Two years after enigmatic Bath uni student PinkPantheress found instant fame with her nostalgic brand of dancepop, Victoria Walker is back with a rewarding debut album that fulfils the promise of that viral debut mixtape, writes Alex Walden.
get this feeling of excitement mixed with fear when alternative artists begin to gain popularity. It’s essentially a takeover of mainstream media, like the alt scene no longer has to hide on streaming services or small venue concerts any more. But what if it’s only a phase for the majority of listeners? What if these artists who are essentially pioneering new genres are left to fade out? I can remember feeling this range of emotions when I first heard Pink Pantheress’ Boy’s a liar Pt.2 on the radio. I was so happy for her but who knew if it would last?
Those who read my article on Pink Pantheress’ previous mixtape know that this was one of my biggest concerns for her. I thought that her first mixtape was a good start, but she had a long way to go to make her next project truly astounding. However, after two years of singles with some iconic artists such as Willow Smith, Kaytranada, Skrillex and Ice Spice, Pink Pantheress has officially released her first studio album. That’s right, she’s graduated from short mixtapes to just under 35 minutes of album-quality tracks, but is it enough to mark her place in the music industry permanently?
The music video for Mosquito includes cameos from Charithra Chandra, India Amarteifio and Yara Shahidi.
Numerous aspects of inspiration
One of my favourite elements of her previous work was that PinkPantheress wasn’t afraid to channel a sound from a time that often gets forgotten. With elements of garage, jungle and even nu metal littered throughout her mixtape to hell with it, it’s clear that she’s not afraid to take inspiration from the era of her youth. Any fan of this aspect of her music will love the fact that not only do we get the same amalgamation of sounds, but she also incorporates some new influences this time. In tracks like True romance and The aisle we get this crisp discotheque/pop sound but then with tracks like Bury me, we get this softened and heavily delayed 808 mix with a very ambient melody which gives us a somewhat psychedelic sound. This plethora of different sounds is mixed together incredibly well and gives the album a more polished feel that makes it sound longer than 35 minutes.
Lyrical progression
As far as musicians go, PinkPantheress has never really been labelled as a lyrical genius and it’s never really been a problem for her because her songs are so incredibly catchy that you barely pay attention to the lyrics anyway (despite her usually talking about some quite serious stuff). I have countless friends who could recite the entirety of Pain and I Must Apologize but if I asked them what those songs are actually about, they’d have to think about it before giving me an answer. But with this album it’s almost impossible to ignore the lyrics. It’s full of serious and quite dark topics ranging from being wanted for her career and not her personality, like being so crazily in love with someone she starts losing friends or her ongoing battle coming to terms with her fame and fortune. These themes are presented in an aggressively straight-up manner. I mean, seriously, I was completely astonished when I heard the line “because I just had a dream I was dead, and I only cared ‘cause I was taken from you”. It’s not every day you hear a lyric like that. There’s no heavy wordplay for you to decode at all, instead it’s very raw and hard hitting. In my opinion it’s amazing that she can be so blunt. We saw a glimpse of this in her EP but this time around, it’s a real step up.
Ice Spice collaboration Boy’s a liar Pt. 2 is a certified hit, reaching number 2 in the UK earlier this year.
Finding a balance
After Internet baby (interlude) the album begins to take a slower pace for the next five tracks. We can hear a range of standout melodies accompanied by these beats that come across as borderline ambient like in the tracks Blue and Feelings. It feels like this half of the album was inspired specifically by the songs All My Friends Know and Nineteen from her mixtape in 2021, but it doesn’t have the same soothing sound that those tracks do. With those two tracks we got rudimentary melodies matched by a calming tone from PinkPantheress singing about her struggles with her love life, growing up and loneliness, while the lyrics had no hidden meaning or crazy harmonic drive. Not that that was an issue – her melancholic tone fused together with the beats so effortlessly that it gave us this schematic “less is more” feel which worked well as a method of giving your mind a break from the fast paced drum brakes and overall feel-good/hype songs earlier in the tape.
Yet with this album the beats are all a bit too well structured. It’s not every day that I find beats that feel overdone but in this case the tracks feel a bit too heavy in places. For example, in the track Capable of love you’re unable to fully let the music take hold of you like in her previous work because there’s just so much going on. You’re constantly waiting for the next hook, the next drum fill, the next thing to happen which clashes with her soft voice making it feel lacklustre in some parts, almost like a supporting instrument rather than the star act.
Final thoughts
The only real negative thing I had to say about PinkPantheress’ first mixtape was that I thought that it was too short. It felt like you couldn’t really get into it because as soon as your mind starts to escape with the music, it was over. I’m glad to say that with Heaven knows, I can eat my words with this album as PinkPantheress has shown amazing improvement in both quality and quantity, there’s a very clear progression in terms of production quality in this album as well as none of the tracks feeling short at all. While I still think that in some areas songs sound a bit overdone, overall this is another great step forward for PinkPantheress. She has shown that she can keep that classic sound we all adore while still experimenting with other ones to give us a more refreshing sound. PinkPantheress has clearly been working hard since her ‘To hell with it’ days and has proved that she’s got what it takes to stay in the spotlight.
Following the release of his new lo-fi single me and you, Alex Walden caught up with East London producer and artist AshZone to talk about the story behind his most recent music video, some features you may have missed, and his influences as a producer as well as an artist.
AW: You posted in Instagram about how there’s a sort of storyline behind your latest music video.
AZ: Yeah, there’s a bit of lore behind the whole AshZone thingy.
How does that work then?
