Morrissey (live in Leisureland, Galway)

Review Snapshot: Great set, shame about the venue . . .

The Cluas Verdict? 8 out of 10 

Full Review:

I am in ‘the coastal town that they forgot to shut down,’ trudging along a drizzly Salthill Promenade.  Welcoming lights beckon a few feet ahead.  They belong to Leisureland: swimming pool, fitness centre, off-season funfair park, and the venue for tonight’s Morrissey concert.  As I enter the grounds, I pass a heap of dismantled funfair ride equipment being rained on; perfect material for Morrissey.  Perhaps he’ll see it and write a song about it.  Heaven Knows These Waltzers Are RustyNow, or some such.  The entrance has an A4 sheet of paper tacked to it that reads, ‘Morrissy’.  Someone - a disgruntled fan perhaps - has used a biro to helpfully add the ‘e’. 

Inside, I am greeted by the welcoming aroma of chlorine.  I make my way past the ‘bar’, which is roughly the size of a hotel mini bar (a badly stocked one).  I find a good spot; close enough to the front to get a good view, but far enough away to avoid being trampled by Morrissey’s more hysterical fan boys.  The gig is yet to start, so I survey the empty stage.  The backdrop is a huge black and white image of a sailor, proudly brandishing his muscles, as he smokes a cigar that dangles from the corner of his mouth.  Great.  There is a giant gong on stage.  Brilliant.  I can see a shelf offstage, lined with a row of those enormous silver exercise balls.  Erm?  It begins to feel like the audience is part of some leisure centre Morrissey flash mob.  I look down, expecting to see a disgruntled pilates class squashed under our feet.  

Thankfully, when Morrissey appears on stage, he more than distracts us from our shoddy surroundings.  Nobody brandishes a tambourine quite like Morrissey and the way he manipulates a microphone flex is an art form in and of itself.  He trails it casually, intermittently whipping it behind him like a charismatic ring master.  He performs with a youthful vigour that convinces me there must be an ageing picture of Steven Patrick Morrissey hidden in some dusty attic.

Smiths fans are in their element as they are treated to several classics, including Ask, Some Girls AreBigger Than Others, and This Charming Man.  ‘For a Wednesday night, I suppose it’s not bad,’ drolls Morrissey, as the crowd cheers in a slightly manic fashion.  As he launches into How Soon Is Now? I begin to wonder if Morrissey gets bored, singing his hit songs from the 80’s night after night.  After a while, wouldn’t it start to feel like karaoke?  How does he keep it interesting for himself?  My question is answered by an incredible red strobe light sequence at the end of the song, which accompanies some frantic gong playing by one of Morrissey’s band members.  It is these details that add a whole new dimension to these familiar songs, elevating the show into a brave new audio-visual world.

The lights are worth singling out in particular.  (I haven’t seen such effective use of stage lighting since I saw MC Supernatural supporting Jurassic 5 back in 2001.)  The aforementioned sailor backdrop is intermittently drenched in yellow, green, red and blue light; or silhouettes of the band are cast onto it.  The lighting cues are timed perfectly to the music; many songs ending in a pleasingly dramatic fashion with an abrupt black out.  The one incidence of overkill occurs during Ask, when piercing yellow searchlights scan the crowd, as though trying to unearth the ‘buck-toothed girl’ from Luxemburg.  I have to cover my eyes with my hand until the song is over.  Shyness may be nice, but blindness is not. 

Songs from ‘You Are The Quarry’ are well received, among them, Irish Blood, English Heart, How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel?, and First Of The Gang To Die.  The highlight is a particularly emotive rendition of Let Me Kiss You, with Morrissey ripping off his sweaty shirt and throwing it into the crowd during the line:

But then you look in my eyes

And you see someone

That you physically despise. 

But my heart is open,

My heart is open to you . . .

Before playing his new single, he addresses us politely: ‘May I lodge a complaint?  HMV in Galway refused to stock my new single.’  This is greeted with a chorus of pantomime boos and shouts of ‘Wankers!’ from the audience.  I can only presume the decision by HMV isn’t due to any particular anti-Morrissey sentiment – it’s certainly the catchiest song about anti-depressants I’ve ever heard - but rather a general decline in sales of singles. 

It is still raining as the crowd exits Leisureland, but nobody seems to care.  The sound of excited chatter fills the air; a sound generally reserved for contented concert-goers.  Not bad for a Wednesday night.  Not bad at all.              

