So here’s a thing: about 400 years ago fierce panda tried to sign a Long Island band called MY FAVORITE, ostensibly because of a song called ‘Homeless Club Kids’. It was uber cool and super indie, like New Order with a girl singer. Imagine our delight then to discover that four centuries on My Favorite are playing the New Colossus festival in New York just at the precise point we are in town, kicking off a Diary of a Pandaman in North America, like a Top Gear US special only without as many bold attempts to get ourselves shot by enraged locals.
It’s a cautiously bumpy intro at an indie pop night at Arlene’s Grocery as My Favorite start songs, abort them and start again. Let’s hope it doesn’t impact on their strict 30-minute set time eh? They finish some other lovely indie pop songs with a morose undercurrent. It’s going pretty well. They get to the final song but time is very much against them. They say they only have two minutes left. They start the mournful keyboard refrain and gloriously glum guitar from ‘Homeless Club Kids’…and then, on the cusp of the precipice of the vocals they cut the song stone dead and walk off stage. Chorus interruptus. The very worst possible kind.
That crushingly indecent indie disappointment aside, New Colossus is top fun. There are a lot of intense downpours – the 24-second hop from Arlene’s to Pianos entails the risk of a severe soaking – and there are just as many intense indie sorts showcasing their wares, especially from the global shoegazing fraternity, over four nights and a handful of venues on the Lower East Side. Exhibit A comes from Sweden. They are called BOY WITH APPLE and they consist of two boys with no apples and two girls, like ABBA and Lush, and a drum machine, like the Cocteau Twins. Put them all together and you have lavishly sweet dream pop with sugar-spun vocals deadpan bass lines and twinkling electronics. It reminds me of another Scandi band called Morning Star Orchestra, who we almost signed about 300 years ago, but that’s for another time.
Tearing our eyes away from the shoegaze days, HAUSE PLANTS are from Portugal and do that lovely crisp and uneven early MGMT thing, all uplifting grooves and grand synthetic hook lines and massed singalongs from behind massively impressive Iberian moustaches. There’s some Grizzly Bear piano in their super bold set as well, which quite frankly is never a bad thing in the Grizzly Piano’s venue. In the same bolshy back room, Canadian / UK duo SHELF LIVES are fearsomely sassy and strident, with a whip-cracking backing tape, a wisecracking singer, some frantic buzzsawing guitar and lots and lots of screaming. Where the wild ting tings are? Oh, go on then.
Still, in the very same Piano’s venue, LA SECURITE is more Canadian cats who play an excitable indie-dance hybrid which comes across like a fractured Rapture, although never underestimate the exotic allure of hearing French female vocals in the midst of the low-slung Ludlow Street drizzle. Over at the Mercury Lounge CHAII has chundered in from New Zealand backed with keytars and flutes and suchlike. She only landed three hours ago but a sassy, dynamic performance belies any NYC wet lag, propelled onwards by Chaii’s effervescent blend of Neneh Cherry and Annabella Bow Wow Wow. Can we use the ‘sassy’ word again in one diary column? No, no we can’t.
An aeroplane from the rains of Manhattan to the plains of Texas, then: straight after New Colossus the music cranks up at SXSW festival, with six days and nights of partying, tequila and alternative hipster chunterings lurking ahead. There is also intense band bafflement along the way as several acts choose to not play their official showcase or indeed any shows at all, following the revelation the US army is involved in some way in festival sponsorship. The plight of Palestine becomes much more of a talking point than the fight to find the hottest new band within the Austin city limits, which is probably just as well as the new band search is often mightily derailed by the disrupted live line-ups.
It’s an entirely valid concern – especially from the Irish contingent – and not surprisingly it casts a gnarly shadow over much of the week, not least because other similarly politically astute acts literally can’t afford NOT to play, no matter how uncomfortable they feel about being onstage. We quite like the approach of frenzied techno bastards MINAS at the Focus Wales show, who basically say that pulling out would have bankrupted them and, to be frank, we all know who the real frenzied bastards are out there. They celebrate by quite literally starting their own mosh pit.
There are some big names in town, as the likes of Sunny Day Real Estate, Big Boi, Ash, Seasick Steve, Frank Turner, The Black Keys and Dinosaur Jr all slide on by. A lot of the acts still standing at the British Music Embassy at the Sheraton Hotel we’ve covered previously, but a special shout-out must go to ELLIE BLEACH and BLEACH LAB, not least because some cheeky booker has put them side by side on the BME stages – a clear case of some serious Domestos abuse. Southend’s Ellie Bleach is on a solo mission, just herself, her piano and some viciously lovelorn baroque’n’roll songs accompanied by a series of seriously mocking eye rolls.
