Of Montreal @ Academy 2, Thursday 7th October

Of Montreal hit Manchester Academy 2 on the 7th October for what was a colourful showcase of their extravagant neo-psychedelia, funk and indie-pop. Brendan McFadden describes their lavish carnival mix of 7-foot monsters, theatrical face paint, glitter and confetti.


The American band that hails from Athens, Georgia bring a brand of music that takes its best serving of influences from 60s groups The Beatles, Kinks and Jefferson Airplane mixed with a modern twist of Prince and the Arcade Fire. Their eyebrow raising energetic stage show is reminiscent of The Flaming Lips and is a full-on bombardment of the strange and the wonderful. Flamboyant singer Kevin Barnes, the ringleader of this spectacle, marches around the stage clad in a miniskirt bandana and purple tights broadcasting a confident falsetto.

A strange story envelops the stage, involving strange beasts who dance, prance and fight - it has no plot but is mesmerising all the same. At one point a creature fires its toy gun into the crowd and then grapples with another monster who is wearing a gas mask. Providing this entertainment are two dancers/performers who wear everything from banana heads to gas masks, straitjackets and angel wings. The group’s eight musicians are reminiscent of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in their outfits, topped with pale theatrical face paint. Watching it all pan out you almost feel like you are Hunter S Thompson in Fear In Loathing In Las Vegas; all of this said, it is a somewhat tamed down performance; Barnes has been known to enter the stage bereft of clothes and riding a horse.


This is as a decent showcase of the group’s more recent material and there's room for many tracks from their recently released album, False Priest. Latest single, ‘Coquet Coquet’, finds appreciative heads in the three-quarter-full crowd nodding in sync. It is a performance that’s full of upbeat funky beats cemented by a loud backing of guitars, violins, keyboards and decoders. A particular highlight is ‘An Eluardian Instance’, one of the group’s bigger hits that sees them jumping up and down on the stage while a pig-headed beast tosses confetti into the grateful crowd.


It is a non-stop fluent flow of music that's lively and upbeat with a fun factor of ten. Of Montreal’s energetic tempo immerses you like a warm blanket, but it’s disappointing to see that sometimes their strident songs manage to get lost in the fusion of noise. At stages tracks become clouded together and it’s hard to distinguish one from the next as you are bombarded by large choruses (like in ‘Enemy Gene’) that explode in a foray of jarring noise; it’s as if their medley of songs becomes a jamming session, which by the end had lost my concentration. In a way the performance overcasts the music, and the melodies become lost amidst the cavalcading atmosphere.


Having just released their tenth studio album they are still pushing boundaries, though, and it’s fair to say they will be around for a little while yet. Of Montreal are a party-band that blast you into an unknown galaxy at warp speed and you will fail to find another stage show quite like it.

Words & Pictures: Brendan Mcfadden

Arts & Music preview, October 2010 (Part One)

Now Then’s early October forecast


Yup, means pretty much everything is going on again now the students are back. SO now we’re safely in our twenties we’ve only got the energy to go until the middle of the month. And no I don’t want to swag more energy off one of those guido Monster N-R-Gay drinks monster trucks shitting out Pendulum all during freshers’ week.

Thursday 30th Sept – holy crewcut, three mega exhibition previews all in one night, let’s get on our hipstermobiles down to Spear Street for the Papergirl no.4 Manchester launch. Papergirl started off in Berlin distributing beautiful rolled-up prints/art from their two-wheels to unsuspecting Germans on the sidewalk, and now it’s here. Check the art out at Soup Kitchen before it gets chucked about. Here’s a nice video. Then Chris Drury splats Common’s walls with another layer of sickness called All My Friends Are Undead – must be Hallowe’en soon? And head down to Easa before it gets literally demolished for 36exp, which does what it says on the roll, showcasing 36 experimental photographers including Eleanor Marechal each given a solitary roll of film to play with. Later kick down to NoiseLab where the Hear No Evil, See No Evil magazine and CD launch party from Mind On Fire and Onefiveeight includes Paper Tigers and the MOF band. Also Trof Corner is hosting the opening of The Toy Shop on Friday 1st which is generally all very nice and lo-fi.


