Whelans

If a textbook were to be written instructing buzz bands on how to stand out from the Hype Machine crowd, Sleigh Bells would surely deserve a chapter to themselves. After Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller became one of the most talked-about bands at CMJ ‘09, they could quite easily have found themselves being dismissed as just the latest hipster fad. After all, the noise duo (a) were from Brooklyn, and (b) looked unquestionably cool. Luckily for them, their songs - ferociously loud and infectious - more than backed up the pre-2010 tipping, while the debut album - "instantly invigorating and enormously enjoyable" - led to some deserved end-of-year list-troubling. Throughout it all, the pair’s live show has always been touted as their finest attribute, and in what amounted to little more than the thirty-two minutes their debut spans last Friday night, Dublin finally got a chance to see just why.

The pair really didn’t need to play for any longer; if anything, in fact, the set's brevity simply added another cool point to what was an incredibly cool performance: half an hour of Miller lurching about the stage and Krauss utterly owning every square inch of the room. There was little or no messing about, as bruising single ‘Infinity Guitars’ kicked things off, before ‘A/B Machines’ and ‘Tell ‘Em’ - two more cuts that tested precisely how sound Whelans' foundations were - were each given an early run-out. Sleigh Bells clearly shop at the same ‘Massive Amps R Us’ store as No Age, but still had time to give the venue's shattered soundsystem a break with the deliciously melodic ‘Rill Rill'. Set-closer ‘Crown On The Ground’ then proceeded to blow the shit out of those speakers once more, bringing to an end one of the finest live displays this writer has witnessed in quite some time.

Sleigh Bells have the lot: the songs, the album, the show and - in Krauss - a candidate for the best frontwoman to emerge since Karen O. Slightly less intense than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs leading lady, Krauss is nonetheless every bit as magnetic tonight, particularly on the heavy breathing of ‘Rachel’ and heavy screaming of ‘Treats’. She’s Lykke Li with killer tats, a combination A&R men everywhere can only dream of being able to bottle. Or at least teach. Class of 2011: take note.  
 

Usually whenever Ragged Words walks into Whelans of a Sunday afternoon, it’s to retrieve a jacket, an iPod or a large slice of dignity left there the previous evening. Today, though, we’re here for Foggy Jam .01, the first in a series of all-day gigs bringing a top-notch lineup of loud, sweet and local acts to the Wexford St. stronghold. This evening’s bill is so choc-full that a large part of the dancefloor - the corner where the men’s jacks used to be back in the day - has been cordoned off as a storage space for the bands’ gear. And that’s before tonight’s headliners No Age wheel in some mile-high amps (more on them later). There’s very little to complain about, then, particularly with punters only being charged twenty quid in exchange for nine hours’ entertainment.

Alas, 4:30pm proves just too early a start for most of the hard drinking class heroes among us, and so Ragged Words can’t really tell you whether Hipster Youth’s one-man bedroomtronica sank or swam early doors. But given that Teenage Elders - the free-to-download debut from young Dubliner Aidan Wall - is one of the best opening gambits we’ve heard all year, we can safely assume he nailed it.

So too, for the most part, do fellow Dublin buzz-stirrers Squarehead. Mixing ‘Popular’-era Nada Surf slackerdom with pleasingly ramshackle doo-wop harmonies, the trio show why they’ve recently become a name to drop around Camden St. watercoolers. Old-new songs ‘Axes of Love’ and (especially) ‘Fake Blood’ shine brightest among a clutch of three-minute gems that suggests there’s surely a strong debut EP on the way.

Next up is Norwegian songstress Silje Nes. Undeniably pretty – both in looks and sound – tonight she and her pair of bandmates share well over a dozen instruments between them (arm-scratch solo, anyone?). Unfortunately, as with Nes’ recent Opticks LP, ‘pretty’ is about as far as you can go to describe tonight’s brief set. One frantic outro aside, it’s hard to really be stirred by her floaty folky numbers. “It’s all a bit too ‘FatCat’,” observes a friend at one point, and that about sums up her overall appeal.

By stark contrast, and much like their home of Dalston, Sub Poppers Male Bonding don’t really ‘do’ pretty. Instead, the well-travelled three-piece unleash a mean and dirty half-hour set – one that’s even more formidable, in fact, than their already-pretty-thrilling debut Nothing Hurts. They’re tight, loud and confident in equal measure – and a rapidly-increasing crowd laps up their volleys of frenetic noise pop (emphasis on the pop), with lead single and track-of-the-year contender ‘Year’s Not Long’ proving a particular crowd-pleaser.