Máire T. Robinson

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A review of the album 'Royal Family - Divorce' by Storsveit Nix Noltes

Review Snapshot: Balkan folk instrumentals tarted up with punk riffing and a brief spell of shoegazing squall. The genre sound is done well but the lack of variety in the tracks means your interest will wear off very soon, though it's probably good fun live.

The Cluas Verdict? 6 out of 10

Full Review:
The band’s name is sufficiently Scandinavian and melodic to suggest that they deal in catchy tunes – and with that allusion to Hollywood hellraiser Nick Nolte, arse-kickingly catchy tunes at that. Plus, that album title can only be said in a Lydon-esque sneer. This seemed promising.

Imagine our disappointment, then, to hear a full album of instrumental Balkan folk. For that, dear friends, is what ‘Royal Family Divorce’ by Icelandic post-rock supergroup Storsveit Nix Noltes gives you.

If you’ve ever seen a film by Emir Kusturica, then you’ve heard this kind of music in a typical scene of his: the scrawny, scruffy middle-aged peasant somehow manages to pull the sultry young gypsy babe and at the wedding the entire campsite is dancing around to it. (Your reviewer hasn’t seen Kusturica’s film on Diego Maradona yet, so we’re curious as to how he’ll work a Balkan gypsy wedding scene into that one. Perhaps Napoli take a pre-season tour of rural pre-war Yugoslavia.)

Oh, but there’s a bit of modernising and indie-ing up done to the genre: some fairly basic electric guitar chugging through all the numbers. Second-last track ‘Winding Horo’ (most of the track titles have ‘Horo’ in them: we believe it’s Serbo-Croat for “condescending, middle-class Lonely-Planet ethno-tourism”) has a bit of MBV-style screeching, the only point where this record briefly considers taking a creative risk.

Look, it’s not a bad album and were you to hear this music live you’d probably have a good night. But on record the whole thing is samey to the point of boredom: same rhythms, same arrangements, no vocals or variety to break things up. It’s background music for when you’re dancing with a sultry young gypsy, and it doesn’t bear attentive listening.

And maybe it’s just us but there’s something vaguely dispiriting about a bunch of Reykjavik indie kids turning out a Balkan folk record. Perhaps it’s the same culturally-right-on self-satisfaction that makes many fans of Beirut so insufferable. (Your reviewer has a hip local bookstore whose staff we’re thinking of here; we’re sure they’ll love this album.)

But if you’re engaged to marry a Serbian gypsy or a bourgeois-bohemian ethno-tourist, this’ll be a hit at the wedding reception.

Aidan Curran

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A couple of months ago I was in Guangzhou, that sprawling capital of concrete and spaghetti junctions and home to the Canton Fair. Like Shenzhen, the other big city in Guangdong province, home to the largest concentration of factories in the world, Guangdong is about commerce and being as successful as Hong Kong, which is technically part of Guangdong (once Canton). More suprised was I to find a flowering of musical talent and record labels (like Starsing). My favourite guangdong sound is dombra (a stringed central Asian guitar-like instrument) playing singer Yerboli, an ethnic Kazakh from China's far west, who's moved about the country's richer cities playing in bars and at Han Chinese banquets. Thanks to That's PRD magazine for drawing my attention with their complimentary article timed with the release of Yerboli's article on Old Heaven Records in Shenzhen. Listen to him on myspace.

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Since their incorporation in 2005, Casio Kids have become reknowned for their epic live performances combining old analogue and trashy keyboards, pop melodies and shadow puppet theatre.  Musicially, the band claim to draw inspiration from artists as diverse as Paul Simon and New Order.

Having spent the first part of the year supporting Of Montreal on their European tour (on top of Eurosonic and SXSW apperances), Tuesday May 26 sees the Norwegian electro-troupe outfit make their Irish debut in Academy 2.  Tickets are on sale now from the usual outlets for €15 but, thanks to MCD, Key Notes has a double pass to give away.  

To win, all you have to do is email keynotes[at]cluas[dot]com (removing the [at] and [dot] and replacing them with @ and .) with 'Casio Kids' in the subject line.  The competition is open until Friday May 15 when a winner will be drawn at random.  As always, Key Notes decision is final.

