Charlotte Church's Late-Night Pop Dungeon at the Lexington

I went to see Charlotte Church’s late-night #pop dungeon last weekend. It’s a label-resisting mix of cover’s, mashups and top-rate karaoke.

The obvious highlight was a formidable mashup of Bootylicious and Killing in the Name but the show closed out with a tender and slightly haunting pairing of Every heartbeat that transitioned into a beautiful rendition of Sufjan Stevens’ Chicago.

There were also all kinds of pleasurable throwaways, such as a few lines of Love will tear us apart at the end of I’m not in love.

While remaining delightfully goofy all the way through, the whole performance was tight, high-quality and technical. The jokes definitely didn’t extend to the performance or the music. A distinct pleasure.

London gig crowds

It's been a while since I've been to a live gig that wasn't essentially in an arts centre. I'd forgotten how much London gig crowds are essentially an assemblage of colossal assholes.

In any London gig about one-third of the people are there to score drugs, one-third are there to meet friends and socialise and one-third are there because of, you know, those people on the stage.

You have to play pretty loud in London, because if you don't then half the audience will be talking loud enough to drown you out.

It reminds me of descriptions of Regency pleasure gardens and Sadlers Wells in the same period. Sure you have to have some entertainment to hang all this stuff off but really your just out to see people and be seen.

Cate le Bon at the London Assembly Rooms

I've only encountered Cate le Bon as a recording artist before now, in that context you have a Welsh folky singer-songwriter with a chanteuse vibe. However within minutes of arriving on stage you have a very different take on the same music, all angular head flicks and fierce sharp rock from a jet-black Thinline Telecaster.

The sound has some of the Swansea, south coast Welsh psychedelic swirl along with the occasional freakout. For the most part it is fierce, controlled melodic lines in the style of Krautrock and the Velvet Underground.

The words and sounds remain accessible but the presentation defies expectations.

Entering the digital music era

I recently started to spruce up this blog after having spent a long time cataloguing and discussing my music purchases at RateYourMusic. One of the more amusing things was that the blog's strapline used to mention CDs. It's been a while since I've purchased music that way and it is usually just out of solidarity with good stores like Rough Trade and Sister Ray.

Music has gone digital and it no longer means torrenting music. There's a number of digital music stores that are not iTunes or Amazon (although I do like the latter's Cloud Player), I use Boomkat and (the also ironically named) CDBaby a lot along with the occasional purchase from Bleep and Rough Trade's Album Club.

I also found Deezer to be an engaging streaming service with a good catalogue after trying Spotify and 7Digital and not really being that impressed.

However it feels as if there are two digital services that are really changing the way we discover and consume media. Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

Soundcloud is like the world's demo tape. Whenever I read something about a new band I go and see if they have some tracks on Soundcloud.

Bandcamp is the service that feels like it is really changing the relationship between fans and artists. Being able to buy almost direct from the artist is like creating a global gig stall for every musician.

The issue with things like Napster and torrenting was that taken to their logical conclusion they would genuinely turn music into a hobby pursuit. The new digital services provide a way to create an audience without any limits beyond the interests of the listeners but also make it possible to allow musicians to create and be rewarded for creating.

Nick Cave - Push away the sky

I missed this initially but the Push away the sky is so full of brooding Australian rock and ballads that it kind of feels like fan service. It feels close to the tone of Murder Ballads and other classic Cave and doesn't feel the need to fight or revel in it.

Opener We No Who U R is beautiful with Cave's haunting voice over a simple piano line. The closing title track is equally affecting. In between there are growled intimations of lust and death and gloomy vocal pictures of grim but beautiful life.

A very lovely and low-key release.

Andrew Bird at Union Chapel

I only heard of Andrew Bird this year when he was part of the Rough Trade Album club but I thought as an acoustic singer-songwriter he would be a good fit for the venue.

The show was better than I could have expected though. Bird (on stage by himself) mostly plays violin with a Phrase Recorder to create a layered sound and manages the trick far better than previous people I have seen use it. He made heavy use of a picked or strummed violin that reminded me a bit of Final Fantasy. He mixes virtuosity with a lot of playing panache so it was a really impressive show to see as well as listen to.

Max Richter at the Union Chapel

Max Richter is a hard musician to categorise, if he didn't use loops and samples he would one of the world's most enjoyable composers of modern classical music. But he does and therefore he kind of straddles that space between electronica, classical music and music as multimedia art performance.

