With the wind behind them, the San Francisco-founded band Deerhoof are one of the greatest live experiences you can have.
Ten years ago Brighton band 12 Stone Toddler burst onto the scene with two off-the-wall albums of madly inventive pop-rock. They then vamoosed back out of existence. Now they’re back, preparing a third album for the Freshly Squeezed label, and playing a packed home town gig. The second song they do is a new one, “Piranha” and it shows they’re no nearer normal. It’s a jagged, shouty thing with a catchy chorus about there being piranhas in the water, half football chant, half King Crimson. It’s edgy, deliberately bizarre, and oddly approachable, fun by way of musical obtuseness, just like the band who wrote it.
There have been changes. While wry, pork-pie-hatted frontman Chris Otero and ponytailed keyboard whizz Ben Jones remain from their last incarnation, female guitarist Helen Durden (pictured below) is a new addition, as is drummer Robin O’Keeffe. Clad in a red, sparkly sequinned top, Durden maintains a deadpan face until near the end of the gig, even when playing intricate solos, then she finally splits into a grin, recognizing friends in the crowd. Behind the band is a large screen initially showing their logo, which has an eyeball peering from the "O" of "STONE", then a series of suitably surreal film clips throughout the performance. It’s the only adornment and, after a late start, due to soundcheck faffing with the keyboards, they slam straight into “Come Back”, the punchy opener from their 2007 debut album Does It Scare You?
One of the main ingredients of 12 Stone Toddler’s sound is 1970s prog-rock. Please don’t run off screaming, I dislike prog as much as the next ELP-loathing post-punker, but this band take the style’s perverse stop-start dynamics and sudden time signature flips, and mash them into their own, unique, tuneful gumbo of burlesque fairground sounds, Balkan tints, psychedelia, reggae and so on. They are, in fact, more like an experimental version of Madness than they are prime-time Yes. That said, they stack the first half of their set with a more than necessary share of musically awkward material, as well as a run of new songs which means it takes longer than it should to build a mutual groove with the audience.
By the time they do settle, the partisan local crowd is jigging and welcome a catchy selection of tunes that includes a persuasive dub affair, whose title I didn't catch, and the contagious brilliance of “Candles on the Cake”, a joyfully doomed celebration of the descent into old age (“Some people say, we're not getting older, we're just getting better”), before ending with the piano-led stomper “The Ballad of Al Coholic”, which has a celebratory Tankus the Henge-ish air of Glastonbury’s far flung fields about it. By this point Otero is chatting happily with the crowd and indicates that his band are not going to go off properly before an encore. Instead Durden disappears briefly behind the speaker stack, then she returns equally promptly and they dive into their best-known single, “The Rabbit”, a galloping jazz-jive of theatrical rock’n’roll that causes mass outbreaks of enthusiastic leaping about.
12 Stone Toddler’s return is a welcome reminder that predictability is not an essential quality in guitar bands, and that experimentalism can still be pop. They have some work to do before their live show thoroughly welcomes non-fans, but its second half showed they’re well on the way.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Candles on the Cake" by 12 Stone Toddler
Emperor of Sand is Mastodon’s eighth album and showcases a band that exhibits absolutely no sign of letting up on the epic riffing and thunderous beat or of edging towards the mainstream. Make no mistake, Mastodon remain resolutely heavy in both their sound and their lyrics.
Over 1972 to 1975, Finland staged a small-scale invasion of Britain. A friendly one, it was confined to music. First, the progressive rock band Tasavallan Presidentti came to London in May 1972 and played Ronnie Scott’s. The Sunday Times’ Derek Jewell said they were “frighteningly accomplished” and that readers should “watch them soar”. The next year, they toured and appeared on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test.
New releases by Mike Oldfield don’t exactly grow on trees, but nor can they be deemed rarities. For the first three decades he brought out roughly half a dozen a decade. But Return to Ommadawn is only his second since 2008. As the title announces, it tours the landscape of his third album Ommadawn, which he recorded in his own studio at Hergest Ridge in 1975 and played pretty much everything that didn’t require breath (wind instruments and vocals).
A single guitar note rang out over smouldering synth-chords. It was bent up a tone and then wavered in the air before gracefully falling. And so began the final residency of the Rattle That Lock tour. No hype. No support act. Just David Gilmour and his all-star band looking back on his long and prestigious career. At least that's how the programme described it. For everyone else this was Pink Floyd resurrected.
Pictured above is the label of an exceptionally important Pink Floyd record issued last November. Only a thousand people bought a copy. That was the amount that hit shops. Pink Floyd 1965: Their First Recordings was a double seven-inch set with a historic importance inversely proportionate to its availability. It was the first ever outing for the earliest recordings by the band and, as such, the earliest compositions for them by its prime songwriter Syd Barrett.
In the run-up to the release of his second album Grapefruit, Kiran Leonard has revealed the musical touchstones which map out his world. Boredoms, Kate Bush, the jazzy French Canterbury-rock types Etron Fou Leloublan, Fela Kuti, Swans, Scriabin and Sleaford Mods all colour his prog-tinged vision of music. And he looks elsewhere for ideas. The album's “Ondör Gongor” takes its title from a Mongolian giant while “Half-Ruined Already” is inspired by a Werner Herzog film.
The 100 Club is dark. Really dark. People are shrouded in the ink-light. I think it’s to save their embarrassment as they order a drink and realise they’ll have to either apply for a loan or sell a child in order to get drunk. In any case, the indoor gloaming provides the perfect setting for the opening act of the evening, Demian Castellanos. The creative helm of psych-rock act The Oscillation, he's on his own tonight with a wordless solo set showcasing new material.
Had he not become one of the pivotal members of Pink Floyd, it's not difficult to imagine that David Gilmour might have become an academic like his father Douglas (who was a lecturer in zoology and genetics at Cambridge), or maybe a high-flying lawyer with leftish inclinations. Despite having been at the vanguard of rock music in its greatest and most extravagant years, Gilmour was never a likely candidate for a dissolute life of rock'n'roll hedonism.