Casio Kids: Grønt Lys i Alle Ledd

 

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This Friday, 8 May, is a public holiday in France to commemorate VE Day. Last Friday, 1 May, was a public holiday too, the French being a socialist people at heart despite the efforts of their bling-bling centre-right president.

And Ascension Thursday, 21 May, is also a day off - the French may be socialists in a secular republic but that’s no reason to let a holiday opportunity pass by. Basically, during May no one’s doing a tap of work over here.

It’s fitting, then, that the last weekend of this holiday-strewn month serves up the first important music festival of the French summer. Europavox takes place on 27-31 May in the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand.

We’ve featured Clermont-Ferrand here before: bands like Cocoon and Quidam are at the vanguard of a thriving local scene that inspired Le Monde to call the city the French capital of rock. With the breadth and depth of its line-up, Europavox should put Clermont on the radar of the international pop community.

The first two nights are curtain-raisers featuring French stars Olivia Ruiz and Sliimy, the latter looking and sounding like a cross between Prince and Mika. Serious business begins on Friday 29 May – between three venues (Cooperative de Mai, Magic Mirrors and Le Cabaret) there are appearances by Maximo Park, I’m From Barcelona, Thecocknbullkid and Danish poppers The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, auteurs of the radio-friendly cracker ‘Around The Bend’.

Bloc Party are the main draw on the Saturday night in the Cooperative de Mai. But that same night in Magic Mirrors there’s a tasty show featuring French Letter favourite Emily Loizeau (even if we’re not crazy about her new album) and fellow piano-singer-songer Soap & Skin, one of many fine acts to emerge from Austria recently.

The final night features an impressive folk-pop bill: Herman Dune, Loney Dear, Lonely Drifter Karen… and our own Declan de Barra. G’wan Oirland! For something with a bit more BPM that night, the alternative is Vitalic.

While Declan de Barra is the only Irish act appearing in Clermont, throughout the five nights of Europavox there’s an impressive cast of acts from across the continent. The Scandinavian region is well represented, as you’d expect at any multinational popfest worth its salt – but there are also acts from Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic, countries not normally associated with Champions League-level music. (For instance, we’ve only ever heard of one decent Spanish band: punk-poppers Dover.)

Full details about Europavox are available on the festival’s website and MySpace page. Any Irish people visiting Clermont-Ferrand wouldn’t want to be too smug about winning the Grand Slam this year: rugby can be a painful subject for the locals during late May/early June, the time of the local team’s annual defeat in the league final.

But in the Europavox spirit of pan-continental pop fraternity, here’s Herman Dune, Frenchmen with Swedish roots, and their lovely ‘Try To Think About Me’ from a live radio session in Los Angeles:

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MSTRKRFT (live in The Academy, Dublin)

Review Snapshot: Toronto’s electro remixers blast out the tunes to an adoring, dancing, day-glo crowd. Subtext? Not for the over-25s. 

The Cluas Verdict? 6 out of 10

Full Review:
‘Isn’t that just Mr. Scruff spelt wrong?’ I was asked when heading to see Toronto duo MSTRKRFT at the Academy. No, it’s Mastercraft (also spelt wrong). The moustachioed men have remixed all your favourites: Buck 65, Death From Above 1979, Bloc Party, Metric, Justice. Due to arrive on at 12.30, the masters were supported during the wait by LA Riots, a DJ who decidedly kept quite serious but popped out some tech-house tunes for the filling crowd to bop to.

Somehow we garnered a spot in the VIP lounge, which was ironically equipped with opposites in excess - a large wooden Buddha and several bottles of Cristal. Looking down onto the crowd I noticed many neon T-shirts and indoor sunglasses and began to feel a bit removed from it all.

Resembling a pair of cowboys (with a bottle of JD on the decks to back up that point), ALP and JFK aka MSTRKRFT bounced onto stage eventually at 1.15am. With alien sounding beats on their build-ups and inspiring a blonde guy to stage dive, they moved the crowd to a level of insanity not far off the emotional outbursts of hysteria at festivals. Strobe lights, purple lights, flashing lights; the venue did its best to raise the level of the show far above simply two guys on decks. It worked.

Men posed at the barriers while MSTRKRFT knocked out heavy remixes of Spiller, Justice’s DVNO, Simian Mobile Disco, and more Daft Punk era floor-fillers. It was about this time that the crowd began to jump and the DJs did too. This inspired a vast number of crowd-surfs, another stage dive (see above) and people trying to get across the barriers while the bouncers quickly made little of them in their massive arms.