It’s more sort of like a personal thing, the storyline. Each song sort of tells a story of me as an artist. If you go all the way back to 2020, with my project called NIGHTINGALE, each song was telling a story. The whole story behind that EP was about finding myself as an artist and exploring myself – kind of like travelling. Although I didn’t actually go anywhere physically, it was about exploring different things and places as an artist so I kind of developed that a bit more in my recent songs.
My last four songs, papaya, get right!, move your body and me and you, all have some sort of connection in terms of my artistry, being obviously my purple self, but I’ve also allowed myself to create this world which is literally based off real life. Everything that happens in real life I draw or animate.
The way that you have your drawings blend in with the real world is dope in my opinion. I love how it shows you can blend your music with the real world.
Thank you. The way I went about it before was I used to draw everything, like literally everything, then I kind of realised from I think papaya onwards, the music video or visualiser or whatever, this blends really well. With papaya I used screenshots from this game called Forza so then I started trying to use more real-life stuff with the next music video get right! and I was like “you know what? I’m going to do a full-length music video,” and thenmove your body came and then with me and you I was like “move your body’s music video is good but I want do better” you know? “I want to do much more interactive stuff”. So, I went out several times and shot different things in Hornchurch, which is my hometown, just shooting different areas and stuff. I had to be careful so I brought the tripod so I could track the camera motion so that my animation would work really well with all that stuff.
When you draw, I notice that there’s often little pop culture references. When you posted the snippet of the character with the overall and rollerblades, I immediately clocked that’s got to be Tab from Jet Set Radio.
Yeah 100%
And I saw you had included a snippet of some Bomb Rush Cyberfunk in there as well. Would you say that those games have influenced the way that you make music as well as draw?
Oh 100%. It’s not even just Jet Set Radio and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I think at the end of the day, it always boils down to my love for Sonic the Hedgehog. I’ve always heard people say to me “your music sounds like something I would hear in a sonic game” and I’m like “yeah thanks, this is perfect,” because again, it goes all the way back to when I was 12. Actually, I started making music at like 11-ish and I think Sonic Colors had just come out at around that time and the soundtrack was what had literally pushed me to like… I remember saying to myself at a very very young age “I want my music to sound like that”.
It is a killer soundtrack to be fair.
Literally, Sonic music is so good and that is what gave me the push to look a lot deeper into music, into composition and all that stuff and to this day I still try to put people onto Sonic music as crazy as it sounds like.
Bro so do I! There are so many hidden gems in Sonic games.
Literally!
The way they construct a whole world with their music is insane.
Literally, like I feel weird sometimes listening to Sonic music but these guys… these guys know what they’re doing you know?
For real, they’re good at what they do.
Yeah but in terms of art, I got into art through my older brother because he does graphic design and back then he used to design a lot of characters and stuff so that kind of pushed me to do the same thing as well. For me to this day, art is still a hobby but at the same time it’s like… you know it’s one of those things where I was like “I can use this a lot for my music”, and my art takes inspiration from many things from Scott Pilgrim to Jet Set Radio. There’s this artist on Instagram called Cassandra Calin. She played a huge role with my art style and everything, but the music video itself does take inspiration from Jet Set Radio and in the outfit I
designed – well not designed because I already own it in real life – but the outfit is based off of Tab or Corn’s outfit from Jet Set Radio to the roller skates and just putting stickers everywhere in my town centre. I would’ve done graffiti but I realised that it would’ve been a lot harder to animate plus I’m sure it’s illegal. You know I’m for inspiring kids to do the right thing these days.
Wow a true role model if I ever heard one.
Ha-ha, exactly!
Moving from the inspiration in your drawing back to your sound; when I first discovered you it was when you released get right! It brought back this garage sound that I hadn’t heard in a while and then, looking further into your discography, I can see you have so many different sounds. You have garage, house Splatoon remixes and even Vocaloid music. With you having such an extensive range of sounds, do you ever find it difficult producing and releasing different genres of music because the audience might not like it or is it just “I want to make this song. I’m just going to make it”?
I used to have a bit of anxiety a little while ago. This was back when I was working on NIGHTINGALE because I had two distinctive audiences at the time. I had my real life audience which was friends I know, my brothers and all that stuff and then there’s my online audience who are mostly from America and they used to like my EDM and my drum ‘n’ bass and all that stuff whereas my real life audience – they’re more used to my mellow kind of hip hop-ish sound and at the time I was thinking like “what do I make, what do I make?” but nowadays I kind of just want to make whatever I want to make, you know? If I want to make a full on EDM track like something you would hear in Rocket League or a Twitch streamer’s stream or whatever then I would make it. I mean maybe not now because I’m kind of in this era of lo-fi house and dance music and all that stuff but if I feel like it I feel like it. It’s that sort of artistic freedom in a way, if you get what I’m saying.
So then if you were to make a project in the future could we expect multiple genres or just the one?
It depends on how I’d want the project to go. It could be like a full on EDM sound or it could be straight up dance music/dance lo-fi or it could be a mixture of both. I’m definitely not new to that concept as I’ve done it before. In fact I think my very first EP that I put out when I was like… how old was I?… I was like 16, 17. It was like a full-on hip hop EP because it was more aimed at my real life audience. Although I was still heavily influenced by Sonic music, I kind of wanted to go back to my roots and then after going back and forth between genres I realised I just wanted to try loads of different genres at the time so I made a project that was strictly this genre and strictly that genre. So yeah, I would do it again if I felt like it.
To be fair, you’re good at that stuff. I mean with get right!, move your body and me and you, they all sound a little bit different; they aren’t exactly the same genre but the way you produce it kind of creates your own unique musical universe with all these characters. Focusing on the characters in move your body, I’m guessing that it’s you and Lotu5 in the video along with the other characters. Are these characters all based off of real people or are they people that you just draw?
