Mount Kimbie make you want to dance away your faultless youth all night long...

Mount Kimbie Live

Koko, London, Thursday 14 November

This review first appeared on More than the Music

Kai Campos and Dominic Maker have perfected a tricky balance in their live sets: they fluctuate between using live vocals, guitar and drums to faithfully enhance tunes from their most recent album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, and also produce exhilarating live remixes that tantalise the audience and stay faithful to their electronic roots.

Campos does the majority of the singing, and although his voice isn’t flawless, it brings an appropriately gritty sincerity to songs like Home Recording. Live drums make the thumping percussion refreshingly authentic and serve to complement the band’s glitchier beats – Maker even cracks out some impressively precise clapping into the mic which is rather mesmerising. In Blood and Form, Campos’s guitar and vocals provide a delicate counterbalance to the tune’s relentlessly electronic industrial sounds. And when the duo sing in unison on Made to Stray, there is an extra umph that turns Campos’s sometimes weak voice into an irresistible pull on the audience to join in.

Mount Kimbie’s achievement in bringing their post-dubstep electronic sounds into a live forum is at its zenith in their collaboration with spoken word rapper King Krule. On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, the two tracks with Krule’s vociferous vocals can jar against the mellow delicacy of the rest of the album. But in the live set he brings an energy to the stage that enlivens crowd and band alike. As he moves from spoken-singing to truly impassioned rapping, Campos and Maker’s increasingly insistent drones seem perfectly matched to the paroxysms into which Krule sends himself.

This duo have moved on from the electronica of their first album, Crooks and Lovers, to hone a sound that embraces everything from trip-hop, dubstep and rap to techno and even free jazz. This heady mix explodes onstage into a varied and immersive experience that is musically assured and excitingly experimental. And as well as the cerebral enjoyment you can take from Mount Kimbie’s music, it also makes you want to dance away your faultless youth the whole night long.

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Gig review: 'Like taking a wholesome walk through the forests of the world' - Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit

Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit
Hackney Empire, 10th October

This review originally appeared on More Than The Music

Johnny Flynn has recently taken a hiatus from music, instead gracing the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe and the West End to act in Richard III, Twelfth Night and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Now the tousled English folkster has returned to the folk scene in which he cuts such an inimitable figure. This current tour, promoting his new album Country Mile, proves that he has not lost his touch.

Flynn’s voice appears effortless, slipping the notes into each phrase like delicate fingers into a perfectly fitting glove. He is as pitch-perfect live as he is on recordings, and brings an additional frisson to his performance with his unforced authenticity and the occasional well-placed extra glissando. The Sussex Wit (made up of Flynn’s sister Lillie on vocals, flute and melodian, David Beauchamp on drums, Adam Beach on bass, Joe Zeitlin on cello and newest member Cosmo Sheldrake on keyboard) complement Flynn beautifully. The band sit separately on a sparse stage, silhouetted by backlighting; a beguiling set-up that belies the perfect synchrony of their performance as a seamless whole. Lillie’s voice adds an ethereal aura to her brother’s earthy tones, which together mingle with miscellaneous folk instruments to create a sound that maintains its integrity as much at Hackney Empire as it did at their intimate Rough Trade record store gig two weeks ago.

The set was compiled from a satisfying mix of old favourites and new songs. Many of the new ones do sound remarkably similar to those from his previous two albums, A Larum and Been Listening – Flynn’s sound has definitely not been revolutionised, lending a certain sameyness to the gig. But if you like intriguing, imaginative folk then that’s no bad thing. From the heart-warming Einstein’s Idea (written when his son was born – cue every woman in the crowd melting) and the two-part contrapuntal harmony of After Eliot, to the vigorous trumpet-enhanced folk-rock of Howl and the rollicking Tickle Me Pink, there is plenty of diversity within Flynn’s oeuvre to keep you wanting more.

Flynn’s music always instills a certain emotional heft, with his catchy hooks and ambiguous, poetic lyrics. Seeing him live, you feel this even more keenly – there is a lack of pretension in these songs that makes you want to slow down your pace of life, pick up a banjo and strum your heart out. Watching a Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit gig is like going for a wholesome walk through the forests of the world, taking in everything from acorn to oak and emerging covered in mud with ruddy cheeks, much like Flynn’s own, and gratifyingly invigorated by your nourishing musical experience.

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Seasfire live review: dreamy electro-pop turns to awkward rock

Seasfire review on morethanthemusic.com
Tuesday 11 June, XOYO

Seasfire seems to be a band that hasn’t quite made up its mind. They fluctuate, sometimes within songs, between poppy dream-synths, pop-rock and anthemic prog-rock. Watching them is a little like flicking through a photo album of your younger brother’s teenage years – the melancholic phase, the rebellious phase, the spotty awkward phase, the cool and sophisticated phase. Some of Seasfire’s tunes create atmospheric, accomplished soundscapes that prove their potential to get out of the teenage years and face the world. Others feel like moments you’ll look back on and cringe at in years to come.

Read on here...

