17/10/07: Voice of the Seven Woods - The Cube Cinema, Bristol.
Voice of the Seven Woods, aka B-Music affilliate Rick Tomlinson is currently the best exponent of psych-folk that this island has to offer. Not afraid to embrace drone, fuzz, or free-improv, he has just released an eponymously titled album - his first long-player after a series of mini-album and EP releases. We find him here at the Cube in the middle of a 6-date UK tour, supplemented by a bassist and a drummer.
For the first lengthy improv, Rick's electric guitar sound is lost in a bass/drum heavy mix, and thankfully a typically vocal Cube audience force the sound engineer to redress the sonic balance. The set swings between constructed and freeform playing, but is unified by fuzz-guitar, and inventive deft drumming. On the downside it seemed as if the band were paying more attention to 'Mr Freedom', a late-60s anti-American French film showing as a backdrop, than to the music - and in honesty, most of the audience were too...at times it did seem as if Rick was responding to the film, and when viewed as a live soundtrack, the gig became a more enthralling proposition.
It was expected, to this reviewer at least, that the quiet receptive confines of the Cube Cinema would have been an ideal place to air his more initmate acoustic moments, but this was by no means a missed opportunity - it was still a showcase of a band with bags of ideas and imagination - a rare, rare thing indeed.
The Super Furry Animals' approach to their live shows has always been idiosyncratic to say the least, from a techno playing tank, giant inflatable 'good/evil' bears, 'spin-the-wheel' song-selection and quadrophonic sound. Tonight their presentation is a little more orthodox, and the yeti-suits are notably absent, although Bunf looks rather hirsute sporting a beard that resembles a Pacific Ocean Blue - era Dennis Wilson.
All eight studio LPs are represented in a mammoth 20-plus song set, which is naturally weighted towards the choice cuts from their latest LP, Hey Venus! They start off tonight at a high tempo, reeling off 'Run-Away', 'She's Got Spies', 'Do or Die' and 'Northern Lites' to a rather muted audience reaction - it's not until the cod death-metal outro to 'Receptacle for the Respectable' (replete with carrot-munching) that the audience shake off their inhibitions. From then on songs like 'God! Show Me Magic' and 'Rings Around The World' are greeted with hearty jumping aplenty - and their enduring appeal is plain, for even the most casual observer, to see.
Always adept at picking their strongest material, SFA play the highlights of their previous two albums, 'Zoom!' and 'Slow Life' with the latter performed in a giant Power-Rangers helmet. Their expletive-heavy anthem, 'The Man Don't Give A F***', usually their set-closer, tonight precedes 'Keep The Cosmic Trigger Happy' from 1998s' Guerilla. It remains a mystery why a band with so many great songs aren't selling out much larger venues.
With much of contemporary music seemingly unable to move more than just your feet, it comes as a relief that a new Robert Wyatt album is out. Three years since his last (and Mercury Prize nominated) album, Cuckooland, Comicopera is an album in three parts, the first , “Lost In Noise” deals with domestic disharmony, mirroring Wyatt’s recent battle with alcoholism. The second, “The Here and the Now” is politically and religiously cynical, the third, “Away with the Fairies” is sung in Spanish and Italian by way of protest, as Wyatt explains in his liner notes; "It's to do with feeling completely alienated from Anglo-American culture at this point…Just sort of being silent as an English-speaking person, because of this fucking war. The last thing I sing in English is 'You've planted all your everlasting hatred in my heart."
Musically, as ever, it’s an experimental mish-mash of pop, jazz, and avant-rock delivered in his trademark ‘innocent-child’ warble belying (or softenening) the bile of his lyrical dissatisfaction with state of the world. It is nothing new, of course, to see a politicised Wyatt – since the mid-70s when a cretinous Top of The Pops producer suggested that the wheelchair-bound Wyatt sing in a wicker chair as ‘his disability might upset teatime audiences’, he has followed a militant path, and remains a hardened leftie – albeit one with a soft voice. If the meek shall inherit the earth, then Robert Wyatt will find an awfully large tax bill on his desk.
The standout track on Comicopera (“comic-opera”) is “Just As You Are”, a tearful duet detailing the strains of a long-term relationship, but even the more fragmented songs are deceptively poppy - their light melodies and free structure sit comfortably beneath the focused polemic, as if part of a sound-tracked monologue. The wonderfully lo-fi "Mob Rule" has a beautiful melody that seems to leap around the scale with random precision, also recalling the hymnal wonderment of a Smile-era Brian Wilson. By the arrival of the third act, the music is more fragmentary, but it’s a strangeness that most of Wyatt’s fans will embrace – indeed, after a listening to his work, you can’t help feeling that being experimental should be the default setting for artists, such is the rewards that it gives to the soul.
Philip Collings
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