Hold up, what’s this, a Now Then event at the magnificent Un-Convention Salford 2010? That’s right, the great antithesis to In The Chitty is letting us host a whole load of should-see music at the Rovers Return, from Veí’s opening, via Paul Green and Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six, to King Capisce ending it all on Saturday 2nd. There’s even performance poetry as well courtesy of Joe Kriss and caro snatch.


Tabloid headline of the week: Twisted queer horror shocker on Sunday 3rd at the Cornerhouse, a special Peaches Christ retrospective.

WotGodForgot have two giant nights at the Ruby Lounge in a row. Wednesday 6th is Scotch Egg’s mental Atari shitstorm Drum Eyes, and, I don’t ever remember Mice Parade being this cheesy (forget it – I don’t even like puns), but it’s definitely still worth going down on Thursday 7th to check out the lush fidgety Adam Pierce play his just-out-now LP What It Means To Be Left-Handed.

Talking of left-handed, there’s no better time than just after the Labour Party Conference here, that saw Ed Miliband try to reclaim the filthy proletariat back to the left, than to go on a Marx and Engels tour of Manchester to see just why those bourgeois bulldozers loved this sodden city so much. The tour starts at The Cornerhouse on Saturday 2nd at 11am and Tuesday 5th at 3pm, of which the latter has the added bonus of a visit to Cheetham’s Library where the two studied. There could be a rather lovely juxtaposition to listening to a load of Chorltonites piling Marx up their arses and regurgitating out of their mouths at the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair at the Dancehouse on Saturday 2nd.

For a fix of alt-indie-post-folk-whatever theatrics, marvel at Pineapple Folk’s capture of Of Montreal on Tuesday 5th.

Friday 8th is Hot Milk’s 5th Birthday Splash at The Roadhouse with Deadly Dragon Sound System.

As I type my mac’s having a haemorrhoid at the thought that Binary New Year is coming on 10/10/10. Not sure how it works for a Binary Party at Arcadia on Saturday 9th spinning 4/4 beats on the ones and twos but does end up being a new year twice in nine minutes. PS it’s not mathrock.


It’s been coming for ages, but if you’re a Doom fan you are probably a stoner graphic novel and AdultSwim fan with a Yankees cap so you need a million reminders like this to buy your billet to see the legend you’ve been waiting to see since you were 16 and a stoner comic book and MTV fan with a Yankees cap. I know it’s hard to spend £20+ on a fraudster when you could get 3.5 instead, but hey, word has it WHP have written into his contract that he’s got to show ID just before he gets on stage. Yes it’s actually Metal Face in his first ever UK gig outside London. Doomsday is Wednesday 13th with ridiculous support from Hudson Mohawke, Illum Sphere and Dels.

If you ever wanted an incisive, balanced, gripping and entertaining – even just good will do – debate about the American healthcare system, don’t watch Sicko. What you will need to do is get your sorry ass down to listen to the genuinely great author, academic, journalist and activist that is Lionel Shriver. Town Hall; Thursday 14th.

One69a and RAG are running screenprinting and appliqué workshops from Friday 15th at Islington Mill to design, print and create your own tees. This is your chance to run buckwild with ironic statements or actually do something amazing if you’re talented. Souper.

All this and we’re only halfway through the month. When you’re ready for more, October Part Two will be duly directed into your bandwidth.

Festivals:
Abandon Normal Devices
Manchester Literature Festival
Free For Arts Festival

Words: Sam Bass

Black Mountain @ Academy 3, Wednesday 15th September

What do you call something that hangs around with musicians?

No, I don’t mean the one about the drummer. For a start Josh Wells’ thumping time-keeping merits not one iota of derision.

Instead I’m talking about the classic set-staller that is: ‘technical difficulties’. Fortunately Canadian quintet Black Mountain aren’t stricken too badly by Matt Camirand’s bass amp malfunction and, after a few mutterings about it having been a long year, we’re away.

Straight into a couple from the third record, including title track ‘Wilderness Heart’, and the immediate wonder is how a band whose sophomore effort In The Future was a 2008 Polaris Music Prize finalist, behind Caribou's Andorra, are only attracting enough punters to mostly fill the Academy 3 venue.


