It Could All Just Fall Apart at Any Moment (Guillemots, Corinne Bailey Rae, The Grates, EPO-555, Mercury Lounge/Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Living Room)

It’s that time of the year, again, when all the anarchy in the U.K. -- and other points east – passes through New York on its south-by-southwesterly trek.  Every band in the world goes to Austin for the festival, and the week before and weeks afterwards we get them coming and/or going.  Fitting everyone in can make for some awkward bills:  Tonight, a JV sun-punk outfit from Australia led into a Brit light-jazz chart-topper; having the #1 record in England means you get off stage by 9:40, here.  The next act entered banging pots and pans; the Danish shoegazer outfit who closed out the night played to a near-vacant room.

*

You know how, in your younger, finger-painting days, you wanted to mix the most rainbowriffic colour ever and all you ever wound up with was brown?

After Chris Martin & Co. sucked everything interesting out of Radiohead’s music and released the remainder upon the world, every song with warm chords and gushy vocals has sounded like the same putrid, useless crap.  It’s all brown, now.  Coldplay, and Keane, and Travis (because shit went backwards, too:  Coldplay is like musical Ice-9), and...  Brown, brown, brown.

Meet the Guillemots (pr. GIL-lee-mots, it’s a type of cliff-dwelling bird), the latest British pop-rock group to suffer from Coldplay’s dastardly Radiohead reduction.  A shame, because they start with a lot of color.  The mastermind behind the group is a man called Fyfe Dangerfield who claims to have been writing songs since he was five.  He’s surrounded himself with a guitarist (“MC Lord Magrao”) from the Brazilian noise scene and a rhythm section (Scottish drummer Rican Caol and double-bassist Aristazabal Hawkes – described in press materials as Canadian, she has a British accent, studied at the New School in New York, and had a devoted cornerfull of Japanese family members in attendance, tonight) with a strong jazz background – mates who share his predilection for pushing boundaries

When you first hear the ‘Mots’ music (From the Cliffs – a collection of singles and songs from a previous EP, I Saw Such Things in My Sleep – becomes available in the U.S. today and is streaming at AOL this week; two other songs are on their myspace), the first thing that you notice is that varied palette – slurred sound effects, beats that, though regular, refuse to be normal, songs that stop and take sudden left turns without heading all the way out to Progville.  It’s weird, and winning, at first.  Distinctive.  But bubbling underneath are bland brown melodies, and the more you listen, the more they suck the hue right from Dangerfield’s songs.

Live, though, you get to watch them mix the paint, get to watch it swirl.

They marched into their first U.S. gig banging tin cups and blowing tube whistles.  Dangerfield looks a bit like Brendan Benson would if he gave a shit; friendly but nervous when addressing the crowd, he is confidently eccentric while singing.  His voice can be cool and Travis-bland, but thankfully he brays and barks and twists into falsettos that look like they might hurt.  He seemed in complete command of his three keyboards, squeezing some accordion sounds here, pounding some Rach out there, but confessed he’d gotten his wires crossed, occasionally.  A toy xylophone mounted on top of one of the bays came loose and fell and he caught it without missing a beat.  If anyone needed a demonstration that it’s Dangerfield’s band, he gave one mid-show by stepping out to the edge of the stage with an handheld keyboard and singing, totally without amplification or accompaniment, a little love serenade to the packed, hushed room.

A spellbinding moment that also proved how much the frontman needs his band.  The song laboriously indulged in picking apart clichés – “I’ve never seen it rain cats,” “they don’t have nine lives,” etc. – went on too long by half and cried out for development.

So thank goodness for Lord Magrao.  He spent the first part of the set hidden under a hood – his t-shirt had a hood – and went at his guitar as if it had done him wrong.  One song stopped completely while he played a Makita solo.   Most of the time he was busy arc-welding din and jangle.  It might have been addition by distraction, but I’m all for it.  Caol and Hawkes – who, giggling behind her upright, tended to mouth lyrics whether she was singing back-up or not – drove it forward with work competent and complicated.

They play all-improv sets, Hawkes said, and I’d love to see one.  I’d rather risk the  garish blotches of overindulgence than drown in brown, and this bunch seems talented enough to match plaids and stripes.  Stay away from the boring radio people, kids, and get weird.

Also there, with pictures: Brooklyn Vegan (1) (2), MusicSnobbery, ProductShop, Sound Bites.

*

Corinne Bailey Rae (myspace) lives at a juncture where smoov R&B meets lite jazz.  It’s a moderately-trafficked, well-regulated intersection.  There are precisely-timed traffic lights and crossing guards.  No one there has ever heard of road rage.

I have no use for this music.  Never before have I had cause to ponder the “Lounge” part of the venue’s name.  Neat trick:  In her first U.S. appearance Rae and her wedding band turned the Mercury into the Sheraton.  The folks next to me were from VH-1; they were all a-twitter.

She’s got a lovely enough little voice; as accurate as anyone could hope, there’s a comforting little purr in there.  She doesn’t indulge in obnoxious, diva-ish runs.  But there’s just no emotional range to her.  Everything’s okay, everything’s fine.  Entirely pleasant.  Happiness never reaches ecstasy, you’ll never be more than baby blue.  Mountains are hills, valleys are dips.  There is only one sexual position.

It’s the audio equivalent of Zoloft. 

In person, Rae’s got an adorable smile; tonight she wore a dress that made her look six years old.  You can’t hate her.  Her CD spent a week at #1 in her native country; her tour dates, there, are all sold out.

Everyone who found themselves thrilled by Norah Jones will be thrilled by “Put Your Records On.”  But then, those people have never really been thrilled at all.

*

Patience Hodgson has never been less than thrilled.  And she’s more infectious than Ebola.

