Charles Harries

Posts Stream Books Walks • Clear filters

• Saturday, 19 Nov 2022 11:46 am | Stream

  The Mountain Goats

  

  Back in Manchester for the Mountain Goats show at The Albert Hall (no not that one). I said it last time and I'll say it again: Manchester is probably the best city in the UK. The best one in England at least. It has the busy feeling of something happening everywhere that you get in the big cities—which I love—but there's always a little nook that you can escape to if you feel overwhelmed. You get the sense that through every door, there's a fractal of interior life waiting to be explored and experienced.

  Anyway, after dinner we made our way over to the venue (by foot; Manchester is very walkable) and found a spot. The Albert Hall has a regular pit-type area, level with the stage, but it also has a horseshoe-shaped mezzanine above the stage, with tiered seating. No assigned seats—everyone just sort of plonked down wherever space could be made—so we had to meander about for a little while before we found a spot to park ourselves. I haven't been to a seated gig for a while, but it was a welcome change of pace!

  The Mountain Goats, predictably, have a sort of mid-2000s indie energy that's very catching for people of Sam & my vintage. Think: bootcut jeans, crumpled sport jackets, glasses, bouncing up and down while playing an acoustic guitar. John Darnielle has a commanding stage presence—he's got such a distinct voice and vibe that you can't help but look in his direction, even if he sort of looks like Death Cab meets John Oliver.

  I think the real standout of the night was multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who filled out the sound with keyboard, saxophone, electric guitar, and backing vocals. The Mountain Goats have a very distinct sound, courtesy in no small part to Darnielle's voice, but Douglas did a fantastic job of adding complexity and surprise throughout.

  Music Shows

• Wednesday, 19 Oct 2022 8:30 pm | Stream

  Bon Iver

  

  Bon Iver at the First Direct Arena in Leeds was the biggest show I’ve been to in a good long while. The First Direct Arena is massive and almost totally characterless: plain concrete and lowest-bidder amenities abound; a pint of beer sets you back the nearly-unbearable (and doubtlessly market-analysis-optimised) price of £7.50. The interior is roughly one-third an ice hockey arena, maybe like everything from the blue line backwards.

  The band, however—and here I was struck for the first time by how much Bon Iver isn’t Justin Vernon on his own—put on an excellent show. Vernon’s got great stage presence and the banter was welcome in a sort of faceless way (although his outlook might be a little granola for my taste; there were frequent Lennonesque exhortations to love and be good to one another).

  Vernon also called out his crew a couple of times over the course of the show (including a comical vignette about riding on the ferry and the homely band being confused with the dashing crew), with good reason: the staging, the lighting, and the sound were absolutely on point. There was this movable lattice of reflective panels edged with lights, used to great effect throughout the show—sometimes undulating like waves, sometimes retracting into a massive dome, sometimes pulling in close and reflecting light across Vernon’s face to create an air of intimacy. Whoever came up with those panels needs some kind of recognition.

  

  On the sound front, I’m used to smaller venues that overwhelm with noise and leave your ears ringing. Part of the reason that I like going to gigs is the opportunity to be obliterated by noise. But maybe because this was more commercial, more broad-market (half the audience was seated!), the noise was a bit more restrained and the sound quality was dialled in. The drums sounded louder than life; I could pick out the individual instruments with ease. The fidelity of the noise felt realer than life, somehow.

  All of which gave the impression less of a live concert and more of an immersive multimiedia recording. I know that this is probably because the show’s been fine-tuned to oblivion, that the musicians are all absolutely at the top of their craft, because the music is sort of progressive-adjacent without being challenging—that they’re just really good at putting on a show!—and an immersive recording’s no better nor worse than a poorly optimised live show. Just different.

  Now that I’ve seen them live, I don’t think I need to see them again—maybe in years and years if they’re still going. I took a couple of videos and a couple of recordings and I think that’ll be enough.

  Music Shows

• Thursday, 13 Oct 2022 7:30 pm | Stream

  Destroyer

  

  Destroyer at Brudenell Social Club in Leeds tonight—a remarkably intimate affair! The concert space was small, the audience pushed right up against the edge of the stage. I don’t think I’ve been quite this close to a band since The Dear Hunter in Orlando years and years ago.

