Dublin

As the tagline of Guy Maddin's 2007 'docu-fantasia' masterpiece, My Winnepeg, proclaims: "The truth is relative". This is the message being broadcast this evening by Luke Haines – former lynchpin of both The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, and perennial misfit of British (anti-)pop – in unison with much-loved Dubliner Cathal Coughlan, the driving force behind oft-missed local heroes Microdisney and The Fatima Mansions. Having been introduced to one another by journalist Andrew Mueller, the pair decided recently to form "a modern rock combo", taking their thematic cue from a mythical collection of holy manuscripts known as The North Sea Scrolls.

Upon arriving at Leeson Street's thronged Sugar Club, we are greeted by a startling image looming from the screen at the back of the venue's stage: it's a picture of one Jimmy Saville (recently deceased, of course), as well as former boxer Frank Bruno and a shell suit-wearing Peter Sutcliffe (aka The Yorkshire Ripper). The latter two are shaking hands in what must surely rank as one of the oddest pictures you're ever likely to see. As we rub our eyes in confusion, the potential meanings behind the image start to get under our skin, and what first appeared innocuous slowly takes on a more sinister tone. As we discover across the course of tonight's gig, this exposing of the mundane as the downright strange and unsettling is the very essence of The North Sea Scrolls.

The show was originally written for and performed at last summer's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Having drawn rapturous responses from audiences and critics alike, it was then decided that TNSS should be brought out on the road proper; fast-forward a few months, and this Sugar Club performance follows a similarly 'revelatory' outing at Cork's Triskel Arts Centre the previous night.

The whole set effectively works as one complete piece, with overlapping themes building from one song to the next before it all unfurls rapturously at the end in one big sonic hug. As for the songs themselves... Well, quite a lot has been crammed into the fourteen bruisers that constitute the bricks and mortar of the show. Pop culture clashes semi-chaotically with the past throughout to tell us how things actually were. No, really.

From 'Broadmoor Blues Delta' to 'Mr Cynthia', it soon becomes clear that this is a history not created by the fevered minds of conspiracy theorists, but rather one that laughs in their faces. Heck, if you're going to rewrite history, then why not have some fun doing it - right?

The aforementioned 'Broadmoor...', sung by Haines (the pair alternate vocal duties all night), tells of how, having been certified cracked at the infamous psychiatric hospital, failed kidnapper Ian Ball was subsequently approached by none other than Beelzebub himself. This blinged Northern Lucifer (Jimmy Saville R.I.P.) somehow managed to 'fix it' for Ball to trade places with his namesake in the indie band Gomez. The song's refrain of "Gomez, Gomez..." draws a wryly satisfied laugh from the attentive audience.

Coughlan's 'Mr Cynthia', meanwhile, apparently alludes to how Sir Oswald Mosley ruled Britain during the '60s, and recounts how his Minister of Culture, Sir Joseph Meek, placed John Lennon under house arrest for fear that the star's progressive views on politics and the world in general could have a damaging influence on Britain's impressionable yougsters. In the absense of our cultural hero, it was his first wife Cynthia who went on to become a celebrated modern thinker.

These are the mere beginnings of the twisted and often hilarious tales that have been set loose by The Scrolls. The song 'My Mother, My Dead Mother' is seemingly about the last Royal Wedding - only, in this barbed version of history, William is in fact marrying his own dead mother, Diana. History101 this ain't.

There's even a mention tonight for the master of Irish conspiracy theories himself, Jim Corr (guitarist in The Corrs), and it's quite apt that this dwarf of the mind should be shown up here. Joining paranoia king Jim are the crime king Martin Cahill and even the prog-metal band Hawkwind, who are seen at one point transporting The Scrolls from Ladbroke Grove to Norfolk in a hot air balloon.

Each number receives its own spoken-word intro from Mueller, a device that not only proves laugh-out-loud funny on several occasions, but also serves as an interesting way of informing first-time listeners about the ribald subject matter on display.

Musically speaking, the songs are unmistakeably the work of the two main performers, but this union has upped the playfulness quotient considerably. As with much of his recent solo output, some of Haines' work here could (almost) pass for stand-up comedy.