For move your body, every single person in that video is based off of someone I know in real life. It’s essentially their cameo appearance in that video. I drew myself with Lotu5 alongside with friends whereas with me and you, yes there were loads of cameo appearances, but there were also people that I designed myself. I don’t know if they count as video vixens, but I did design and style them myself, some of them. For an example, if you look in the video there’s a girl wearing a red, black, and white Ferrari Jacket. I designed her by myself and it’s kind of based off not people that I know but people that I see in real life, like the different hairstyles and all that stuff – different black hairstyles might I add – and different fashion senses. You know, I had to like actually go outside, which is a crazy concept, but I had to go out and seek and study people’s different senses of fashion and all that stuff and I tried to apply it to these people that I’m creating for this specific music video.
I respect it man. One that caught my eye was the sticker of a man with a pink jacket and his dog in the art style of Bathing Ape’s Baby Milo, is that a real person?
Yeah that’s my friend, his name is Diore and his Instagram is @realeffingdee. He’s a very, very supportive friend. He’s one of my good friends in this scene. I only met him earlier this year but we found out we went to the same school and everything and he’s been so properly supportive with my music and stuff and he’s also just a really great guy so he asked me if he could have a little cameo appearance and I was like “yeah, not only am I going draw but I’m also going to give you your own little Brent [Faiyaz] sticker in different places here and there” and he was like “bro thank you so much!” and I was like “aye man it’s nothing, you’re so supportive of me, this is like me paying my respects back to you”.
Towards the end of the video, you put a little trailer for 365 which is coming soon. As well as that is there anything else we can expect from you in the foreseeable future?
About the 365 thing, I was hoping people would take more notice – I was sprinkling a little bit of 365 here and there throughout the whole music video. What’s so lucky about where I live is that there is a bus route with the number 365, so I thought I’d take advantage of that. But anyways, yes at the end of the video I do tease a little something with an artist called honey. She’s released music with an artist called 10tendo called Money and the song is really good but it’s big as well. Me and her have got a little something together. 365 is… I don’t want to say too much but it’s definitely something we can expect in the future at some point.
Playing to a sparse crowd in Belgrave Music Hall, Girl Ray’s undercooked hour of straightforward disco-pop had highlights but suffered from a muddy mix and was ultimately upstaged by their support act.
To be fair to me, the passage from the neon-lit buzz of Belgrave Canteen to the upstairs Belgrave Music Hall isn’t immediately obvious, particularly upon arriving relatively early on a Tuesday night. Not for the first time at this venue, I accidentally managed to skip the queue via a promising unmarked door next to the pizza stand, and located a toilet before approaching the security guards, receiving a slightly mean chuckle when they pointed out I had toilet roll stuck to the bottom of my shoe. Once in, I did at least have first dibs for the bar and for Belgrave’s limited seating, plus unfettered access to the merch stand. It wouldn’t be manned until after the gig three hours later, but I made sure to leave the venue sporting a bright red Girl Ray tee nonetheless.
Twenty minutes later came that sinking feeling that comes with watching a support act take to the stage to a nearly empty room, and tonight was a particularly tough draw for Kuntessa, whose audience numbered around 20 for her opener. She did at least seem to have three dedicated fans supportively bobbing up and down to the beat near the front, until I realised these were of course the Girl Ray trio willing on their friend. Astonishingly, the Italian electronica songwriter seemed unfazed, posing and preening joyfully across the stage and hilariously introducing zany songs that ranged from rants about her time as a bartender, her love of Kylie Minogue prosecco and a showstopper about wanting to become her crush’s bike saddle – all from her recent Pussy Pitstop EP, as she was at pains to remind us. It was a showing easily profane enough to prove the crudeness of her stage name is no mistranslated coincidence.
Support act Kuntessa played to an almost empty room. I positioned myself at the front during the final build up to Girl Ray’s set and had expected the wide empty space behind me to fill up with latecomers. Instead, there remained a six-feet radius around me and I ended up uncomfortably feeling like part of the show, feeling too exposed to slip back into the crowd; I was closer to frontwoman Poppy Hankin than any other audience member. It was perfect for dancing, yes (and it had been no problem when a similar thing happened for Los Bitchos last year), but also mildly embarrassing.
It was a shame, because this has been a big year for Girl Ray. Mirroring Jessie Ware, although on a much smaller scale, the trio has pivoted from serviceable indie pop to energising disco through their rewarding recent album Prestige, which presented a sort of raffish charm that suited a genre accustomed to not taking itself too seriously. Faultless pop tunes like Everybody’s Saying That and True Love have no doubt already fueled wild nights in Girl Ray’s familiar North London haunts but, like a hungry young football team contemplating an away day to Stoke, could they deliver the goods on a drab night in Leeds?
The answer was, sadly, not really. Opener True Love immediately fell flat when Hankin’s crucial rhythm guitar was rendered inaudible by a messy mix, and over the course of the next few songs the balance hardly improved even when Hankin repeatedly asked the sound engineer to turn her up. Unlike Kuntessa, Girl Ray seemed understandably a little deflated by the poor turnout on this, the penultimate night of a sizeable UK tour. The gave it an admirable good effort, but lyrics like “baby, get down with me,” simply don’t work without maximum gusto.
In the end, that was what condemned this brief gig: Girl Ray’s performance was never simply bad, just consistently unremarkable. Solos were unambitious, never venturing far from the original recording and lacking any sort of technical dazzle needed to wake up a tepid crowd. Hankin’s vocals sound endearingly rough and ready on the record, but here they just sounded ordinary and slightly held back, like a shy friend delivering a relatively impressive showing at karaoke, good enough for a few raised eyebrows, if not quite a free drink.
