Tag Archives: dance

Confidence Man live at NX review – ludicrous dance-pop tears the roof off
9
Dec

Fresh from releasing their third – and finest – album, there’s simply no room left for duds in Confidence Man’s supremely silly live show. Even by Newcastle’s high standards, Saturday nights out don’t get much more ecstatic than this.

The first thing you should know about Confidence Man is that the band’s two singers go by the names Sugar Bones and Janet Planet. The other two band members perform exclusively behind what can only be described as wide-brimmed midge-proof hats. Together they make willfully silly dance-pop, and their notorious live show involves camp, somewhat stilted dancing, all duly served to the crowd with unflinching poker faces. If aliens learnt about dance music only through a Wikipedia page and decided to invade Earth in the guise of an Australian four-piece electropop band, they would sound and look an awful lot like Confidence Man.

If Con Man’s aim really is gradual world domination, their plan is working. October’s 3 AM (LA LA LA) was their third LP and quite possibly their best, a full-throttle clubby blast featuring a bounty of nostalgic musical references to Britain’s famous 90s rave scene, plus enough of a resemblance to Charli xcx to get the youngsters like me excited. It is 47 minutes of gloriously uncomplicated party music best enjoyed with your hands in the air and feet off the ground.

It made sense, then, that 3AM only sounded more glorious when flowing out of NX’s meaty soundsystem and into a packed room of dancing fans. Amidst the blasting dance beats, Planet and Bones’ kitsch choreo was occasionally impressive (a few of Janet’s somersaults would score well on Strictly) but always hilarious, delivered with a faux-seriousness that made it clear that we were watching a performance, and by no means the musicians’ authentic selves. In today’s post-Brat world, where popstars are obliged to lay out their deepest and darkest emotions on a record, there was something refreshing about seeing an act plainly giving the fans what they want: 90 tears-free minutes of quality entertainment.

And what entertainment. Breakout hit Now U Do was hastily disposed of at the very start of the set, but justifiably so – Con Man’s new stuff makes this mellow house track sound almost soporific. Recent single I Can’t Lose You, for example, is pure electro-pop gold – a sticky, agitated synth line set to a stellar vocal hook. The band have been churning out winning earworms for years now, but this is surely the most ruthlessly catchy ditty Sugar and Janet have ever penned. Control similarly provoked delirium in NX with its heady swirl of techno bass, backed by suitably batty visuals on the giant screen behind the band – think pigeons with laser eyes and badgers smoking cigarettes.

Not once did Bones and Planet falter in their complete commitment to the bit, launching from one side of the stage to the other as they recounted dancefloor love affairs and wild drug-fuelled nights out, occasionally pausing to execute an acrobatic lift. Album highlight Real Move Touch was served with a particularly involving dance routine, fitting for this breathless sugar rush of a dance track. In Newcastle, Janet’s pivotal yelp of “Don’t you know you make me want to scream?!” sounded utterly electrifying, the perfect distillation of the dopamine-filled mania this concert tended to induce.

Even 3AM’s more questionable tracks were given shrewd facelifts on the night. The patience-testing ode to psychedelics Breakbeat was rescued by a spot of crowd participation, whilst Sugar Bones’ sludgy solo number Sicko came with the theatre of seeing Janet smash a sugar glass bottle over his head (karma perhaps for Sugar Bones uncorking a full bottle of champagne on the front rows – myself included – in a particularly giddy moment a few songs earlier).

It must be said that, if it wasn’t already obvious, lyrically Janet Planet is no Shakespeare. Intoxicatingly heavy frugger All My People reads “With a face like that there’s no conversation / With an ass like that there’s no hesitation” (no prizes for guessing the choreography keynotes here), and pathetic boyfriends account for much of the lyrical inspiration. A Con Man gig is not the place for mulling over nuanced metaphors, nor should it be. Janet and Sugar instead focus their efforts on roof-raising beats and titillating visuals, two things they do extremely well. The exception was So What, which hides its musings on the pointlessness of taking life too seriously behind a curtain of trashy Eurodance synths. Whether they were listening to the words or not, the crowd – encouraged to give each other piggy backs – greeted the track like it was a legendary Eurovision winner.

Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie (or so they call themselves) were unsung heroes, cooking up club beats behind their veils at the back of the stage and more than proving their worth in two extended instrumental breaks that succeeded in keeping the crowd’s hands happily bouncing in the air even without the two frontpeople for encouragement. Sugar and Janet eventually returned to stage wearing little more than light-up underwear and took back control with a terrific rendition of Boyfriend (Repeat), perhaps the biggest fan favourite in a night of fan favourites.

Effervescent hit Holiday wrapped up the show before an encore of 3AM’s title track, home to the band’s most artfully melodic hook. A shirtless Bones flexed his biceps one last time, Planet (now in a frilly maid’s costume) delivered a final pout, and the crowd erupted. It had been a Saturday night out for the ages. Releasing her pose and taking a final moment to appreciate the crowd, Janet finally dropped her stern persona and cracked a smile. Who could blame her? Everything about this night was pure euphoria from start to finish.

Fat Dog live at Project House review – barking mad dance-rock is a treat
15
Nov

The much-hyped band crowned a breakout year with a bangers-only 45 minute blitz in Leeds, packed with mammoth riffs and thunderous bass lines. Even the band’s photographer couldn’t resist the pull of a vintage mosh pit.