Bleach Lab is from Aylesbury and we like their sparkling guitar work, the fact they are furiously hungover during their afternoon appearance, and singer Jenna’s excellently doomed attire, all billowing black dress and matching cowboy boots. She’s dressed like a rancher’s weepingly gothic widow in full tribute to the local environs we presume? “Oh, I dress like this all the time at home,” she shrugs, definitely not a coward of the Home Counties.
Anyhow, following the chaotic vibe and the never-ending tips we’re fed quite literally off the streets here is a wee nine-pack pick of the best of the locals from the Lone Star-swigging state.
RUSTY DUSTY (playing at Chess Club) are good old Austin boys with beards and power-crazed power chords and massed harmonies crammed onto a tiny stage. It’s a hoarily hysterical fallout from the mid-’70s, and there must be a gazillion ballroom blitzing bands like this in Texas, but not many of them describe themselves as Acid Americana or have a singer wearing a Descendents tee, I’d wager. Bob Mould and the Silver Bullet Band? Could be.
SNOOPER (at Cheer Up Charlie’s) are from Nashville and proffer giddyingly ridiculous female-fronted punk rock with papier mache and cardboard costumes presumably borrowed from the nearest freaky kindergarten. This is sspeed-happychaos, all thrash and burn hecticness, yet amidst the digital chaos there are some nicely synchronised guitar-throwing shapes like they have crashlanded onto an especially glammy episode of Top of the Pops in 1974.
LIP CRITIC (also at Cheer Up Charlie’s) takes the techno chaos up a good few notches. Armed with two drummers providing relentless rhythmic beefiness, the New York quartet use samplers and vocals to create pulverising industrial grooves with the odd burst of death metal screaming. So far, so Digital Hardcore, but beneath the extreme noise terrorism there lurks a cheeky bratboy charm and a punk sensibility.
PSYMON SPINE (at Empire Garage) do a thumping electro-indie thing with weird feedbacking outbursts. It’s kinda like danceable dream pop, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, with some beefy grooves and boisterous boy/girl vocals. “We’re from a weird land of dragons and rivers and bridges…called New York City.” They have to get the crowd to spell their name out to remember who they are.
HORSE JUMPER OF LOVE (at Chess Club) create a lovely weary alt. rock soundscape with delicate rushes of melody and a splendidly morose underbelly, like Death Cab For Cutie cutting the ice with Eels. The Bostonites are the slowest thing we see all week, providing solemn interludes and a sweetly sad-faced juxtaposition to the sonic overloadings around them.
FCUKERS (at Mohawk) are fruity post-post-everything Brooklynites with a punkoid cowboy bassist some lush happy house piano and a delightfully understated singer called Shanny who doesn’t so much sing as breathe some words over the rampant electronics. Have they started with a cover of Beck’s ‘The Devil’s Haircut’? Yes, yes they have. It takes two sets to realise that Shanny actually sounds like Wet Leg. All of both of them.
DUST (at Swan Dive) are from Australia and partake in off-the-wall punkoid antics with flanged prog interruptions howling power chords and the odd saxophone. At their best, they fly with a three-guitar assault hurling itself around somewhere between The Strokes and At The Drive-In. They have that perfect couldn’t-give-a-toss approach, but at the same time, they’re tighter than tight and even provide a flash of Fontaines DC in the final melodic dash.
HOTEL MIRA (on the 13th Floor) are ballsy and bluesy fun with a cheeky Canadian swagger. They come across as almost anachronistically straight ahead at something as hipster-driven as SXSW, where weirdness abounds, but in singer Charlie Kerr they have a denim-clad rock demon in the spirit of Michael Hutchence as well as in the crowd rolling around the floor. You get the feeling one support tour in front of the drooling Kings Of Leon lions would propel them skywards, and that is meant as a compliment
The last paragraphs then, which relate to the opening paragraphs and therefore tie this entire diary together, like a pink bow on a small puppy: about 200 years ago fierce panda tried to sign a Canadian band called KIWI JR, primarily because of a song called ‘Salary Man’. It was supercooled and uber indie, like a half-amazed Pavement gone a little mental on the melody front. After the NYC abandonment of our favourite My Favorite tune will lightning strike twice?
No, no it won’t: two-thirds of the way through a powerpopping Swan Dive set fizzing with intelligence and the kind of twists and turns the North American collegiate rock circuit once delivered so casually ‘Salary Man’ appears, all exuberant janglings and devil-may-care vocals and shimmering coda, and it sounds utterly terrific. No abrupt farewell, no chorus interruptus. There is an American gigging God.
PANDAMAN’S USA SPECIAL TOTAL: 104