Nonetheless, there were highlights to be found once the worst of the mixing issues had been resolved. Tell Me was easily the band’s most exciting song and provided a workout for Sophie Moss on bass plus Girl Ray’s most pleasingly silly couplet: “baby, we were hot like a cigar / but here I am crying in the back of my car”. Hold Tight arrived with a bouncy electronic drum beat from Iris McConnell at the back of the stage and Hankin’s acoustic guitar strumming was buoyant and peppy, even if it seemed to take perhaps a little too much inspiration from George Michael’s Faith.
Give Me Your Love, Prestige’s 7 minutes, 43 seconds closer and arguably the only song in Girl Ray’s catalogue to show some genuine creative ambition, closed the set. I had found it underwhelming on the record but was hopeful it would come alive in person. The entry of a severely overblown kick drum, engulfing all other instruments with every beat, put a swift end to those hopes. It was so deafening it even seemed to startle the three band members at first – good for clearing out my sinuses, less good for closing out a pop concert. It was fitting for this gig that a final, potentially interesting crack at the vocoder from Hankin was almost entirely lost to the din.
I had hoped to meet one of the band at the merch stand afterwards, but having lingered for ten minutes I settled on telling Kuntessa how much I admired her confidence before attempting my exit, trying a door I’d been through on previous visits to Belgrave for investigative purposes. I quickly turned around when the same security guard as earlier told me in no uncertain terms that I had to leave the same way I came in. Feeling sheepish, I decided a bus home would be a solo adventure too far this time and called an Uber. For me as for Girl Ray, sometimes it’s just not your night.
Louis Cole, Genevieve Artadi and an incredible collection of collaborators have crafted an album elevated far above any of their past music, shaping a promising future for the electronic funk duo, writes Matthew Rowe.
Agood few years ago I was playing GTA with some friends when I first heard F—k The Makeup, Skip The Shower on FlyLo FM, and ever since I have been obsessed with LA’s experimental funk duo KNOWER, the main driving factor for me getting into funk music (thank you rockstar). It has been seven years since Louis Cole, Genevieve Artadi and their array of ridiculously talented musicians released an album under KNOWER, but you can tell they never stopped.
Cole, Artadi and friends are often found touring with their respective bands and solo projects. For example, Louis Cole’s tours often include a full entourage of artists, having a huge overlap with those included in KNOWER FOREVER. This is evident with how tight all of the songs feel, with every member able to fit seamlessly into the funk pocket, no matter how convoluted some of the melodies are.
KNOWER FOREVER is the product of a band where each member has refined their act so finely that their sound has evolved significantly, moving from a more unhinged dubstep feel to well put together funk. As an album, this was a brave move from Cole and Artadi, releasing it on Bandcamp back in June before it got released on streaming services, but listening to it on Spotify, I wish I’d caved in and bought it via Bandcamp.
Admittedly, at first I was a little worried about how the album would turn out, and that the rest of the songs would struggle to hold a candle to the three released before the rest, those three being I’m The President, The Abyss and Crash The Car, all of which set the bar high. On the release of specifically the first two, they were all I could listen to for a good week. The risk of the rest not being as good was one of the reasons I was put off buying the Bandcamp version but now since the Spotify release, I can’t stop listening. This project is easily the best funk album I’ve heard this year and is in contention for my album of the year, alongside Black Country, New Road’s Live at Bush Hall.
This project is easily the best funk album I’ve heard this year.
KNOWER has always been known for pushing the boundaries of wacky and ridiculous, but I believe that in KNOWER FOREVER they have successfully balanced this with producing nicely subdued songs in comparison. In the previous album, Life, there were songs like The Government Knows and Pizza which I’m sure some people will miss, but I think it’s a very welcome change for them to focus more on the synergy of the band rather than making rather nonsensical music. The new sound is very similar to two of their most famous songs, Overtime, and Time Traveller, the Overtime live session being one of my favourite videos of all time.
In this project, it’s also clear that inspiration has derived specifically from Cole’s other endeavours. Louis Cole is part of a duo that goes by Clown Core and in It’s All Nothing Until It’s Everything it’s clear to see with the drum beat that it is heavily inspired by them. This album also hosts a wide range of musicians; despite being a project by Cole and Artadi, it feels more like a revolving collective of pure talent. On top of this, some big names have been bought in: Jacob Mann and MonoNeon, just to name a couple. The only problem I have with this project is MonoNeon’s lack of bass soloing on The Abyss and despite his insane bass lines, I was left feeling that there was untapped potential.
As a drummer, I love nothing more than hearing new Louis Cole tracks, and he delivered. I have found, after several hours of trying, that his sound is very tough to replicate. Every song on KNOWER FOREVER seemed to bring a different style with it, but I for one find it very impressive how easily he can fit technically complex drumming and fills seamlessly into the rest of the band without overstepping. This has developed with this album. In the past, in songs such as Like A Storm, the contrast with the melodic singing of Artadi clashed with Cole a bit too much, but the new album has perfectly mixed her vocals depending on the song. Pair this with Sam Wilkes’ stank-face-inducing basslines and Sam Gendel’s sax riffs; you can’t go wrong.
It’s not only Louis who displays range in his playing; the entire band is capable of completely different soundscapes depending on the song. Just in this one album, we are blessed with ethereal melodic songs that focus on the range of the soft-spoken lyricism of Genevieve, fast bouncy funk in Nightmare and hardcore dubstep funk in It’s All Nothing Until It’s Everything. The band’s ability to adapt to any subgenre is inspiring and gives me a lot of hope for the future of KNOWER.