It is that second album that dominates a typically cohesive set. ‘Angels’ and ‘Wucan’ welcome a smattering of nodding heads, before ‘Tyrants’ fully brings to light Jeremy Schmidt, who bears a passing resemblance to his contemporary keys controller in fellow drone rock merchants Dungen, and his Moogs. They shimmer and soothe in cosmic layers as a bass addled synchronicity is supplemented by persistent guitar noodlings, courtesy of Stephen McBean, who would surely be a contender for the proposed Beards of Manchester charity calendar, if he were a resident.

The instrumental break also sees singer Amber Webber adopting the moody musician look – borderline disinterested, or perhaps just zoning out of the real world; her mind on a similar sonic excursion to the audience’s; remaining inanimate as her bandmates act as tour guides in a psychedelic trip.


An oft-conjured image is one of euphoric escape down an ongoing dusty highway; plains either side until you reach a steep cliff-face. You know, the Butch Cassidy type of scene. But, after taking a mellow country fried turn akin to Jefferson Airplane and then finishing with the psyche-tinged classic rock of ‘Stormy High’ and ‘Don’t Run Our Hearts Around’, the encore shapes up as more of a sci-fi soundtrack. The quarter of an hour long ‘Bright Lights’ constructs, to my mind, an intergalactic exploration: anticipation, lift-off, touchdown, standoff encounter, then eye-opening discovery.

However you envisage it, this is music to take you to another place.

Words & Pictures: Ian Pennington

Pineapple Folk & One Inch Badge present: WHY? @ Deaf Institute, Friday 19th March, 2010

The hip hop/indie hybrid is one that intuition says might not necessarily work, but Yoni Wolf’s energetic showmanship could lead the way for pretty well any unlikely genre-mash. His appeal is almost idolatry to the sell out swarm of awkward music geeks crammed into the Deaf Institute’s delightfully decorated upstairs venue.

Josiah Wolf is first up though, failing to imitate the same stage presence as his brother, but providing a mellow solo acoustic start.

Berlin’s five-piece I Might Be Wrong boast a wider selection of instruments and lead chanteuse Lisa von Billerbeck helps to exude the same sullen, downtrodden indie-electro-pop allure as the likes of Au Revoir Simone and Metric. Flick over to the organ setting on your keyboard and you’re halfway there. The other half unfortunately loses its way a little, as songs begin to sound samey and they become submerged beneath the beats-led nature of their soundscapes. That isn’t to say the performance is bad; just lessened by comparison with what follows.

WHY?, still performing as the line-up swelled by two a couple of years ago, kick off with ‘Song of the Sad Assassin’, an effective introduction notable for the fashionably late entrance by Yoni Wolf and his intermittent frenzies of karate. Wolf gains some local kudos by sporting his Lamb t-shirt, although after the early flurry of tracks, and consequent sing-a-longs, from 2008 album Alopecia, he couldn’t be any more of a star in the eyes of those watching so intently. ‘Good Friday’, ‘The Vowels Pt 2’ and ‘The Fall of Mr Fifths’ from the aforementioned album are well received, as Wolf junior’s vocoded echoes are given a healthy usage.


“Welcome to Manchest-uh,” is the heckled reply to the Wolfs’ anecdote of near-murder that evening, as part of an odd break between songs. Josiah, manning the percussion and relegated to backing vocals for the main event, bafflingly brings up his earlier stint in the limelight, seemingly to gauge a reaction. My advice is to stick to the rhythm section, as he does on ‘A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under’ with the delicate xylophone intro, but his backseat is confirmed when eyes switch back to Yoni; conducting the crowd with his claws.

There’s time for some tracks from latest album Eskimo Snow. ‘This Blackest Purse’ is performed more pensively; less animated than the set’s norm, which is later powered home zestfully in a “Fuck You!” jointly exclaimed with the crowd during ‘The Hollows’; typical of the pied-piper effect that Yoni radiates.

Words: Ian Pennington
Picture, top: Nelesh Dhand