Other highlights include 'The Angel of The North' and a song that could/should be called 'I'm Falconetti', concerning as it does the death of popular radio DJ Chris Evans. The ubiquitous jock actually gets burned at the stake, his dying vision being that he has somehow come to inhabit the body of iconic actress Maria Falconetti (from Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc). Perhaps surprisingly, in this version of living Evans is depicted as being a fairly wise figure... Perish the thought!

The performances given this evening are universally excellent, with pathos-ridden cello accompaniment coming from Audrey Riley. A rousing singalong brings the North Sea Scrolls experience to a close, with lyrics projected onto the screen behind the band. We're then treated to a Coughlan classic in the shape of 'Singer's Hampstead Home' (from his Microdisney days) as well as an equally wonderful brace of Haines' own making: the inimitable 'Leeds United' along with 'Georgous George', a typically madcap missive from his latest LP, 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of The 1970s & Early '80s.

Given the conspiracy-soaked post 9/11 climate we now live under, where rain cannot fall without The Mossad's hand being seen behind it, tonight serves as a timely reminder that, if anything, what most of these New World Order theories lack is a dose of imagination. Jim Corr could do worse than ask Messrs. Haines and Coughlan for advice the next time he wants to get on the telly. The North Sea Scrolls certainly beats a night with the Corrs hands down.

Go here to view a gallery of Colm Kelly's photos from the gig, and here to read our recent in-depth interview with Luke Haines.

Reasons to be cheerful: it’s Saturday night, we’re in out of the rain at a seated show, and we're about to be served two prime anticon. acts reinvented for our listening pleasure. Not too shabby really.

Opening tonight’s Button Factory show is Dave ‘Serengeti’ Cohn, who delights the early arrivals with stripped-down renditions of songs from his wonderful Family & Friends album. With minimal accompaniment (Doug from WHY? on piano and a drum machine, basically), he leads a crowd singalong on album standout ‘California’ and provides humorous interludes aplenty with a series of impromptu recorder solos: “I just bought this thing, and I still don’t know how to play it”, he bluntly admits at one point.

Headliners WHY? then take to the stage, and it’s clear from the offset that the Cincinnati collective are in flying form. Frontman Yoni Wolf – tonight dressed somewhere between Woody Allen and Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters – bellows “You people are awesome!” as he and his cohorts kick into updated versions of ‘These Few Presidents’ and ‘The Vowels’ from 2008's Alopecia LP. The acoustic band consists of Doug McDiarmid sat behind a Steinway grand piano; Yoni's brother Josiah manning a drumkit and bass simultaneously (I dare you not to be impressed); and his sister Liz on snare and precision-tight backing vocals.

This evening’s set is mostly made up of brand new material, save for a few choice cuts from Alopecia and its follow-up, Eskimo Snow (somewhat curiously, there isn’t a single note played from their mid-noughties masterpiece Elephant Eyelash). Thankfully the calibre of new songs does not disappoint: ‘White English’ sees the band at their experimental alt-hop best, while ‘Untitled’ soothes with perfect four-part harmonies and unusual rhythms. In-between songs, Yoni repeatedly declares his love of Dublin, jokingly remarking how he's “only seen one black person since I’ve been here.....and that was my friend, Dave Serengeti!”.

The biggest cheer of the night comes when Wolf(s) and co. launch into a pounding rendition of ‘The Hollows’ - and sure, it wouldn’t be a seated gig in Dublin without an over-enthusiastic lone dancer up the front. There's no doubt there is still a lot of love for the anticon. stable on these shores and, judging by the high standard of tonight's previews, hopes are very high for the new WHY? record.

Yoni Wolf photo by Sasha Bond - go here to view a full gallery of her shots from the gig.

It’s been a long wait for a second album from Miracle Fortress. The band, essentially a vehicle for Montreal-based songwriter Graham Van Pelt, was shortlisted for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize on the back of their excellent 2007 debut Five Roses, and it's taken four years for a follow-up – the similarly impressive Was I The Wave?, which has just been released on this side of The Atlantic through Republic of Music – to appear.