You don’t need to be a BitTorrent-addled UPC customer to know that Male Bonding ain’t really that loud compared to tonight’s main special guests HEALTH. The L.A. natives unleash an undeniably thunderous noise wherever they go – but honestly, it’s one this writer doesn’t really get. There’s just something a bit too sterile about their more extreme, Zoothorn-driven numbers, while some of their more palatable, synth-heavy moments tonight – this year’s ‘USA Boys’ being a prime example - bizarrely end up straying a bit too close to Linkin Park territory for our liking! Do I appreciate the skill, the mastery of noise? ‘Course I do. Can I enjoy it? Not quite.

Mice Parade frontman (and anagram fan) Adam Pierce is clearly enjoying himself onstage half an hour later, however. We reckon he may have availed himself of a complimentary Guinness or three – maybe he misread those posters as Groggy Jam? – but the smiles on the faces of him and his ludicrously talented bandmates are refreshing to see. Their set actually turns out to be a little hit-and-miss – a bit of an oddity given the overall consistency of Pierce’s work – but when it does hit, it’s pretty great. Watching the peerless HiM/Codeine and now Mice Parade drummer Doug Scharin in action is a serious pleasure too.

But back to those towering No Age amps. Randy Randall and Dean Spunt must have a bet on with fellow Californians HEALTH to see who can burst the most eardrums tonight because fuck, do these guys make a racket. The duo – now augmented by a Dom Joly-lookalike keyboardist for live outings – have never sounded louder. While this writer is yet to be completely won over by new album Everything In Between, we can say with certainty that No Age are hitting their prime as a live force. Most of the audience, meanwhile, are soon hitting each other, as a serious moshpit starts to kick off down the front. The rest of us stand further back – those more advanced in years complaining of sore backs after standing for almost nine hours – as old reliables like ‘Eraser’ and ‘Teen Creeps’ merge seamlessly with rasping newies like ‘Life Prowler’ and ‘Sorts’. The band are loving it as well - as they almost always do – and, given that it’s fast approaching 1:00am, the latter parts of the set have the feel of a traditional No Age after-show party. For those in the crowd still wrestling hangovers from the weekend’s Hard Working Class Heroes festivities, the inaugural Foggy Jam ends up feeling like one hell of an after-party in itself. Roll on Foggy Jam .02!
 
 
As well as noise aplenty, there was also no shortage of photo opportunities for our snapper Mark Earley over the course of the evening. Head on over here for a bumper gallery of his Foggy Jam shots.

Ambling onstage with a bath towel wrapped around his head for no particular reason, Will Oldham looks every bit the anti-rock star. With his beard trimmed back to a handlebar moustache that wouldn't look out of place in the WWE, he opens the show with ‘That's What our Love Is’ from his most recent album, the brilliant (despite what others might say!) The Wonder Show Of The World, and the first thing that strikes you is just how amazing his voice sounds live. Having never seen him in concert before, this writer was expecting a moody, maudlin performance, but Oldham can really put on a show, tonight delivering each line of every song with a passion and charisma that borders on the theatrical.

The set consists mainly of tracks from The Wonder Show…, the record he made with his backing band tonight, The Cairo Gang, and lead guitarist Emmett Kelly really has a knack for lifting these songs with fluid and virtuosic playing. He's the perfect foil for Oldham's bewitching songs, and it's easy to see the connection that the two have onstage together.

The highlight of the night arrives in the shape of ‘Go Folks, Go’, the last song before the encore; another track lifted from The Wonder Show, it is essentially a plea from Oldham to the enraptured crowd to live their lives to the full and never give up. Amid songs of love spurned and lost, it’s a touching moment that has most of the Whelans crowd singing along to every word; one fan near the front has even brought her own red paper hearts, which she throws onstage at Oldham. The band finish with a rocking cover of ‘Price Of Love’ by The Everly Brothers, and Oldham thanks us again for coming, before telling us all how much he loves this venue. Judging by the crowd’s reaction, it will be too long a wait until he plays here again. It really was a…‘royal’ performance (sorry!).

Tonight’s support act Hulk consists of Dublin-based producer Thomas Haugh and guest Adrian Crowley; Crowley provides guitar atmospherics, while Haugh fiddles with all manner of intriguing-looking instruments to create an elegant amalgam of electronic and acoustic sounds. “Atmospheric” and “ambient” are two difficult words to avoid in describing this music, which veers from tranquil to creepy. It’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that, despite their quality, Hulk should be playing in a church or soundtracking a silent horror movie rather than serving as a Saturday night warmup act – the lack of rhythmic propulsion and obvious song structures means the crowd’s attention inevitably drifts as the set progresses.

Bradford Cox, on the other hand, is given a delighted reception. He arrives on stage, though, to announce that he’s going to play the show sitting down “cos my stomach hurts”, and goes on to reveal that he is high and jetlagged, which makes his subsequent behaviour a little more understandable. His long, rambling monologues on Ireland, his family’s racial history, his mother’s use of Youtube and his chemically messed-up state threaten at times to derail the performance entirely; mostly, though, things manage to stay just on the right side of messy.