  Technical complaints to get out of the way first: maybe it was just because we were right up at the front, but Bejar’s vocals got all lost in the noise. You could tell it was him—his throaty voice is recognisable basically anywhere—and you could hear the notes, but you couldn’t really understand what he was saying.

  Bejar also wasn’t much of a showman—Colin Meloy and The Decemberists set the bar pretty high pre-pandemic—but I don’t think I expected him to be, and I didn’t hold it against him. Meloy’s got a sort of cheery theatre-kid dynamic but Bejar, like his lyrics, breeds a sense of cool mystery, an uncle with a richly sordid past. He left the microphone stand at its lowest limit and leaned on it like a cane during certain songs the way that a crooner leans on a grand piano. He finished every song by kneeling down, replacing the microphone, and closing his eyes, as if taking a moment for himself. His stage presence was electrifying even in the absence of stage banter.

  The live band did a fantastic job of elevating intimate songs to wild heights—which I wasn’t expecting. A lot of Destroyer’s modern music is immaculately poised but the band brought a raw rock’n’roll energy that confounded expectation. Near the end of the show, one of the band members performed a cool experimental drone piece on the trumpet, layering notes into a wall of noise and then modulating it into waves of catastrophe. The rest of the band sat down and listened and we all got lost in the sound.

  Opener Ashley Shadow delivered as well—that sort of quiet chamber pop vibe always finds a happy listener in me. Shout-out as well to Josh Wells, drummer for both bands (and producer, as it turns out!), who Pitchfork describes as bringing “delirious high drama to every thwack of the snare” and who got me headbanging w/o reservation at the drop on “Tintoretto, It’s For You”.

  Music Shows

• Thursday, 19 May 2022 10:57 pm | Stream

  Men I Trust

  Men I Trust wound up being terrific. A little bit light on the banter, which, I like banter—but we can’t all be Colin Meloy, famously banter-prone.

  I think the set list might have benefited from a cover halfway through; Men I Trust have a definite sound that gets a little same-ey after 25 minutes or so. Something 90s with a bit of excitement would have gone over well, like “1979” by Smashing Pumpkins or even “Everlong”.
  

  On the plus side, the sound was extremely faithful to their records, which I guess is a matter of preference but in this case came across really well. I noticed as well that they cut a couple of songs short dropping a verse & chorus on the numbers that are really just glorified basslines with some vocals atop. I think this was probably the right call.

  Sam says it was the quietest gig she’s ever been to. She might be right.

  Music Lifestyle

• Wednesday, 11 May 2022 8:47 pm | Stream

  Every Noise at Once

  A project of truly epic proportions, mapping every genre tracked on Spotify. And we’re not talking like, alternative rockand chamber pop here—without scrolling, I can see forest psy, tribal house, and nitzhonot. Can’t even imagine what that last one is.

  This is what APIs are for. Spotify is (arguably famously) bad at surfacing stuff you’ve never heard before—I think their algorithms really reward multiple listens, so even your Discover Weekly playlist is bound to have 3-4 tracks that are already in your library, and Radio stations will, after a couple weeks, start to play basically all the same songs.

  This is what APIs are for. Spotify is (arguably famously) bad at surfacing stuff you’ve never heard before—I think their algorithms really reward multiple listens, so even your Discover Weekly playlist is bound to have 3-4 tracks that are already in your library, and Radio stations will, after a couple weeks, start to play basically all the same songs.

  Every Noise at Once, on the other hand, surfaces almost radically random music. The homepage tries to map genres on a matrix but the best way to start discovering new stuff is just to dive in and start clicking on things.

  If you’re not up for just clicking around, though, I’ve found a good way to discover new stuff is to search an artist you’ve been listening to a lot, navigate to their profile, and click the most esoteric-sounding genre assigned to them. That’ll bring up a list of the most popular artists under that genre, & away you go!

  Every Noise at Once

  Music

Archive