By comparison, this second full-length is notably more beat-driven than its often dreamy and summery predecessor; much like his compatriot Dan Snaith and the evolution of his Caribou project, Van Pelt has in recent years made a deliberate move away from sunny psychedelia and towards the dancefloor. The reference points to be found in Miracle Fortress' fresh material have changed accordingly: some of the tracks on Was I The Wave? carry the same clean, polished synth-pop sheen that compatriots (and recent tourmates) Junior Boys have built a career on honing, and in a live setting the tight, anxious grooves of these new tunes sometimes hark back to eighties giants Depeche Mode and Talking Heads – the latter perception aided by Van Pelt’s endearingly nerdy, nervous disposition, which puts this observer in mind of David Byrne.

What a treat, then, to discover that the accompanying live show is every bit as meticulously prepared as the album’s carefully layered compositions. The problem faced by many one-person projects – and, indeed, by any performers that rely heavily on electronics – is that the dynamism of the music is frequently lost onstage, resulting in the performance coming across as fatally static; the effect can be one of looking on as someone plays along on a laptop. Van Pelt sidesteps this problem in a couple of ways: firstly, by having drummer Greg Napier expertly bash along with the digital beats that underpin the new material, which adds some much-needed energy to the show; and secondly, by looping his guitar lines and using a bank of samplers and drum pads – meaning that he is effectively playing electronic instruments in real time, as opposed to simply pressing play on a backing track. It certainly helps that he has a way with a melody, as well as an obvious love for shimmery electronic textures, all of which combines to make his songs hover in a kind of floating, ecstatic mood – a very lovely end result indeed.

Van Pelt proclaims himself delighted to be back in Dublin, which he dubiously labels “the best city in the world”. Cynics to a man, tonight's audience are rightly sceptical of such talk (“I bet that’s what you tell all the girls”, the wag next to me mutters), but as the evening progresses his dedication to his songs shines through, and it soon becomes obvious that his enthusiasm is genuine. Rather unsurprisingly, the set is frontloaded with new material, of which the moody 'Tracers' and new single 'Miscalculations' stand out. The overall impression is of a much more sharp and focused project than listeners familiar only with Five Roses might expect, and it's a feeling that's reinforced by the brevity of the show (forty-five minutes tops). On a Sunday night, however, nobody's really complaining, and the audience reaction at the end leaves no doubt that Van Pelt has made his point.

Check out a selection of Sasha Bond's photos from Sunday night's show at Crawdaddy over here.

“How does that old song go?...”

As a document of a band falling apart, it’s hard to top Mercury Rev’s 1998 opus Deserter’s Songs. Beset by intra-band conflicts and personal problems – the departure of founding member and lead singer David Baker was still a fresh wound, while stories of Jonathan Donahue’s near-fatal heroin habit were legion – the group decamped to New York’s Catskill Mountains to record what all concerned assumed would be their last album. Up to that point, The ‘Rev had released three long-players over the course of a decade that, despite critical praise, had sold about twenty copies between them; no one had any reason to suspect that album number four would be any different.

Fast-forward thirteen years, and the band are in town to give a track-by-track, in-the-flesh run through of an album that not only brought them “back from the brink”, but was also responsible for altering the musical vocabularies of many who came into contact with it. For this writer, it remains the record that steered him away from the increasingly dying embers of Britpop (although I do still have that cassette of The Bluetones’ second LP somewhere…) and on to the cosmic Americana highway. More than that, though – and like a disproportionate number of truly great albums – it sounded like something the band simply had to make.

It still does to this day, in fact, so it’s with a mixture of excitement and slight trepidation that we take our seats tonight. Can they do it justice? Is asking them to regurgitate an album with so much baggage attached not a little too close to the bone? What if Jonathan can’t hit those high notes any more? Luckily, over the course of the next hour all these questions and more are swept away.

Sure, Donahue’s vocal chords may strain somewhat on opener ‘Holes’, but the sense of occasion makes up for it as he intones the song's now-deeply ironic closing line: “Bands, those funny little plans that never work quite right.” ‘Goddess on A Hiway’ and ‘Opus 40’ – both of which, along with ‘Holes’, have remained live staples down through the years – prompt spontaneous dance-offs to break out across the fully-seated audience; it’s the less frequently-aired numbers that threaten to steal the show, however: ‘Endlessly’ is every inch as serene a slice of chamber pop now as it was thirteen years ago, while album-closer ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’ amazes us all by still sounding so fresh and vibrant, its vaguely Balearic bounce not a million miles away from latter-day Animal Collective. But it’s ‘The Funny Bird’ – a song that Donahue introduces as “a metaphor for the band” – that really dazzles: a wailing, distorted beauty on which renowned producer (and former bassist) Dave Fridmann’s presence is most keenly felt, and the song that most openly wears the scars of its authors' troubled past.