He has a new album coming out and on Sunday there was a gig at Union Chapel to coincide with the release. Although a huge fan of Blue Notebooks and Songs From Before I have never had the chance to catch a live performance.

The support act was Johann Johannsson whom Amazon has been recommending to me for the last year. In this case Amazon is right, it is the kind of art noise meets string quartet experience I enjoy.

And then the sun began to set and a truely magical experience began. It was partly the light and atmosphere of the old church but it was mostly about beautiful music. A swooping, haunting melody that captures so many complex feelings. All of Max's releases have a concept and narrative that binds together the fragments of themes and individual pieces and the performance, though mixing music from four different releases, had the same sense of a journey through melancoly, stasis, loss and hope.

The performance was fantastic, with the playing matching the quality of the recording but adding an emotional feeling on top of the technical reproduction of the recorded sound. Everyone on stage seemed to be caught up in emotion of the music and everyone in the audience seemed rapt (rather than doing the normal London gig audience thing of talking incessantly).

It is truly the most amazing gig I have seen since I moved to London and is really one of the highlights of my life. I'd love to do it all again.

High Contrast 6Music Mix

6Mixes can be a bit of a mixed bag but at their best they are a mix of influences, admiration and a personal musical history. Listening to the High Contrast Mix (not someone I had heard of before) I was struck by the familiarity of his choices and his reasoning for choosing his music.

Although it lost me towards the end I was really curious who this person was, finding out that it wasn't just a 6Music punter I had a Google and came up with a bio which says that actually we not that different. Except that he's more my brother's age and he's a drum and bass producer and I'm an IT consultant, natch.

Still I found it weird that we had these parallel journeys through a Welsh childhood with our musical discoveries.

NIN: Ghosts I-IV

Late, tired. New NIN musical experience is amazing value for $5. Buy it now.

Throbbing Gristle - Discipline

Since I seem to posting now I might as well get the last link off my list and point y'all in the direction of Throbbing Gristle's Discipline. I don't generally really "get" much TG but this live performance is punishing brilliant.

When the beat kicks off it's amazingly heavy but also surprisingly 4 to the floor modern. There is also an amazing moment near the start when the vocal delay and loop is taken off the mike and suddenly this kind of song appears from the midst of a cloud of discord.

Generally I prefer SPK for the misery music but this performance is fascinating because it is not simply proto-industrial. You have punk nihilism, post-punk performance, electronic beats and Kraftwerk electronic manipulation all going off in one place.

If you think it's rubbish then you can watch this and skip to 5:20 where someone agrees with you in a satisfyingly direct action sort of way.

Insanity in the sideband

If you have a digital radio I don't know if you've ever made use of the little text ticker that accompanies the broadcast. Usually I just use it to check what record is being played at the moment. However Marc Riley's 6Music show makes an insane amount of use of the ticker. In addition to telling you useful stuff like the release date of the new Tindersticks album they also just make up completely random stuff on there. Kewl!

Indelicates - Sixteen

I quite like the Indelicates but their current single is the kind of funny, catchy, clever and bitter pop song I love. The video captures the yearning, snideness of the lyrics and I think its hard not to be delighted by the swooping rhythms and rhymes of the song's chorus.

You can get more Indelicates at their Myspace page, I'm looking forward to their album but Sixteen is really their high point to date.

If you do take a look at the video (you are aren't you?) then also take the time to watch the Iggy and the Stooges Sixteen video that you'll probably get in the recommendations. It's amazing to watch some simply give themselves over to their performance with no irony and no reservations. It's mesmerising to watch Iggy at his best.

Listening to Tom Robinson can be expensive

Sometimes I listen to the Tom Robinson show on 6 Music when I am washing the dishes. Sometimes these shows can be expensive. I have ended up buying three EPs within weeks of each other due to airtime on Tom's show and at the end of tonight's show I have another five names in my notebook to follow up on.

First there is my new favourite shoegazer band, Ringo Deathstarr, you can buy their EP from Spoilt Victorian Child and you really should you know. Then there are the goth rock stomp charms of the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster and the northern vaguely category defying Beneath Fire and Smoke. Listening to a radio show has never been so expensive.

New Google Feature

Que?

Google Music Search for Mum.

That was the year that was

Okay, year in reviews are kind of obligatory in the musical world. This year I read the OMM and The Wire and realised how hopeless and useless these kind of thing are. Pointing out overlooked gems only works if you have built up some kind of relationship with the reader over the previous year and this year no-one had so I was skeptical of what unknown quantities were chosen over music I had heard.