Two years ago I would have been right there, until the very last tune, dancing without purpose or care. But I’ve started to believe that maybe nights like this are not designed for the over-25s.

This one left me with a brain melt, as well as the vision of a hairy white bum that was exposed as one man tripped down the Academy staircase.

Pint of Guinness in Doyle’s anyone?

Niamh Madden

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Note to CLUAS regulars:
The following blog post has nothing to do with music. And it may appear at first glance to be completely irrelevant. But it relates to the technology we use to run the site (DotNetNuke) which - it is sad to say - your humble webmaster is quite keen on. Read on at your peril and if you get to the end and go 'Er, so what?' you cannot say you weren't warned.

Recent email exchanges with other DNN Blog Module team members got me thinking about how popular the DNN Blog module is relative to the other 22 free DNN Modules (or "Projects" as they now seem to be called) available via the DotNetNuke mothership. Measuring "popularity" of a piece of software is an imprecise - if not impossible - science. All the same, I made a stab at it by assuming that number of downloads of a module is an indicator of popularity.

Each of the core DNN modules has a stats page on Codeplex (from where the modules are downloaded) and it shows you the number of downloads for each module over different stretches of time (for example here's the stats page for the blog module). I pulled the number of downloads over the last 3 months for each of the 23 modules and the table below brings all the data together, with the modules listed in order of average downloads per day over the last 3 months.

The most downloaded (or popular) module? That'll be the "Form and List (formerly User Defined Table)" module (with an average of 51.9 downloads per day over the last three months). Biting at its heels in 2nd place is the Blog module with 42.9 downloads per day in the same period. I am not surprised to see the Blog module with such a relatively high number of downloads. But I never thought it would be the Form and List module that would top the table (even if I for one have been very keen to deploy its latest version on CLUAS.com in order to replace the - dare I admit it? - FrontPage forms that are still used on the site).

Ranking	Module	Downloads per day
1	Form and List (formerly User Defined Table)	51.9
2	Blog	42.9
3	Survey	42.2
4	Gallery	38.5
5	Announcements	33.0
6	Events	32.2
7	News Feeds	31.0
8	Documents	28.7
9	Store	28.6
10	Forum	28.5
11	Links	24.9
12	Repository	21.7
13	Map	20.9
14 (joint)	Feedback	20.3
14 (joint)	Media	20.3
16	Wiki	20.2
17	IFrame	17.5
18	FAQ	17.0
19	Reports	17.0
20	Contacts	17.0
21	Help	13.4
22	Users Online	12.6
23	XML	10.6

 

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Your correspondent isn’t a man for the horses. You won’t find us in the bookies on Gold Cup day, nor studiously examining the racing pages of The Star in our local at lunchtime. In fact, as we can neither eat nor wear anything from them, horses have little relevance to our existence.

Yet even we’ve noticed the unmistakable equine trend in French pop recently. Last year we featured Poney Express and their excellent single ‘Paris De Loin’. That’s “Paris from afar” and has nothing to do with your loins. Then there's a band called Poni Hoax but they're fairly bad. (You'll have noted so far a serious spelling difficulty for these two bands with the word 'pony'.)

And now, doubling the horsiness as if to prove the point, here’s Pony Pony Run Run. (We feel obliged to tell you that French people generally speak English quite well. It’s just that sometimes they’re terrible at naming bands.)

From Nantes on France’s Atlantic coast, PPRR (right) are a trio comprising Gaetan, Amael and Antoine. They’ve just released their first single, ‘Hey You’, and it’s a cracker – catchy dancefloor pop that marries too-cool-for-school indietronica to a swooning pop melody. We’re not too far from Phoenix here, and that’s always good for us.

PPRR’s first album, with the no-less-terrible title of ‘You Need Pony Pony Run Run’, is due out on 15 June. You can hear a couple of tracks from it on the band’s MySpace page. They’re due to tour around Europe in the autumn of 2009 – that is, if they survive a support slot to (eek!) Simple Minds in Arles on 11 July.

Oh yes, as we were saying, ‘Hey You’ is a fantastic song - here’s a homemade video for it:

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R.S.A.G. (live in Whelans, Dublin) Review Snapshot: Big fan of drum solos? Nah, me neither. Fortunately Jeremy Hickey, spotted above ground on a drum stool last weekend, kept the solos t...

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