Filed under: live, review | Tags: charlotte richardson andrews, dum dum girls, i will be, live at madame jojos, veronica falls, yuck
Dum Dum Girls / Veronica Falls / Yuck
Madame Jojo’s, London ••••
March 2, 2010
Queues all the way down Brewer Street and particularly unhelpful door staff meant a lot of the hyper buzzed fans only got to catch the last yells of opening support act Yuck, who faded out with an enticing swansong of distortion guitar wails. Veronica Falls followed up with a set of consistently lovely songs that have progressively stolen a substantial number of hearts over the past year. The shoegaze pop of ‘Stephen’ was dreamy enough to sway unabashedly to, while ‘Beachy Head’ rang out with romantic thrash. One of the capital’s most exciting homegrown outfits, they proved to be a well-selected warm-up for the US headliners whose appearance was the last, love-letter punctuation on a week of gigs across the capital, a doubly special affair since it marked the band’s UK debut.
Lonelady
Nerve Up ••••
Warp
Warp Records has a long history of plucking unusual and promising electronic artists out of obscurity and giving them an arena in which to produce their best work. In recent years though, they’ve branched out into music which falls outside their usual electronica-based remit, but that pushes playfully at genre boundaries – think Jamie Lidell, Maximo Park, Grizzly Bear et al. – and Lonelady (aka Manchester-based artist, poet and musician Julie Campbell) falls somewhat defiantly into this category with her debut album, Nerve Up. A one-woman wonder, Campbell has created an album that blends modern girl-with-guitar attitude with 1980s synth-references into sparse, solitary musical vistas befitting her stage name, and which could only have originated from the home of The Smiths.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: blood red shoes, fire like this, maxie gedge
Blood Red Shoes
Fire Like This •••
V2 / Co-op
It’s all a bit too easy with Blood Red Shoes. They’re the tastiest, most palatable pill in all of rock, sliding down the throats of the record-buying public with the slightest of contractions. Anyone expecting a challenging and exciting progression from their 2007 debut Box Of Secrets may find themselves confused by the first half of Fire Like This; essentially, it’s just more of the same long guitar phrases, punchy drums and sweet overlapping vocals that build up to the chorus into boring shouty melodies. Take ‘Don’t Ask’ as a prime example. You can practically hear the teenagers singing along, but there is a sense of something lacking. It’s like Blood Red Shoes by numbers. There’s a middle drop-out section with a lovely thick guitar sound, but it’s just so predictable that it does nothing to accelerate the heart rate and fails to ignite to the usual levels of angst that we’ve come to expect from Stephen Ansell and Laura-Mary Carter’s disaffected tales of boredom, isolation and frustration.
