Last updated 14^th December 2005
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Live

The Angels Of Light; Akron/Family ULU, London 26th May 2005 Okay, here's the usual disclaimer. I'm not going to be objective. In the slightest. Michael Gira's been a hero of mine for many years now, and this was the first time I got to see him live. So forgive me if I don't give it the whole fair and balanced thing in the following review. You've got to hand it to Akron/Family. Considering they are The Angels Of Light at the moment, and they're playing support on the Angels tour, that means, as Mr Gira points out later in the evening, these poor guys have been playing two sets a night for the last six weeks. And they still seem very... hmm, I think maybe "mellow" is the word I'm looking for. Spectacular beards, amiable banter, and a serious lack of consideration for what music "should " be like. They're wonderful. Coming on at times like a lo-fi Flaming Lips, at others like a backwoods Slint smoking a bong with Devendra Banhart, they're actually fairly indescribable, which makes reviewing them fairly difficult. Suffice it to say, they make a wonderful noise, and it's not hard to see why Gira a) signed them to Young God and b) took them on as his band. So, they get about five minutes between sets before the man himself takes the stage. Sitting in a chair, dressed as if auditioning for Death Of A Salesman (particularly apt considering his history, in Swans, of wringing maximum existential horror from dead-end jobs and consumerism- imagine, if you will, HP Lovecraft kicking Ayn Rand's head in) he launches straight into "To Live Through Someone", every bit as beautiful as the studio version, but now with drums. Ah yes, the drums. The new album ...Sing Other People has a famous lack of these, but tonight the Akron guys are in fine rockin' form. And while on CD the lack of drums, once you finally notice it (so rhythmic is the music anyway), seems to add a whole new dimension, in a live environment the drums... well, add a whole different dimension. Gira himself is every bit how you'd want: one minute crooning with passion and anguish, the next flipping out, twitching and screaming like a marionette with broken strings and Tourette's Syndrome. Then turning into your kindly uncle, trading jokes with the Akrons, and telling people asking for Swans numbers to fuck off. Jovially. If "relentless" is the only way to describe Swans, then "intense" is the only word that comes close to summing up this. "Michael's White Hands" (a paean to a conflation of Michael Jackson and Saddam Hussein united into a single savage deity), already a fairly frightening piece of music tonight becomes utterly terrifying, all insistent trebles, growing more and more powerful until the breakdown- "BRING DESTRUCTION! AND BRING THE END! FEED THE GAS INTO MY LUNGS! I BELIEVE IN MICHAEL'S HANDS!!!" I don't mind telling you, I could have done with a bit of a sit down after that, but there was no way I was missing any of this gig. A lot of the new album came out, "Destroyer", Johnny Cash tribute "On The Mountain", a truly powerful "My Sister Said", the Akrons giving the "kill that man" chorus an almost gospelly feel. "How I Loved You" offered up a particularly sleazy "New York Girls"... and we even got a Dylan cover, "I Pity The Poor Immigrant" before the closer, a solo acoustic "I Am Blind". If anyone says he's lost his intensity since Swans, I'll fight them. Right here, right now. Bring it on. -The Deuteronemu 90210 With The Silver Tongue-