The Grates (that’s The Grates, not The Rakes or The Brakes (or Brakes)), on record (you can stream their E.P., The Ouch.  The Touch. here (then buy); an additional song is at their myspace), sound like dumbed-down, low-rent Aussie Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  Which is, quite frankly, what I sometimes wish the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sounded like.

“Hey there, cool dudes.”  Patience greets the room.  “We’re going to work out, now.”  Hodgson is dressed in an orange sun dress with tiny white polka dots; her socks have Wicked-Witch-of-the-East black-and-white stripes.  She smiles a LOT.  ALL THE TIME.  She talks with her hands, and makes her hands talk to each other.  Sometimes, when she wants to really SING, she raises and lowers a hand like she’s playing a Theremin, like the way that Christina Aguilera person does it.  But she doesn’t sound like Christina Aguilera.  Occasionally she sounds like one of the Sleater-Kinney women, I don’t know which one, maybe Sleater.  Or Kinney.  And other times she doesn’t.

She has the personality of a retarded aerobics instructor.

These are all good things.

They’re a trio, mostly.  Patience bounces about out front while Alana Skyring takes her drum playing all serious and guitarist John Patterson – who smells, Patience wants us to know – does his best to look “rock.”  Occasionally they’re joined by a keyboardist, but no one mentions him, so we won’t either.  It’s simple-stupid music, thank goodness, and has lyrics like “My baby, grrrr, grrrr.”

We Yanks tend to like our punks angry because mean MEANS something.  Sure, Karen O smiles a lot, too, but she also spits n’ stuff.  Grrrr.  Grrrr.  We like our Hannas and Zapatas and Sleaters and Kinneys and Pearls.

“We have one more song before all the real bands go on,” Patience tells us, at the end of her set (Well... almost at the end of her set.  Duh.).  I wonder if she knew that her little imaginary band was more fun then the rest of all the other guys put together.  I hope somebody will tell her that.  And I bet she’ll smile.

*

First the Olympics, now this:  America is no longer the most arrogant nation on Earth.

Denmark has Lars von Trier, Denmark has Jyllands-Posten, and now Denmark has epo-555.  Here is band frontman Mikkel Max Hansen, demanding his spare Mercury Lounge audience move forward:  “We’re trying very hard to please you, so please please us back.”

There was plenty of space to gawk at your loafers, the bulk of the night’s crowd having followed the Guillemots out the door.  The last band on a Monday night, THX1138 had to deal with drowsy eyes and drunken gabbers, and they didn’t always deal well.

In short:  They put out a good bit of sound (myspace); choruses and instrumental wails – the stuff that shoegaze is made of – blew people backwards.  Verses were wan, weak.  Vocals are okay – Hansen sounds a little like Tim Burgess, and keyboardist Camilla Florentz ads some nice hushed harmonies... but they’re best when they shut up and drone away.

The most interesting thing about the group:  The drummer, “Sir” Ebbe Frej, also plays slide guitar.  He ran electronic beats through his laptop, would play his guitar parts then pick up his sticks and bang along with the synthstuff.  Frej also kept his cymbals hovering five feet over his set.  I would have asked him why, but I cut out during what I guessed was their last song.  It might not have been fair, expecting to be engaged after five bands and a long night; Patience, after all, had bounded off long ago.  But I really didn’t feel they were trying very hard to please me, so I took one giant step back.

*

Get Cape.  Wear Cape.  Fly. is Sam.  Duckworth.  A nineteen.  year-old from.  Essex, England.

And that’s enough of that.  Don’t totally discount the odd moniker; though three sentences are a bit much for a one-man band, GC.WC.F.’s music displays both a naïve comic-book worldview and an earnest self-help attitude.  That last sentence was brought to you by the letters E, M, and O.

It’s not emo, of course, but some weird people called DCFC that, too.  It doesn’t help that Duckworth’s songs – he writes electronica-backed folk-pop (myspace) – hang around the upper registers of his vocal range.  There’s a whole generation of kids whose balls never dropped.

It’s his first time in America; his first time outside England, actually.  The Living Room is practically empty.  The biggest group – it starts at four, and swells to seven – hangs around the rear corner; they’re British, and might be his handlers, or friends, or the next band.  There’s a couple up front who seem to be here for the food.  His guitar has been gaffer-taped together.  He’s wearing a tie – a tie with a loose, fat knot that’s pulled to one side, exposing a not-fully buttoned dress shirt.  Over that, there’s a sweater that looks like lint.  He’s wearing corduroys, and puffy sneakers, and three kinds of bed-head.

He’s a little nervous, and a little disappointed.

Duckworth is on acoustic guitar for the whole show; he plays along with his laptop.  The room is empty enough that we all hear the prompting beeps from the computer.  Normally I’d hate this much prerecorded stuff – and I like it better when, for the middle part of his set, he just goes “solo” – but he’s at least got enough presence as a guitar player to get out in front of the playback.  His strumming is fierce, his fingerpicking frantic (if not always exact).

This bird isn’t done yet.  What lyrics I bother catching reveal every one of his nineteen years of never-been-nowhereness.  There are things like “I was stuck in minor chords” and other not-as-clever-as-he-thinks-they-are attempts at self-awareness.  Perhaps his sentiments are vague enough someone will think them universal.

His PureVolume profile mentions “socially motivated accoustic [sic] songs” – and towards that end he covers Billy Bragg – but his own work comes off as so unworldly I’m not sure what he thinks I should be motivated to do.  The boy’s band name, again, might be a clue:  It’s a to-do list, perhaps.  But not a can-do – or should-do – one.

Get Cape.  Wear Cape.  Fly. – Whitewash is Brainwash (mp3)

tags: sxsw  guillemots  the grates  corinne bailey rae  epo555  get cape wear cape fly  

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