I think that there can be little doubt that one of the most outstanding albums of the year was Radiohead's In Rainbows. It managed to blend their experimental and conventionally rocky side into a more coherent whole. Some people said it was a retreat from the Kid A era but I think they are wrong, Kid A was exciting and unconventional but In Rainbows is holisitic rather than simply ditching everything done to date.

However personally I was suprised to find myself returning again and again to the math techno of Calabi Yau Space by Dopplereffekt. I liked their previous albums but would have to say they hardly kept me coming back for more. Calabi Yau Space has never left my MP3 player this year and has been a welcome listen in all kinds of situations.

Live the experience I look back on most fondly was watching Jeffery Lewis perform an acoustic version of one of his Crass covers. Lewis is whimsical nu-folker who has some funny kitschy songs but it was a strong of genius to see that aggressive anarchist punk lyrics would more be more plantive within a twee pop setting.

Sellaband and Co.

Julia Marcell is a female singer-songwriter, something that Sellaband isn't necessarily short of. However she is the real deal and has shot through to the 50K in no time at all. Having ignored her initially one listen made me realise I was up my own arse about it and that I needed to buy some parts. I am actually looking forward to her album.

However if you want to support some not so attractive but musically very worthy people then check out my list or simple look at this band, they're great!

Anyway there was a piece in Guardian Money reviewing the new set of websites that aim to link fans with money with bands wanting money. They mentioned Trail who I also thing should record an album (they are a bit mainstream but they are still better than some crap acts that actually have deals like Morning Runner) so hopefully there will be a little jump in parts purchased.

On the back of the article I tried SlicethePie which I found incredibly convoluted. I tried scouting but after acerbically reviewing two fucking awful RnB acts I realised that apart from being incredibly rude to musicians there was no point to the experience for me. There is no community interaction and the whole investment thing basically buys a CD and a weird spread betting-style purchase. The whole thing felt really negative instead of being about letting people connect to music they might actually like.

Amazing Tunes on the other hand seems to work. Listen to a track, like it, buy it DRM free for a fair price. Isn't that what this whole idea is meant to be about?

Bleep was robbed

iTunes won the best online music store at the BT awards. Bleep deservedly won last year and while they may not have been expected to win this year I cannot believe that iTunes got the prize instead. Have people actually used different music stores? iTunes is useless without it's own app, that would disqualify it immediately in my opinion.

iTunes winning this award is like announcing that beige was the most exciting colour of the year.

Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster: In the Garden

This is an awesome piece of gothic rock from a band I previously associated with limp-wristed indie fare. The EP costs £9 from HMV and while that is a lot for just one track it is actually a generous double cd affair with a live recording on the second disk. You can also get a digital download of the track via the band's website (although I had never heard of the site involved).

Thank you 6 Music for alerting me to this rocking track.

Roisin Murphy Video

I've just spotted this YouTube version of Roisin Murphy's (the lead singer of Moloko) new single, Overpowered, and I think it's a bit of a gem. The track is quite good but the trip home across London is one I recognise, lots to wryly smile about. Of course I tend not to have a stage costume when I'm heading home but maybe that's just me being unimaginative.

And on a related note have a look at this mashup (it pains me to use the word, mind) which while using two similar tunes is really very good and gains bonus points for noting the similarities in the videos.

SellaBand

Like all muso Guardianistas I read the story about Sellaband and immediately jumped over to have a look at the bands I could buy part of. The first disappointment is that all the bands who are gaining a lot of traction are really incredibly dull. If Sellaband intends to be something of a focus group on music then it's a depressing outcome with folky, souly, lumpen pub rock being the main recipients of most peoples money.

I chose some electronica bollocks which I think is good but to which I am rather in the minority at the moment. When it works the system seems good, you get to listen to some interesting music and you can put a stake in the ground and say "this would be even better with some professional production". However overall the experience is a bit depressing, the musical taste seems conservative and although 5000 people does not sound a lot it is probably a lot more sales than most bands make. A CDR release probably doesn' t go above 500 copies. There also a lot of intrusive advertising on the site and some of the flash items on the jukebox player actually end up showing you an advert rather than having any function.

On the plus side though there are some truly dreadful promotional pictures on the band pages. I find it hard to understand the logic of these. You are going to display a vision of your band to potentially thousands of people so you put your dad in the picture, you can't persuade the drummer to take his glasses off and drop the pony tail for five minutes or you mistakenly think that people desperately miss Venom.

Sellaband probably just shows why most bands can't get a record deal but I do hope that it leads to something interesting for decent independent artists.