The band’s ability to adapt to any subgenre is inspiring and gives me a lot of hope for the future of KNOWER.
One thing I really appreciate about this album is the use of the full house band. This is classic Cole: a house full of musicians, all somehow in perfect sync with each other. This has been done in the past, but to my knowledge, has never made it into a KNOWER album, often being made as fun projects after the songs have had official releases. This opens up a whole new dimension to the song I’m The President, making it more of an epic orchestra rather than just a band, and the result is all of these talented musicians coming together, with perfect mixing to help realise a song, that otherwise would have been incredible, but is greatly boosted up by the theatrics of the brass and choir.
KNOWER FOREVER was worth the seven year wait. Even though I only started listening to them after Life came out, I have been waiting to see what else they could do. This has set the bar very high for future projects, but if there’s a group of people who can maintain quality, it’s these guys. All members involved contributed greatly, and all of them had their chance to shine, creating solid music with well-suited solos. They are able to take on any genre they feel like, and I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do next.
No Bach Preludes were to be found here, just consistently thrilling African beats propelled by Selaocoe’s fierce bowing and awesome throat singing. In between show-stopping dance numbers and a spellbinding percussion solo, it was the audience participation that lifted this gig towards something spiritual.
Abel Selaocoe doesn’t just play the cello, he consumes it. At the start of what will be a special night in Newcastle he strikes an imposing figure, appearing in a huge rose red toga with gold patterns flowing all around him, somewhat upstaging his three plainly dressed bandmates who comprise the Bantu Ensemble, a group fashioned specifically for this tour. Stood up or sitting down, Selaocoe is a bear of a man, but the lovable, cuddly kind: he starts his show with a heartfelt thanks to the audience, his broad smile only encouraging lengthy cheers in response which he patiently waits to subside. Like most musicians, he writes his music about love, but a love deeper than the coffee shop crushes and sickly clichés that might take your average popstar to the top of the charts. Instead, Selaocoe speaks about love for one’s friends, love for humanity in general and, most importantly, love for one’s home. Indeed, this concert is devoted to his homeland of South Africa, with its hypnotic, percussive grooves and ingrained emphasis on the power of community. The cello is Selaocoe’s tool of choice for celebrating his culture, his playing zippy and playful, lending a new sense of soul to an instrument so often confined to the sanitised world of European concert halls. Perhaps Selaocoe is less consuming his cello, then, more giving it a much needed hug.
That’s not to say Selaocoe’s music is all sunshine and lollipops. He opens with an expansive reworking of his track Qhawe / Hero, launching boldly into a capella vocals, standing tall and closing his eyes so as to maximise the power of his bone rattling voice. Therein lies the first surprise of the night: Selaocoe is a great cellist, but his vocal abilities are just as remarkable. The several passages of a capella singing in this show have a primal quality, and despite being almost entirely sung in his native Sesotho, there’s something about his abrasive transitions from lion-like throat singing to shamanic growl that require no translation. Besides, watering down his lyrics to appease an English audience would forgo the many wonderful qualities of his mother tongue, most notably Sesotho’s extraordinary click consonants, which give his faster passages of singing a fascinating percussive edge. Selaocoe does offer translations for his song titles, but otherwise we must simply enjoy how his words sound rather than what they mean, and his performance is all the better for it.
Abel Selaocoe often stood to sing.
The best songs were the ones that managed to cram in all the many aspects of Selaocoe’s offering as a performer. Hlokomela / Take care was one of several roof-raisers, starting with gentle singing and plucking before bursting into joyous life, Selaocoe standing up at one point, leading claps for the crowd as if they needed any encouragement. This form of tribal African music seems to dig a layer deeper into our urge to dance as one community than most Western music, and a rowdy Newcastle crowd didn’t require much introduction to get their feet moving and heads bobbing, a few giddy yelps emerging from the audience to greet any particularly acrobatic new bass line from Alan Keary. Mohamadou Kouate was the engine in the centre of stage, kneeling amidst a playground of various percussive wonders but spending most of his time striking a calabash, an upturned dome that, when struck with a firm fist, released the earthy pulse at the heart of Selaocoe’s uptempo crowd pleasers. Hewasn’t merely a beat provider, though; exquisitely gentle Ibuyile l’Africa / Africa is Back sounded like the giant sun rising over the savannah at dawn, complete with birdlike whistles from Kouate, plus a shimmer of beads like a rattlesnake emerging for another day on the plains.
Quite what sort of music we were hearing was difficult to pin down. To English ears it sounded fresh and exotic, but it may not have sounded especially familiar to many of Selaocoe’s South African compatriots either. Some passages veered towards jazz, especially when Fred Thomas’s piano flutterings came to the fore, and Keary was even offered a wild jazz fusion solo on the opening track, an opportunity which he took with aplomb. Other times, Selaocoe played the role of spiritual leader, and an astonishing one at that. Several songs were elevated by two-part harmonies sung by an impressively full-throated Boiler Shop crowd. On the faster numbers the singing just added to the fun-filled chaos, but on slower compositions crowd participation added something deeper. The sound of several hundred strangers singing loudly and proudly will always be moving, but when applied to Selaocoe’s timeless melodies, the effect was transcendental. Ancestral Affirmations provided one such moment, our shared melodies falling like leaves. Most powerful was the fact that this clearly wasn’t just a song about joy – swelling piano chords and murmuring bass gave the music a dark, religious quality, Selaocoe our sombre funeral leader. Ancestral Affirmations truly was not just a song, but an experience, the sort that I’m convinced is impossible to properly convey in words.
