Club Uncut’s final night in Brighton can’t quite match the high of Josh T. Pearson’s performance on Friday, but a strong, diverse bill of female talent doesn’t disappoint.
“I’m tired,” Josh T. Pearson says. “It’s been a long life. I don’t even know what day of the week it is...” Someone in the crowd tells him the day and the date. “Friday the 13th?” he wryly muses, as if his life has been full of nothing but such days of potential reckoning in the ten long years since his band Lift To Experience released their fearsome album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, and soon after blew apart. That record imagined humanity making its last stand in Texas during the apocalypse. Pearson’s eventual follow-up Last Of The Country Gentlemen considers a recent relationship in similar terms. There’s the rare sense tonight of every bitter, funny, helpless word mattering, because they’re being pulled up from a harrowing place and being relived on stage.
As the first night of Club Uncut’s annual seaside trip to Brighton’s Great Escape festival comes to an end, a girl passes me yelling “My ears! My ears!”. New York’s Gang Gang Dance have just come off stage at the Pavilion Theatre, where they’ve cranked up the decibels to ear-splitting levels. Really, it was loud. Earlier this week, I’d been listening to their latest album, Eye Contact, recorded in relaxed circumstances near rural Woodstock, and been impressed by the ambient textures of tracks like “Glass Jar”. Live, they’re clearly a very different proposition: the sheer intense forcefulness of their sound physically impacts on the body. It had all been so very different three hours earlier…
Weird list, I think. Two terrific albums from Preservation’s Circa offshoot, though. The mystery record that’s been intriguing so many of you , by the way, is going to be announced in about ten days. So I guess maybe one more week of prickteasing after this…
Not much time to blog at the moment, since our normal routine has been savaged by, among other things, all those bank holidays. Number One still dominating business here, though, and check out a pleasing late arrival at Number 14.
One or two auspicious things amidst this lot, though check out Weyes Blood and Robert Stillman, too. Very conscious of cryptic hyperbole here, but Record 14 is as good as anything I’ve heard this year, this morning at least.
Ashley Wales’ remix of “You’re No Good”… the second movement of Fucked Up’s rock opera… “I Had A Dream” by The Long Ryders still sounding levitational, right up to the last second when someone observes, correctly, “That was tight!”… Robert Stillman… The People’s Temple ramalam I blogged about yesterday… “The Only Way I Know To Love You” by Joe Tex… Andre Adams… “Supercollider”… and Sun Araw covering Teenage Fanclub, downloaded from the always on-point Raven Sings The Blues… All good…
The new Black Lips album – produced by Mark Ronson, weirdly – arrived yesterday, and reminded me of a couple of things. First, that I always feel unaccountably guilty for not liking Black Lips records as much as I think I should. And second, I actually have a bunch of good garage records that need writing about.
An extra-long list this week, since we seem to have worked our way through more stuff than usual. A lot of good stuff, too, I’d say, with one or two exceptions, and a tremendous new mystery record that’s coming out in the summer and which hasn’t, I think, been announced as yet – hence the necessary evasiveness.