Cox plays all of tonight’s show on his own, which at times gives the impression that we’re all observers in his bedroom; with only an acoustic guitar, harmonica and a box full of pedals at hand he does a fine job of recreating and reinterpreting his own introspective and intimate material, most of which is taken from new album Logos. He creates an impressively layered sound for just one man, looping his guitar and vocals to lend songs like 'My Halo' and 'Criminals' much of the enveloping, reverb-laden presence they have on record, and presents a downbeat, shoegazey version of his summer pop jam 'Walkabout'. A few missed chords and a lack of dynamic subtlety sometimes betray Cox’s spaced-out state, but he never falters for long, and when he brings his (bemused) friend Laura up on stage to watch him cover an Elizabeth Cotton song, it’s a fittingly eccentric end to an enjoyable evening. 

Every once in a while, something really special comes floating into your musical headspace. Once this happens, you pretty much have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to snap up every record that your new infatuation releases, trace their catalogue right back to the video of the school concert they sang in when they were six and run up to strangers on the street like an escaped lunatic wielding an iPod and screaming “You have to check this band out, seriously, just listen for a minute, I have to let the world know about this”. Ok well maybe the last bit’s a step too far but I can think of worse offences than kindly informing passers-by of Phosphorescent’s existence.

Judging by the size of the crowd at a seated gathering in Whelan’s at the end of an unusually tropical bank holiday Monday, it seems that Phosphorescent are still, after five albums, largely unheard of this side of the Atlantic. The fans that they have accumulated have arrived early and are visibly salivating as they sit zealously on their stackable plastic chairs. Seated gigs in Whelans always seem a bit alien to me. The venue is great for a loud, sweaty, elbow-in-the-face kind of night but, for more intimate performances I’d rather somewhere aesthetically and acoustically suited, like the Sugar Club for example; Whelans with seats feels a bit like a concert in your school hall. Adding to the school concert vibe was support act Sam Amidon. The Vermont-born left-field folkie ambled on stage and, ignoring the microphone, proceeded to belt out a bizarre folk song, punctuated by some invisible banjo strumming. Uncomfortable silences ensued. As it turned out though, young Mr. Amidon proved that he does in fact have a voice and a flair for string instruments, once the awkward clapping had subsided and everybody just leaned back in their seats and relaxed into it.

Phosphorescent’s accomplished vocalist, Matthew Houck, has long been credited with not merely being the lead singer, but the glue that holds the band together. True, as vocalist, songwriter and founder, Phosphorescent is undeniably Houck’s vehicle but, from the moment they appear on stage together, you realise just how integral each touring member is to the group. They open with ‘A Picture of our Torn Up Praise’ from 2007s critically acclaimed album Pride. In fact, most of the songs performed tonight are taken from Pride and Phosphorescent’s latest release, To Willie, which was recorded as a tribute to Houck’s idol, Willie Nelson. The Nelson covers are played in succession and while Houck’s cracking vocals on songs such as ‘Too Sick to Pray’ and ‘It’s Not Supposed to be That Way’ are definitely his own, the underlying impression that he doesn’t want to contort these songs too much is all imposing. Essentially, there are two ways to deal with covering a song. Either you completely mangle it so as it’s undeniably your own unique take on it or you restore it with gentle and delicate respect, not wanting to deviate too much from how the original performer intended it to be heard. Houck chose to go with the latter and in doing so his adulation for Nelson shone through and breathed new life into old songs.

Dressed in worn jeans and torn t-shirts, onlookers would be forgiven for thinking that they’d stumbled across some travelling truckers’ karaoke night but it is striking how harmonious and unified this beardy, sweaty man-band from Athens, Georgia are. Upon returning to their own material, Houck and co. displayed just how adept they are as musicians by playing songs such as ‘Wolves’ and ‘Cocaine Lights’ so tight that you could bounce a coin off them. But the thing that was really infectious here was the sense of roguish camaraderie between the men on stage. Drummer Chris ‘Showtime’ Marine impressively thrashed his way through the set playing, literally, singlehandedly after a recent incident in Paris involving a knife and a beer bottle rendered his left hand bandaged and useless. Houck told the story with good-humoured relish and proceeded to give Marine a dig-out by bashing cymbals and keeping rhythm where needed.

Houck returned for two solo encore songs before bringing his band back on stage. After asking if the crowd had any requests, calls for ‘Pride’ went unfulfilled due to the drummer’s temporarily limited repertoire and as an alternative, the band finished up on ‘South (Of America)’. The perfect end to a perfect June bank holiday.