Finally in the headlights: Frightened Rabbit's Pedestrian Verse tour

Frightened Rabbit at The Forum, London
Wednesday 13 February, touring the UK until 28 February

Tall white posts, each crossed by three horizontal slats, flank the spartanly spiritual stage. They act as artful metaphors for Frightened Rabbit’s music. When singer Scott Hutchinson puts such raw passion into lyrics like ‘Well I can dip my head in the river/ Cleanse my soul, oh/ I'd still have the stomach of a sinner’ in ‘Holy’, they become mutated Christian crosses, embodying the tension between doubt and faith that runs throughout the new album. And with the panegyric ‘Old Old Fashioned’, on which Hutchinson croons ‘There's a radio in the corner/ It's dying to make a scene/ So give me that soft soft static/ With a human voice underneath’, the posts transform into pylons beautifully transmitting the band’s music, celebrating its amplified energy and its simultaneous old fashioned-ness, its allegiance to their traditional Scottish roots. Frightened Rabbit embody Celtic indie rock at its best, slowly building into anthemic guitar riffs layered with hauntingly honest lyrics.

It is these lyrics that really make Frightened Rabbit a heart-in-mouth kind of band. Hutchinson (also the songwriter) articulates himself through unusual, symbolic, breathtakingly frank depictions of loneliness and anguish. Occasionally some of this intensity is lost in the live performance – surprisingly for a nominally indie rock gig, it was the acoustic songs that had the rawest power. Every word of pain was agonisingly audible. The intricate finger-picking of ‘Poke’, with Hutchinson’s resonant voice intoning wistful ‘oohs’ between verses of exquisite desolation, made me cry (without any poking at my iris…)

But the coarser full-band songs had their own potency, despite a few moments when enthusiastic guitar riffs overwhelmed the finer complexities of lyrical beauty. This was a forceful, crisp and lucid gig, truly worthy of a band now deservedly selling out venues off the back of their first release on a major label with their fourth album, Pedestrian Verse. Tracks from this record were vigorous and robust, but I still think the visceral ache of their second, The Midnight Organ Fight, remains Frightened Rabbit’s best work. It clinches the longed-for condition of an indie rock band – that blurry curtain-opening moment of emotional nakedness when all the horrors of the drunken night before hit you square in the stomach, combined with the ability to face that moment with a musical dignity that makes it all worthwhile.

There was, perhaps inevitably, some of that simple, instinctive emotion missing from the live show. Pedestrian Verse as an album has more of a balance between the brutally personal and the universally contemplative – similarly, the band seem to have a more detached live presence than when I saw them at 2000 Trees festival two years ago. But with that detachment comes musical tightness and an overall coherent eloquence to the set. There is nothing humdrum or prosaic about Frightened Rabbit’s foray into the ‘pedestrian’. Quite the contrary: they have a sinewy power and subtle originality that is thoroughly deserving of the new disciples they will acquire from this landmark tour. The very fact that they deal in ‘not heroic acts of man’ is what paradoxically makes them great – not heroic perhaps, but better for that: discerning, elemental and refreshingly emotionally honest.

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The final tour? The beauty of Bon Iver

Bon Iver, 5th November, Berlin Arena

We stand in a cavernous hangar, lit only in the gaping rafters. The blank acoustic space slowly amasses sound-absorbent bodies, its atmosphere increasingly electric with the anticipation of seeing one of the best bands of our generation.

I kept looking longingly at the beams above our heads, presenting the impossible temptation to perch monkey-like above the hordes and receive the full impact of the sound. But even without this height, subsumed instead within the pulsing crowd, the liquid beauty of Bon Iver’s music seeps into your (very sweaty) skin.

Opening with the soft electric guitar riffs of Perth, the virtuosity of the whole band was showcased from start to finish. Every member of this behemoth group is humblingly multi-talented. Special mention for drummer/singer/one-man-band Sean Carey, whose soaring falsetto is one of the most exultant vocals I have ever heard (and that while he is drumming in perfect unison with Bon Iver’s other percussionist Matthew McCaughan). The set grew through other tracks from the band’s second album, Bon Iver, swelling into the ecstatic nostalgia of Towers and the emotive 80s homage Beth/Rest.

As always with the ‘famous’ single, there is a risk of disappointment, but For Emma, Forever Ago’s Skinny Love evolved seamlessly from initial understated delicacy to climactic, heart-thumping power. The pared-back acoustic recording is replaced in the live set with a throbbing leviathan of a song, from the first unadorned chords to the punctuating bass drums in the chorus which compel you to stamp your feet in time. And this is how I would characterise the whole gig – a perfect balance of fragile beauty and stomping euphoria.

From their heartfelt folky roots to their experimental impressionism, Bon Iver get it all right. Justin Vernon’s elemental, resonant bass and sinewy upper register perfectly complement a band whose tonal subtleties arise out of skilful layering, a respectful fusion of synths and acoustic sounds, and a genuine emotion that pervades every note – the instruments and their players metamorphose into one ecstatic sphere of sound.

All of which brings me to lament the fact that Bon Iver are having some down-time after this tour. Justin Vernon has said ‘I need to walk away from it while I still care about it. And then if I come back to it – if at all – I'll feel better about it and be renewed or something to do that’. So, if you haven’t yet, listen to Bon Iver and revel in their exquisite musical beauty. And hope that their renewal comes quickly to grace the stage again. In the meantime, this is a good place to start.

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