Twilight on a moody November evening by the canal in Leeds, and the leaking locks are hissing harshly behind a gloomy row of trees. At 8 p.m. it’s still just about bright enough to make out the passing clouds, oddly glowing with light pollution against navy skies. I’ve only just arrived, but I already feel exhausted – with the murky recent weather, a cold going round and a certain election result, I can’t have been the only one approaching Project House feeling weighed down by November blues. I walked towards the reassuring thud of live music – the muffled sounds of what turned out to be a rather dreadful support slot from Truthpaste – hopeful the music might provide some catharsis.

As it happened, few bands do reckless, enthralling catharsis quite like Fat Dog. Like Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, they were borne out of the fertile left-field music scene centred on the legendary Windmill venue in Brixton, making a name for themselves in recent years solely through notoriously wild live shows. Fat Dog’s unique sound is charged with an impulsive energy that makes it easy for audiences to be swept away by it all even without prior exposure. Remarkably, one scant album into their career, Fat Dog have already carved out a distinct stylistic niche – aggressive industrial dance music with thunderous unisons riffs, scuzzy saxophone and yelped, barely coherent vocals about impending doom. Think somewhere between Madness and Daft Punk, but with more lyrical references to slug invasions. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before.

You could forgive Fat Dog for being exhausted themselves – they’ve essentially been on tour for their entire career so far, including a marathon four performances on various small stages at this year’s Glastonbury. Emerging onto stage to a volley of drums and a tremble of deep synth bass, frontman Joe Love was a wonderfully enigmatic figure, his eyes barely open beneath a canopy of curly locks and a white Stetson. Vocally, he made no sense either, producing a manic yelp of “It’s Fat Dog baby!” at the start of the concert, sounding more menacingly deranged than comical.

Such is the unique appeal of Fat Dog, a band who on paper sound jokey – drummer Johnny ‘Doghead’ Hutch has a penchant for performing in a German shepherd mask, sadly not donned in Leeds – but in reality sound like credible harbingers of the apocalypse. It didn’t take long for the audience to start colliding with each other to the sounds of Vigilante, an album opener which brilliantly pairs a mammoth hook with a haunting, vaguely Eastern European folk melody. Gone were the intricate details of the studio recording – most notably a melodramatic spoken word passage, and a gigantic-sounding string orchestra carrying the hook – but in Leeds an additional percussionist was let loose on an arsenal of bongos and cymbals, more than plugging the gap. The result was an intoxicatingly heavy three minutes that had an instant, drug-like effect on the audience, who duly threw their arms – and beers – up in the air.

Joe Love’s performance was intimate for those in the front row.

It was enthralling – but then again I’m bound to say that, since Love spent a majority of this brief gig right next to me, close enough I could have nicked his hat. He leaned against the barriers for song after song, singing directly to his devotees like a young Nick Cave, only with less heartfelt hand-holding and more woofing into the microphone. It was a thrill to be in the mix of bodies with their arms reaching up towards him, but I doubt the people a little further back from me – spending most of the gig looking at a largely empty stage – would have agreed.

From my fortunate vantage point amidst the mosh, the only possible downside of Fat Dog’s set was that each song was almost too exhaustingly compelling. Seven-minute opus King of the Slugs was a marathon of industrial beats, particularly in its propulsive second half where the tempo was ruthlessly dialled up a notch. Wither similarly took off like a rocket, Jacqui Wheeler’s restless bass riff and Love’s oddball intonations of “You better wither, baby, before you die” whipping up a frenzy in the crowd. The bedlam was so irresistible that, in one exquisite moment of rock ‘n’ roll, even the hired photographer camped out beside the stage in front of me felt compelled to down tools and leap into the crowd, practically landing on top of me. A few seconds later I watched her drift off to the dim recesses at the back of the venue as Morgan Wallace’s saxophone squealed like a wounded pig.

Even I Am the King, the unconvincing ballad lodged in the middle of the band’s debut album, sounded gripping in Leeds, the shimmering backing of strings given new urgency by Hutch’s rapid hit-hats ticking away like a time bomb. “I am the king… and it means nothing at all,” Love repeated again and again with rising desperation, the swirl of synths rising around him like floodwaters. Yes, Love has penned plenty of silly lyrics (his first words in his debut album are “Granny’s tights on my head”), but this was a moment of genuine artistry and the evening’s only opportunity for pause and reflection.

It all came to ahead with an electrifying rendition Running, a stupendous single and one of the very best songs from any band this year. It’s a masterclass in tension and release, evident in Leeds when it triggered not one but three mosh circles (where fans clear an area of the floor then rush into the space when the chorus hits). The lengthy bridge in particular was excruciatingly tense, and by the time the eventual payoff came – a panoply of winning hooks, all neatly foreshadowed earlier in the song – bodies were circulating in the crowd as if swept up in a fast-moving lazy river.

An encore of noughties rave classic Satisfaction – a perfect riff for Wallace to attack on her saxophone – wrapped things up before the clocks struck 10 p.m.. Too early to call it a night perhaps, but I’m not sure if I had the physical fitness for much more, and the revellers around me looked like they’d been worked to exhaustion too. In the end, the crowd simply barked in unison instead of asking for one more song – if Fat Dog had indeed imbued their strange music with some sort of magic potion, it had worked a charm.