Morning Bride; Imogen; Carmen Rosa The Spitz, London 18th July 2005 A balmy, dirty London night finds me climbing the spiral at The Spitz to see Morning Bride solely for this review, or souly for my own pleasure. There is no way that humans can survive long in this heat, or so I imagine. It's raining outside, a slow tease rain that isn't going to refresh so much as make sure my fellow audience members smell damp on top of sweaty. Ah well, The Spitz makes up one hundred fold for their lack of air quality with their super listening quality sound and an engineer who knows which knob does what. Another credit is that I have a little candlelit table, a feature of The Spitz. They don't have enough of them, and I had to move mine to just the right spot, but it's miles better than the usual small time of trying to write while being jostled by people who aren't listening to sound which is unhearable. So on to the music. Band one up is Imogen, a duet of girls next door types singing sweet Folky songs accompanied by the guitar of one of said girls. I don't know, this isn't my sort of thing, still it does take some guts to perform raw like this. The guitarist doesn't sing as well as her partner, who has a lovely voice that sounds quite church trained. The songs are a bit unremarkable, but the delivery is first class and brave. I reckon the lyrics are homemade but I can't remember them. It feels a bit like fifteen minutes have rolled by and twelve songs. For the finale, the girl with the good voice leaves the stage and the guitar player scandalizes "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". I've now lost all sympathy. Now Morning Bride. Starting off with my favourite song of theirs is a good way to begin. "Blue-Eyed Boy" is not only one of the most evocative of their songs, it is a perfect showcase of Mark Pearson's divine wordsmithery. The message, "there's got to be another way of slowing down time/than running backwards all around the world/Hang on and keep the wolves at bay/help is on it's way..." transmits right through my blood into one of hope. It's a catchy song, one I've heard many people sing along to watching the band, one that I've heard someone singing away from a gig, cycling past on a sunny afternoon. My point being that Mark clearly has what's necessary to write a saleable song. But there's more than that, a haunting melancholy behind all that promise of hope and herein we get to what is a gorgeous theme running right on with all of Morning Bride's material. Mark has written and arranged these songs with a craft that most bands miss. Darkness and light, speed and lethargy. Old Blues and Postpunk, right down to dirty Southern Rock and Roll. And it isn't just that these are themes behind the songs, these are themes within each song. With proper minor chord heartwrenching urgency, Morning Bride have found a combination of players which comes on like a chemistry class ready to demonstrate fire power. There's only four of them but they can move a room full of a super varied and super cynical audience to shut up and take notice and call for more. I've seen it with them time and time again, and we're talking jaded audiences, used to everyone doing everything possible to be different, to be other, to be original, to be blasé. A magic happens when Morning Bride plays, an enveloping and indisciminate magic. I've mentioned basist Mark's infallible writing ability; Mark is a poet. Then we have Amity with her gossamer voice looking and sounding truely like a just blessed morning bride. A voice that seems a little delicate but flowers out in the most pleasing way when she lets it. She is beguiling, she sounds like the girl voice in all your best dreams. There's also Jim on drums with his serene Jesus looks, playing tailor, sewing up time to thread everything together. And Fabio on guitar, o Fabio... A man who has clearly absorbed the lessons of many masters before him and ever so slyly will flow from gentle strokes to true "Freebird" style rocking out so that one hardly notices before one is swept up in near lighter waving frenzy. His decisive understanding of Blues guitar causes my ears to crane round corners to see if I really am in backstreet New Orleans. That is a feeling I could not do without. The boys sing along as well and no one is upstaged or featured but the band as a whole glimmers. In fact both Fabio and Mark have fantasticly strong voices and create gliding harmonies with Amity. More poignancy in "This Place Is No Place For Harbouring Angels", which is, not to gush on, such a strong show song it lets a listener conjure up beautiful day dream visions of the failed perfect love affair. To be fair, I don't even know all lyrics, but the general mood of the tune allows for that, for one to make up one's own story and to let Morning Bride soundtrack it. The rollercoaster of slow/soft anticipation and then fast/loud requition really estimates the true gut pull that love is. On a new song, "Stepping Out In Front of Cars", I'm reminded of this other pure power behind Morning Bride which is that they do so work together, play off each other, and each song is dependant on the band as a unit. "Replica" is another crashing good example of their ability to interact and switchback roles. Mark sings alone, just when you crave him to, and then Amity carries this crafty tune along to the place just inside your head where it will stay playing for days to come. Again it's the twisty lyrics, "Who loves you baby? Who really cares?" with such an inflection of sarcasm and bitterness, matched up to the smack in the face rise of "Bang!Bang! Lay down and play dead..." that I want to store the song for when I really need to tell someone off. It seems unthinkable that Morning Bride will not become a commodity, so saleable and so well packaged as they are, naturally occurring as if they have been streamline destined to fuse together. So I say bollocks to all the jingle jangle guitary pre-fabs around who are outselling each other in scandalous numbers. Music like this: crafted and nurtured and devoted is like a hymnal to the aurally starved masses. It's music to be felt and sung along with and soul racked by. See Morning Bride if you can. I hear they will be recording very soon. One swoons at the idea of Morning Bride in one's own private listening chamber... In bad form - I blame the stifling heat of the place - I left too early to appreciate the last band, Carmen Rosa. They were kind enough to supply an EP which on a few listens, does sound like I rather missed out. Maybe it's a little bit like Slint. Still, the heat was too hot and the night was too cool to keep me in for long. 'Til next time then. -Lilly Novak-

Morning Bride; Owls The Others, London 12th November 2005 Saturday night and The Others is jam-packed- what was a freezing, damp, stone-walled building scant minutes earlier has become a furnace, as the great and the good of Stoke Newington come together to celebrate the launch of the debut single from local heroes Morning Bride. As well as the paying punters, also helping them celebrate are the magnificent Owls, whose blend of Birthday Party-style chaos and Waits-esque folkiness is never less than impressive, with tonight being no exception. Frontman Luc Owl is clearly in his element here, all absurdist song intros and hellfire preacher stomping providing a scarier counterpoint ot what is to come later. Which is, of course, Morning Bride. You could, I guess, if you were the sort of person who did such things, describe them as "alt.Country" (but please don't: I despise that "alt." prefix with a passion that verges on the homicidal). What they clearly are, however, is heartbreak and longing, whisky and loss. Waiting for a phone that never rings, or a train to far away that never comes. Floating in the stars but looking down on the gutters. Lead singer Amity Dunn's haunted vocals, fragile one moment, strident the next, tell stories of doomed romance over twanging guitars and a good solid rhythm section. And they're catchy as all hell. No sooner have you realised you're not gonna be getting this tune out of your head for weeks, it's washed away by another, equally as engaging. And it's all rather lovely, in a melancholy sort of way. Note I said "melancholy", not "depressing"- for all the pain in these songs, they're suffused with beauty, lifted by dreams. The last few months have seen Morning Bride go from strength to strength, with a series of increasingly dynamic gigs which have seen them building up a good set of "every one a winner" songs. There's no filler here, no time to look at your watch (or to go the the toilet- another reason this band suit whiskey so well, rather than, say, lager...)- each individual track is a thing of beauty. I can only imagine it must have been a real bitch trying to isolate two for the single, the first track from which ("Isabelline)", of course, gets a good airing (and is played again as the encore, because "we messed it up"- I don't think anyone noticed. I certainly didn't. But fuck it, any excuse to hear it again- and it was what everyone was there for, after all). And, of course, its companion piece, in which the Jehovahkill-era Cope-style male vocal slides sleazily into the wonderfully insistent girl-pop of the chorus. But it's the glorious "Blue-Eyed Boy", always a favourite of their live set, that gets the best reception- and we can only hope this one gets committed to CD at some point in the near future, if only for its wonderful three-part harmonic climax. Notoriously hard-working, The Bride will no doubt be playing somewhere within days of you reading this review, and I honestly think you could do worse than check them out, if you have any kind of soul at all. Rarely will your heart have been broken quite so delicately. -Deuteronemu 90210, from the bottom of a bottle of Jack.-

© The Contributors and Freq 2005 e.v.