“Dudu knows the cosmos better than the rest of us,” Selaocoe told us in his delicious baritone speaking voice between songs at one point, referring to percussionist Kouate. What followed was the most extraordinary percussion solo I’ve ever witnessed. It was not a drum solo in anything like the traditional sense, more a fascinating show-and-tell: here was a strange dark cylinder emitting a sound like waves; a black tube looped around the neck which Kouate blew into; two flexible corrugated plastic tubes which Kouate flung around his head like a football hooligan. Strangest of all were two pipes with cut-open water bottles taped to their ends, which Kouate dipped repetitively into a basin of water as if a plumber trying to dislodge a blockage. It was all inescapably absurd (there were plenty of confused laughs from the crowd, particularly after Selaocoe’s cryptic introduction) and might have devolved into silliness had the actual sounds produced not been so surprising. The hooligan plastic tubes, for instance, were spun at various speeds so as to produce – miraculously – a discernable melody which Thomas later picked up on the piano. The plumbing element initially seemed like a highbrow way to recreate the sound of watery footsteps, until Kouate used the air rushing through the tube and the partly-covered hole as its end to produce a sound like a wind instrument. Kneeling back down at his station, he delved into a tintinnabulum of shiny trinkets, producing a dazzling flurry of tinkles, even if it did occasionally sound like what happens when you open that precariously stacked kitchen cupboard full of saucepans.
By the time Ka Bohaleng / On the Sharp Side came along at the end of the gig, the crowd was in raptures. Destined to be not quite as thrilling or rhythmically impeccable as the brilliant studio recording, there was still a fantastic piece of call and response crowd work in the feverish finale, Selaocoe’s great clapping palms ushering bedlam. Kouate’s climatic solo on talking drum – a two-sided hourglass shaped drum tucked under the arm – had the added thrill of interpretive dance, Kouate’s arms flailing wildly at impossible speed, all silhouetted against a background of pulsing white lights.
It was all a far cry from the gig I had been expecting. Yes, Selaocoe’s debut album contains Ka Bohaleng, but it also contains strikingly restrained accounts of a Platti cello sonata and a few movements from Bach’s cello suites. It makes for a fascinating and perhaps uneven record, and I’d arrived at Boiler Shop prepared to critique Selaocoe’s attempt at marrying Western baroque music with its African antithesis.
But there was to be no such challenges: Selaocoe’s show was devoid of tranquil (and perhaps sleepy) baroque pieces and instead stuck to unchartered territory. I have no doubt Selaocoe’s passion for Bach runs deep, but it’s hard to imagine any music delivered as passionately and compellingly as Selaocoe’s own compositions. Crucially, rather than hearing interpretations of some other composer’s ideas, we got Selaocoe’s own soul. As a result the crowd required little thought before falling in love with it all, judging by all the shouts of joy during the grooviest passages and the staggeringly loud singalongs.
The applause was so fervent it made you wonder if the encore really was planned this time, or if the band, like me, had been awed by the sense of occasion. Either way, Selaocoe was not one to get carried away in the moment, standing calmly as the applause quietened before telling us, monk-like, that “with this energy we’re gonna take over the world out there.” The breathtakingly quiet Infinite Love rounded off the night, a delectable waltz that rose elegantly into the Boiler Shop rafters like smoke from an incense stick. Both Selaocoe’s vocals and cello sounded silkier than ever but, not for the first time, it was Mohamadou Kouate’s work on percussion that was most spellbinding. This time his bowl of water played the role of a sonorous kick drum, Kouate floating a smaller, upturned bowl on the water’s surface and deftly striking the top with his palms. Woody crunches like footsteps and sparkles of kalimba, all emanating from Kouate’s encyclopaedic ring of small instruments, completed a stunning soundworld. As his fellow musicians drew the song to a peaceful close, Kouate filled his bowl with water and purposefully poured it back out, his other hand tickling a set of chimes. Some may say the sound of water sloshing isn’t really music, but Abel Selaocoe’s concert had already ventured well beyond the traditional boundaries of music and into something more artful and poignant. As Selaocoe’s last stroke of the cello strings receded to nothing, Kouate shook out what was left of the water, the last drops falling like tears.
Squid’s twisted, ugly brand of post-punk rock music was a perfect match for the industrial surroundings of Newcastle’s finest gigging venue for a set packed with interest and surprises, not least a theatrical twist at its climax.
Squid’s latest tour, in support of their critically acclaimed sophomore album O Monolith, begins with nothing but cowbells. Two rhythms weave immaculately together whilst drummer and frontman Ollie Judge gets comfortable on his stool, plinthed and silhouetted against a growing storm of technicolour stage lights. A buzzy, detuned synth loop arrives spectre-like, then an eerily off-kilter bass line and dizzying assemblage of dovetailing guitar lines. After a minute or two Louis Borlase lunges forward and unleashes a piercing guitar riff, his instrument scratching and screeching higher and higher, urging this monster of a song towards its startling finale. This is Swing (In a Dream), Squid’s fascinating set opener that serves as a head first dive into the strange, nightmarish underworld in which this band’s music resides, full of unhinged melodies and alien stretches of what can only be described as noise. It makes for unrelentingly challenging listening – unlike their similarly daring peers Black Midi, Squid aren’t tempted to throw in a delicate acoustic ballad just to keep the audience on their toes – but it is all utterly enthralling.
Ollie Judge’s endurance as both drummer and vocalist was impressive.
