‘Wedlock’ Capsule Promotions’ Japan Red Cross Benefit with Bargepole + Fickle Twin + Backwards + Dreams Dream the Dreamers @ Hare & Hounds, 30th April 2011
Well done Capsule for this alternative Royal Wedding event and the corgi-orgy lampoon posters all in aid of Japan Red Cross. Now, cognisant of Capsule’s deference to the slightly unusual, if not downright deranged promotional ethos, tonight’s Jacobean Tragedy for the ears came as no surprise, although a warning for the feint-hearted might have complied with at lease some elementary heath & safety issues. Ah well, the play’s the thing where in these four bands unleashed the subconscious of the sting and, crying havoc, let slipped the dogs of nu-punk, minimalist psyche-core.
Act 1. Dream Dreams the Dreamer’s ‘chaotic noise orchestra’ was a challenging, dysfunctional sonic apocalypse. A quintet with a lady violinist, whose sound mix level might have benefited from being turned up to 11 given that the two drummers approach to life seemed comparable to James Dean driving a Reliant Robin blindfolded, snorting Ketamine off Anne Widdicome’s left buttock, over a cliff in to a vortex of napalm. Pushing the envelope definitely. Atonal, cacophonic mayhem commenced after the ‘vocalist’ in a folksy check shirt, delivered a dirgeful mantra that might’ve been a Mezzanine’s call to prayer or that he’d caught his dick in his trouser zip. So difficult to tell sometimes. During this he trembled in an other-worldly trance transfixation, or maybe it was his misgivings regarding that fly-agaric mushroom soufflé he bought from the Amish take-away earlier on. Again, the exploitation of the ambiguous is this band’s forte. The ‘serious’ vocals commenced with a fearsome, cathartic bellow that suggested that phase-two of the said mushroom’s delusional toxicity was kicking in. I was minded of Gyorgy Ligeti’s ‘timelessness and micro-polyphonic’ score in Kubrick’s seminal ‘2001’ when the lunar monolith was sunrise triggered to emit its screeching beacon. It was a comfort, of sorts. Capsule promotions do this to you. No stage set list, just a ‘Best Wishes for the gig’ card – lol, Edvard Munch.
Act 2. Backwards. ‘A heathen gang who draw in your borders and folds them out, one bass disintigrates in the other’s repetitious friction then feigns attention, the drums collapse, the drums lock, the words are a strange frame, drunk songs for the drunk, music for young lovers, music for fuckers music to polish brass too.’ Precisely. Their twin-bass, no lead guitar, sludge-core grudge against humanity, are fronted (affronted?) by an Oi-boy, butcher’s apron blue shirt and braces mustachioed maniac with the deranged demeanor of an egg-bound constipate who’s just discovered that he’s the bastard spawn off-spring grandson of Oswald Mosley. Possibly.
He uses a bar-stool crammed with distortion pedals to vent his spleen to alarming effect and with such agonised, dystopian grating one suspects his vocal muse came from having watched a You Tube clip of camels copulating in a sand-storm without recourse to a pot of KY jelly. Ever tried opening one with a hoof? Pain in the arse, as I discovered.
Monstrously wonderful band. And a name check for Polar Bear’s Nathan on cluster-bomb bass. Again, no discernible set-list on stage, just CSI frightening body fluids.
Act 3. Fickle Twin: ‘Big reverb drenched riffs, vocal screeching of a madman…thundering rhythms.’ Disengaged from performance orthodoxies (and any grasp of vocal phrasing, timing, in fact of anything) the singer created both his own mosh-pit and private Hell.
Wisely given wide-birth by the wary crowd, indeed behaving as if was about to give birth, he seemed to renege on the ‘rhythms’ aspect of their sclerotic biog. Somewhat against the ethos of the evenings iconoclasm they adhered to the conventional drums, bass and lead-guitar. Not that it mattered particularly because their use of them was more interpretational than guided by any notional approach to music as we used to know it. And I’m duty bound to say I had a disturbing suspicion that one number was, God forbid, close to becoming a ballad! The Horror…
Act 4. Bargepole: ‘…a cheese-grater to the ears…self-destuctive, self-deprecating…they are their own worst enemy.’ Enema, was more my first point of reference. In the ‘take a bath with your toaster’ spirit of the night their amphetamine ‘Sabre Dance’ nihilistic sound and fury was just the tonic for the evening’s closure.
Sailing close to Wedlock apostasy there were some discernible speed-metal riffs and frenzied picking techniques recalling Screaming Blue Messiahs and Soundgarden. What I mean is, there might have been tune! How could they? Brilliant night, well done Capsule. Kids today, eh?
No set-lists. Someone ate the crayon.
Review – John Kennedy
Photos – Katja Ogrin