonight (Thursday) as they work their way through fresh numbers and fan favourites from their In Loving Memory Of… EP. It’s an adoration the band repays in kind with their typically messy aplomb and a healthy dose of onstage charisma, and it’s one that’s met with a rowdy sing-a-long as Let’s Wrestle close with their titular, and profanity laced, anthem, ‘Let’s Wrestle’. Our verdict? Brilliant stuff from a bunch of idiot savants.
by Charles Ubaghs
Ludovico Einaudi
The most surreal moment of Thursday night was probably classical composer Ludovico Einaudi’s performance in Cargo. Armed with a Steinway, the Ferrari of Grand Pianos, he played by candle light to a cross-legged audience, who where captivated by the noise he was making and by the visual display (the usual crap, you know, Mussolini, Moses, Egyptian mummies, hieroglyphs etc etc). Used to playing major concert halls - and, ahh, er, um... scoring music for Top Gear - he pounded the ivory like Rachmaninoff with his great pink sausage fingers. The bashing is maybe in an effort to hide the fact that he was just playing the same sequence over, and over, and over again. Perhaps intended as a symphony for Shoreditch, it was a grand triumph of style over substance. by Charlie Gilmour
Anni Rossi**
Whilst lazy comparisons could include Joanna Newsom, Final Fantasy and Regina Spektor, that wouldn't do justice to the breadth of sounds that Anni Rossi gets out of just her viola, throat and foot-stomped suitcase-cum-soapbox. Swampy down-tuned riffs, shrieking harmonics and Philip Glass-like repetitive evolving figures meld with those more obvious reference points evidenced in her octave gliding, cute-but-not-cutesy vocals, creating a genuinely captivating and constantly engaging performance.
by Christopher Alcock
Liz Green
Following on from the bold bow-wielding Anni Rossi, Liz Green’s style is one which gives more than a nod to the American country bluesmen and women of the 1930s and 1940s whilst her own unique, delicately hushed north-western vocal remains endearingly English. The tear-jerkingly melancholic moments are where the subtle combination of finger-picked chords and wistful warbling bypass the ears and cut straight to the heart. Lyrically jovial and blue in equal measures Green retains a nostalgic quality yet a style which is almost entirely her own. by Luke Slater
Mechanical Bride
Having only heard her very slight cover of Rihanna's 'Umbrella' it's little surprise to discover the rest of Mechanical Bride's output to be refined, lo-fi and so subtle it's barely here. What is with us tonight (Thursday, Strongroom's Bar) however, is the spit flecks of Beirut's brass, the folk silhouettes of Bat for Lashes and a voice which sits sweetly between Feist and Cat Power. Whilst not cadaverous, the ghost-like near-nothingness did drift over some peoples heads tonight but the uplifting, relaxing and awing near-mist even brought a smile to A-lister Mischa Barton's face.
by Sean Adams
The Village Orchestra
Seeing as they were invited to play C&G by The Wire, it's of not much of a shock that much of The Village Orchestra's set sounds like an extended demonstration of Cargo's sound systems capacities. The oblique, minimal noodling does pay off though, with the disparate beeps and thuds melding into an interesting groove, albeit one that only one lonesome, pilled up Swede feels any compulsion to actually dance to.
by Christopher Alcock
Telepathe**
Telepathe sound like an indie-electropop group gone horrendously and quite fascinatingly wrong - slowed down, glitched and pitchshifted into an avant rush of sound, their singers still trying to coax a hideously unreceptive audience into some kind of squalid party. Sadly their intricately constructed pop vocal lines are too at odds with the compelling mire of the sound and drones and the party doesn't quite get going.
by Christopher Alcock
TV on the Radio
It's an unfashionably conformist thing to say, but TV on the Radio really are one of the most special bands in the world at the moment. Heralded as the contemporary equivalent to Talking Heads and all that jazz, with their fusion of The Avant Garde Textures and The Big Grooves. Unfortunately tonight, in probably the smallest UK venue that the band have ever played (certainly the smallest London one in many a year) the chin-strokey elements of their sound - mainly the comforting duvet of Kevin Shields-y guitar scree - are played down in favour of the drums, bass and vocals to maximise the movement of tightly packed bodies under this railway arch.
This has its pros and cons - recent single 'Golden Age' is improved, mutating into an evil beast of a track whilst breakthrough track 'Staring At The Sun' turns into dance-rock by numbers. The highlight comes as 'Dirtywhirl' which escapes almost unscathed, its beatbox loop intro caving in under the weight of the drum and guitar avalanche. While it's great to be able to see the whites of their eyes, and as I-was-there-man as this gig is, it's serves as little more than a tease and whets appetites for their next visit.
by Christopher Alcock
Photos by Burak Cingi. If you missed our picutres of Concrete & Glass on Thursday click here and for Friday click here. _
DiScuss: did you goto Concrete & Glass? What were your highlights?