My friend Liam and I are in the thick of it. Despite arriving shortly after doors opened at Newcastle’s Boiler Shop, we’ve somehow secured the best spot in the venue, pressed against the barriers and right under the nose of a shadowy Judge, who is throned centre stage. With the masses of fans all behind us – Bristol group Squid have garnered a comparable cult following to the likes of Black Country, New Road in recent years – we can fully appreciate the perfectness of the venue, a bare and atmospherically lit former warehouse that seems built solely to recreate the dystopian future so vividly painted by Squid’s music. There’s plenty to look at on stage, too: five musicians and many more instruments. Borlase inhabits a small forest of synths on their stands; Laurie Nanivell makes use of a dedicated cowbell station when he’s not injecting songs with trumpet; Arthur Leadbetter has his own ring of synths, plus an electric cello for good measure. What’s more, it’s not all just eye-candy for music nerds like me; Squid’s ambitious compositions genuinely demand half the stock of the nearest Gear4music warehouse. It’s this vast choice of instrumentation that allows these songs to be so volatile, the band indulging in lengthy song transitions that veer towards the genre of ambient noise, full of indecipherable squeals of synth and undulating tides of electronic fuzz.
It’s in these off-script song transitions that Squid were their most daring and compelling. An early sortie in the preamble to Undergrowth was breathless, Judge emerging from a mist of guitar with a thumping dance groove that sounded like a warped version of Parcels in full nightclub mode. Then there was the song itself, with its heavy hip hop groove and sticky guitar hooks. “I’d rather melt, melt, melt, melt away,” Judge yelped in the chorus, competing with a honking trumpet amidst a superb, head-banging racket. Peel St. was another early highlight that emerged from experimental noise, the band miraculously turning what sounded like a jammed photocopier into one of the most lethal grooves they’ve ever dug their teeth into.
Louis Borlase played guitar and electronics whilst Arthur Leadbetter performed on electric cello.
It was all a bit too much for one man a few rows back from us, who used the few pauses in the music so impatiently shout the lyrics to Squid’s biggest hit, Narrator, at one point getting the crowd to clap distractingly during a quiet section of solo guitar. Liam and I saw him extricated from the crowd and awkwardly heaved over the barriers by half a dozen security a few songs later. “Sunday night… who would have thought it?” Judge mentioned quietly at one point, apparently in disapproval. Tellingly, it was one of the only things he said directly to the crowd all night.
It was a good thing that the five members of Squid were all far too absorbed in their craft to let a rude audience put them off. The crowd did at least elevate standout Documentary Filmmaker by singing along gleefully to a trumpet riff, then shouting along to Judge’s descriptions of a hot summer (“the sweat dripped off my plastic sheets”) during a suitably stifling climax. The biggest climax, however, was reserved for a deafening rendition of Siphon Song, which was helped by a more restrained use of the robot-like vocal manipulations that somewhat took the sting out of the studio recording. A patient outro that flickered like a dying ember gradually revealed Narrator, the track that many in the crowd will have been waiting for. It was a performance that was bound to fall short of the experience of listening to the original track for the first time – Martha Skye Murphy, whose blood-curdling screams in the finale make for one of the most disturbing pieces of rock I’ve ever heard, was of course not present at Boiler Shop – but Judge’s sheer vocal stamina in the epic crescendo was admirable, even if the song rather outstayed its welcome over the course of a nearly nine-minute runtime. Simultaneously drumming and singing (or, more accurately, wailing) for such a behemoth of a song was no mean feat.
Laurie Nankivell and Anton Pearson completed the lineup.
Whilst Squid’s sonic onslaught was sometimes overwhelming, they could never be accused of boring their audience. In Newcastle this was true right until the very end, with the awe-inspiring The Blades, which started with a clever reprise of the opening cowbell rhythms. Here lies perhaps the most memorable image of all Judge’s sinister lyrics: a drone operator sits alone and watches his screen that shows aerial images of people on the ground which he darkly reduces to “blades of grass waiting to be trimmed.” Judge repeated these menacing lyrics with increasingly uncontrolled yelps, as if playing the drone operator as he gradually loses his mind in the warfare, powerful trumpet melodies and wailing sirens exploding like bombs. It made for a violent depiction of mania that would be compelling even if it didn’t come at a time when war crimes are becoming depressingly common in the news.
Then came the twist. For the first time in the whole gig, Judge stepped out from behind his kit, untangled his microphone from its stand, and positioned himself at the very edge of the stage, almost within touching distance of Liam and me. “Back to bed / Another man’s hand on the joystick,” he almost whispered over dreamlike sustained guitar chords. He looked genuinely frightened, gazing nervously up to the metal rafters of the warehouse building while gradually tangling himself in his microphone cable. Judge – or, more accurately, his character – seemed defeated, lost, hopeless. It was a moment of intense theatre that would haunt me on the subsequent walk home and make me wish Judge had dug even deeper into the performance art that his evocative lyrics so easily lend themselves to. As the quiet final notes of this otherwise thunderous gig rang out, Judge stood alone centre-stage, incapacitated by his own microphone cord. The crowd had been rowdy all night, but something in Judge’s performance seemed to have genuinely struck a nerve. As the stage lights dimmed, all that was left of Squid’s concert was a stunned silence.
A dejected, overwhelmed Lincoln set the scene for a thoroughly unprofessional showing from Penelope Scott, whose pitchy vocals and underwhelming songs made the hour feel like two.