Throughout the performance, various reminiscences are aired – most memorably a tragi-comic tale of master tapes being left behind in a taxi – and we’re wryly informed that Deserter’s Songs “paid for one or two trips to rehab.” And then, before we know it, it’s finished, prompting Ragged Words to instinctively reach for the repeat button.

What we get instead is a celebratory encore that includes a cover of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’ along with ‘The Dark Is Rising’ from 2001’s All Is Dream (a spiritual successor to Deserter’s... in this fan's view) and, bringing us bang up to date, a white-light motorik storm through ‘Senses On Fire’, one of the band’s most recent singles.

New material is rumoured to be on the way, but for now this victory lap feels both well-deserved and well above the plodding, going-through-the-motions nostalgia rock that certain 'middle-aged' bands are guilty of peddling. It may not have been the original plan when the band retreated to the hills all those years ago, but it definitely looks to have worked quite right.

Photo by Mark Earley. To view a full gallery of his shots, go here. 

At a time when guitar-based instrumental music on this island is in such rude health, it's only natural that that genre's electronic cousin should start to pick up the pace and follow the fine example set by celebrated vocal-less locals like And So I Watch You From Afar, Enemies and Adebisi Shank. It could well be argued that Solar Bears presently make up a similarly-promising triumvirate along with Hunter-Gatherer and Toby Kaar, with all three acts either in the early stages, or just about on the brink, of garnering attention beyond these shores.

Whatever about the strengths of John Kowalski and Rian Trench on record, the Dublin-via-Wicklow duo would surely be the first to admit that, as a live undertaking, they are still very much paying their dues. Tonight is in fact one of the Planet Mu-signed pair's first proper 'gigs', and their bass-heavy opening set is a more solid than spectacular affair. The straining guitar samples and stuttered drumbeats of 'Neon Colony' draw punters away from the front bar and into The Workman's' main room, and there's an interesting-sounding new tune on which the duo let their shoegazing tendencies off the leash; on the downside, it can sometimes be a case of 'name the influence' - be it Boards of Canada, John Carpenter or M83 - as slickly-assembled tracks like 'Crystalline (Be Again)' and 'Forest of Fountains' end up sounding slightly derivative in a live setting. There's also the lack of audience interaction, but it's not like SB are the first (or last) electronic act to be found wanting on that front.

Will Wiesenfeld (aka Baths), on the other hand, brings no shortage of personality to the stage. There's a refreshingly naive giddiness to his stage manner (on the eve of tonight's gig, he had tweeted "My only impression of Ireland is from 'P.S. I Love You'"), and it's an endearingly unself-conscious quality that also shines through in his music.

The bulk of tonight's hour-long set is culled from last year's slow-burning Cerulean LP, and album highlights like 'Indoorsy', 'Aminals' and 'Lovely Bloodflow' - the last of which you can watch below - are rapturously received. The only minor low-points seem to come when Wiesenfeld abandons his customary falsetto: a handful of tonight's tracks suffer from feeble, unconvincing vocals and/or scatty, erratic bleeps that seemingly strive towards aping 'the Warp sound' but end up in IDM-by-numbers territory. Minor gripes aside, it's an assuredly entertaining set littered with high-points: the cosy cerebral pull of 'Maximalist' and, in particular, 'Plea' are stronger than ever this evening, the latter's echoing "please tell me you need me" refrain sounding almost anthemic as it bounces off the venue's walls. Who says you can't sing along to a guy hunched over a laptop?!?

To view a gallery of Fiona Diffley's photos from the show, go here. Below, meanwhile, you can check out Soundblob's video interview with Will Wiesenfeld, conducted only a couple of hours before the gig. There's also video footage of both artists in action on the night courtesy of Sasha Bond.

SOLAR BEARS /// PRIMARY COLOURS AT THE BACK OF MY MIND from Sasha Bond on Vimeo.

SOUNDBLOB presents BATHS from Sound Blob on Vimeo.

BATHS /// LOVELY BLOODFLOW from Sasha Bond on Vimeo.