Gig Review: Flipron, Betika, Animal Magic Tricks, Bob Burke, Creepythinguy - Solid Air @ 60 Million Postcards, Bournemouth

Reasons why I prefer listening to records to meeting people or going to gigs: 1) it’s easier to check your memories of a record against the document itself; 2) you don’t have to chat loudly about banal topics whilst listening to records (or at least I don’t, as I almost always listen alone); 3) records don’t change or disappear simply, elide into memory, as humans and events do, their unchanging nature my only source of metaphysical comfort (knowing that at least survives, even if I won’t.)

None of this is to discourage gig-goers, merely a mark of personal preference (or obsession.) These words, amongst other things, are designed to mark the passing of events, not just to record what happened. It all sounds a bit sad and overly heavy, but I’m feeling both at the moment. I’m leaving relatively soon, and native melancholy is getting the worst of me, even at gigs. Everything reminds me of everything else: as Creepythinguy began playing at 60 Million Postcards, crouched over his acoustic guitar, the sheer steeliness of his attack reminded me of Derek Bailey (not coincidentally, as I’d been listening to his superb solo document Aida earlier that day). Creepythinguy's songs seem almost rabidly to mine the same seam of melancholia that the best of late 80s/early 90s American indie (Throwing Muses, Pavement) made their territory. In fact, you can hear the influence in his warped American inflections, the landscapes that are scattered throughout his songs (desert vistas, highways and the motels and forests of telegraph poles that follow them), the distant traces of blues (including the borderline – though obviously fantastic – misogyny of one song about one a woman who “should be locked away” for breaking our narrator’s heart; his guitar technique even carries a faded echo of Bukka White’s percussive techniques.) Bent awkwardly over his guitar to the mike, contorting with each pounding slash, it was intermittently harrowing and powerful stuff, even though his set was cut short by technical set-up time.

The remarks at the top here are almost entirely for the benefit of the following fact: Animal Magic Tricks (pictured) played what is likely to be her last show in Bournemouth. Seeing her play at The Portman Green Room last July was a weirdly formative experience, one that encouraged me in conducting my few experiments in music writing, and encouraged me in the belief that not all was lost by living in a backwater like Bournemouth. I had thought that her set at Thursday’s Club Anemone would be her last performance in these parts, but she was added to the bill at the last minute at this show. It’s probably appropriate that I can barely remember more than temporally-displaced fragments of her set, and that my camera largely refused to take pictures worthy of the name – that it would all disappear as arbitrarily as it appeared. The damaged, oneiric textures of her music are, nowadays, so bound up with my own ideas about memory and death that it’s hard to write about: the rattling chains of ‘Cannibal I’ are the spectres of a past we’d prefer to scrub away, her beautifully smeared poetry evoking everything it would be impossible to articulate: “Growth’s a slow hero/In death’s advance/I needed your patience//And how…” Her laughing introduction of ‘Smallish Hooves’ as a song “I made with a man in Canada” raises a smile every time; her voice perfectly wrote its slow, frayed cod-exotica beat, her hands (air-(?))drumming happily at a bongo drum in her lap. The Handsome Family song ‘Weightless Again’ was more tragic and spooky than ever, the weight of a life cursed with desire hanging on every note; ‘The Rush’ is charged with magnetic power, its elemental forces bent on annihilation – “the water/Comes rushing up like a mad lover/Who wants to kiss you/But you want your mother to save you from” – framing a voice dancing along its oddly happy rhythm, stretching itself out almost as if to highlight its own fragility, as breath that will itself one day cease. She closed – I know this much – with ‘Poor Heart’, an astonishingly beautiful piece, the world’s most melancholy keyboards floating over rhythmic shots of static like radio transmissions from the ether; she looked, to me, almost crushed as she sang, eyes down or closed, straining forward to the mike: “I wish I had something left in my hands/To feed a little warmth into your cavities.” You do, Frances. Thanks.

Moving on – and I thought immediately afterwards “God help whoever has to follow that” – Bob Burke came on next, plugging in nothing but an acoustic guitar. His MySpace page describes his work as “J. Taylor vs. Led Z. vs. Sly S.”, the kind of formula to send a shudder down the most catholic of pop fans’ backs. Unfortunately musicians can’t choose their critics, and I just happen to have an almost pathological distaste for rock music; especially rock forms played on ‘acoustic’ instruments, as if that adds extra ‘soul’, the authentic hobo touch. That’s not to say I find Bob Burke's work offensive, merely that it does next to nothing for me. Strumming his acoustic at an almost uniform railroad pace, along chord progressions almost genetically engrained they’ve been so used over the course of time, he sang lyrics in a mid-Atlantic semi-twang about… um… y’know, relationships and stuff. All very unpromising material, although he did include a song about riding the rails, which included some marching moves whilst he played the guitar. That’s all I really have to say.

Betika can never fail to stir me from a torpor; no matter how good they are on record – and they’re pretty damn fine – it doesn’t come close to matching up to the full 7-wo/man assault they unleash live. Their unceasing purveyance of sweet, corrosively dark and poisonous pop was underscored and bolstered by an unstoppable groove from drummer Richard, bassist Will and Dave’s incessant guitar pounding, and Martin and Carolyn’s hyperactive percussion and horns, limbs shooting back and forth like typewriter arms. And if that weren’t enough, the massed vocal attack and keyboards of Hubcap and Lexi – who never lose their frowns of concentration, no matter how manic the music gets – should finish the job. ‘Dormitor’, (I think) ‘The Castle’ and ‘Bob Hope’ stomped like little children, ‘Hatred’ set off bouts of spontaneous shouting over its odd, almost cabaret lurch. By the time they finally rolled around to the end, I wondered whether the audience or the band would collapse first. Fine, as always.

And, um… I’m not entirely sure I can say the same about Flipron. There are occasional moments where I wonder whether it might not be better to eliminate from my consciousness all those bands about whom I’m ambivalent, about whom I’m obliged to form an opinion of some sort – a kind of musical Cultural Revolution if you like, with said bands as the ruthlessly exterminated petit-bourgeois. Flipron would be the first band against the metaphorical wall. As their set dragged on toward the hour mark, and my shoulders started to sag under the effort of remaining upright, I wondered what I had gained from the experience that I couldn’t have got from Later With Jools cunting Holland, boogie-woogie piano and all (and what really is the use of a three-tier synthesiser if you’re not going to use it properly, i.e. to stir up as much face-lashing noise as possible?) The plodding tempo and frighteningly competent (but not exactly virtuoso) playing allowed for some interesting textural shenanigans – introducing an accordion and lap steel as main instruments on a couple of songs – and the frontman’s “hobbit offspring of Marc Bolan” shtick – crouching on top of boxes to get at the mike, crumpling up his body, working his guitar in a downright onanistic fashion, hissing lyrics about zombies, three-headed dogs and fantasy casinos (and none of them were as good as that list of topics suggests) – was occasionally enough to make me wheeze out a guffaw. But apart from that, I’d rather have kept them from my memory – we can only preserve so many things. Philip Larkin wrote (with many disclaimers), in ‘An Arundel Tomb’, “What will survive of us is love.” I don’t know if I’m capable of such a thing, but I hope that all of these words will go toward preserving the right things. After they’re gone.

Dan Barrow