Glug Loops
Saturday, November 17th, 2007
Can’t really put it any other way, but Spiritualized at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem were pretty rubbish overall. Jason Spaceman seems to be several things, on the basis of this performance: (i) autistic; (ii) slightly tone deaf and consistently out of key vocally; (iii) limited to roughly 3 chords on his accoustic guitar; (iv) determined to ruin his own better songs with a distorted PA and a poor vocal mix. Disappointing really, but the majority of the crowd continued to go wild. I think they could have come out on stage, hit a bucket arhythmically with a stick, and many in the audience would still have whooped for more. Only positive was visiting the Apollo, former venue for the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Supremes, etc.
Far more entertaining and tuneful were the Fiery Furnaces at the Hiro Lounge. The brother Friedberger appears to take himself too seriously, but is certainly talented and is more able to form a sentence while talking to the crowd than the Spaceman above. Sister Friedberger has an intriguing stage presence and did justice to their attention deficit disorder song structures. She uses a scatter gun approach lyrically. And she showed retraint while not shoving the lens of the NY Times photographer who stood at the front and set off a flash about a foot from her face two or three times a minute for the first half hour. I would have growled at the unkempt looking tosser. Seeing the Furnaces live helped cement their latest album, Widow City, in the ears, which is the most listenable of their long players that I’ve heard so far.
In an attempt to flavour birdw0rks rhythms with a different colour, have invested in PC Drummer: a snazzy little software tool that while looking a bit primitive, has a nicely flexible interface for creating “drum kits” and putting together percussion loops. A track featuring a kit made up of the snort of a dog (infamous Rio) eating peanut butter, a gallopping Mao beast stomp, the glug of a Scottish loch, the crunch of crisps, and so on will at some point be forthcoming.