Somewhere between Leeds and Manchester, the knot of anxiety in my stomach tightened. As the light outside the train window weakened, my apprehension of what was to come – namely a solo traversal of Manchester city centre by bus – strengthened. I am lucky to have travelled to far more exotic places than this, but something about the task of negotiating a ticket on the number 1 towards Wythenshaw from a no-nonsense Mancunian bus driver sent shivers down my spine. An egg sandwich bolted at a shady bus stop felt like battle fuel. Of course, as is almost always the case, there was absolutely nothing to worry about, although I had cut things finer than I anticipated, joining good friends Ewan and Isaac in the Deaf Institute’s bar queue with just enough time for hugs and Coke orders before the crowd cheered the night’s first performer onto the stage.
I wasn’t the only one feeling anxious that Wednesday night. Lincoln, a singer-songwriter from Ohio dealing in neatly packaged emo rock and painfully poetic lyrics, is the man responsible for what remains the finest EP I’ve ever heard, 2017’s A Constant State of Ohio. At five songs and 16 minutes long, there isn’t a single minute on Ohio where Lincoln loses his burning sense of creativity, with consistently thrilling songwriting and staggeringly stylish rock arrangements that belied the fact that it was his first – and for many years, only – official release, produced when he was still a teenager. It was this set of five tracks that caught the imaginations of 14-year-old Ewan and I, and we took to playing it in our high school’s only practice room, me bashing out the chords and bass lines on piano, Ewan playing guitar and singing along with all the heartfelt devotion that lyrics like these demand.
The fact that, somewhat out of the blue, Lincoln had booked a brief debut UK tour in support of Penelope Scott seemed too good to be true, and for those initial few minutes settling down in the beautifully restored Deaf Institute it still seemed ridiculous that this random American artist, adored by us and (more or less) us only, was just a matter of metres away from us. But there he was, plodding onto stage alone, head hung low and letting his now chest-length scraggly brown hair fall away in front of him, covering a wiry moustache that almost made Lincoln unrecognisable from the few, aged photos Ewan and I had seen of him online. Immediately, alarm bells were ringing. “There’s a lot of you here and… I’m not ready for this,” were his first tentative words, the crowd’s reaction gradually switching from laughter to intermittent cheers of encouragement as it became clear Lincoln wasn’t joking.
Right from those first words, it was obvious that Lincoln wouldn’t have the conviction to produce a satisfying support set, although circumstances didn’t help. Sat down and hunched over a guitar, he looked crushingly lonely on stage and needed other musicians not just for more visual interest but to beef out his songs – opener Smokey Eyes was a different song altogether without the spectacular drum fill intro that lights the touchpaper of the studio recording. Instead, Lincoln battled on alone, admirably pushing through what seemed like a genuine personal crisis but leaving little musical substance for the few fans like Ewan and I to cling to, even if Ewan proudly belted out every lyric in support anyway.
Lincoln had to battle through his set at the Deaf Institute.
Instrumentation aside, the lyrics remained extraordinary even if Lincoln often didn’t seem to enjoy delivering them. Lines like “quiet lies that you’re telling to those black and screaming skies” were appropriately spat out with disgust from the singer, as was Lincoln’s poetic assertion that “the sky is what we leave behind” on Downhill, which wrapped up this set powerfully as it did on the original EP. Not that Lincoln seemed at all aware of the effortless flow of his rhymes, instead rolling his eyes to the ceiling when they weren’t glued to his feet. He didn’t realise it, but they were songs that he had every right to be proud of.
It soon became clear exactly what he meant by “not ready”, too. Part of Lincoln’s apparent terror was the fact he had walked onto the stage without a plan, improvising a set list and often forgetting his lyrics. Every song seemed like a challenge to be overcome, and with awkward gap came the genuine risk that Lincoln might no longer be able summon the courage to continue at all. He needed the direct help of Ewan – easy to hear over a meek guitar intro – to find the opening line of Banks, a song that shouldn’t have been so difficult to remember; the stunning final four lines about the power and limitations of music and art in general remain etched in my memory since I first heard them years ago. As I would have the chance to insist on Lincoln later, if I was into tattoos, the lyric sheet of Banks would be my first point of call.
It wasn’t just Ewan unwaveringly powering Lincoln through this set, although they made up a big proportion of the most vocal supporters. Every song was cheered, every mumbled apology batted away with whoops and laughter and shouts of “we love you!” dotted around the room. When Lincoln cut his finger whilst strumming, one audience member even offered a plaster, symbolic of the band-of-friends atmosphere that had emerged in the Deaf Institute as we watched what felt like a mutual friend crumble in front of us. Of course, Lincoln declined the offer.
He finished the set with a subversion of the usual showman’s routine of lines like “I’m so sorry we’ve ran out of time” or “I can’t wait to see you all again soon!” Instead we got “I’m gonna get down off the stage. Can I do that?” It was a measure of the crowd’s sympathy that instead of the usual pantomime groans, the audience gave a loving, appreciative yes. With that Lincoln wiped his brow a final time, unplugged his guitar and slunk backstage.
Then something remarkable unfolded. Improbably, Ewan had acquired Lincoln’s personal email address in a thorough online trawl of the deepest corners of his elusive online presence in the weeks leading up to the gig, and had managed to persuade Lincoln into an exclusive interview for Ewan’s YouTube channel. After such a forlorn performance, the three of us wondered if he would appear after all, but sure enough Lincoln snuck out from a side door five minutes after leaving the stage, trailed by a lowkey stage manager. Venue security prohibited us from going outside, so the Deaf Institute’s atmospheric, gloomy stairwell would have to do for an interview venue. Lincoln Lutz from Cincinnati, Ohio is hardly Ed Sheeran, but meeting the creator of one of my most treasured works of art felt special. Ewan asked the questions (just as disbelieving as me), Isaac filmed and I positioned myself in a corner, trying to take it all in. Conversation veered chaotically from allusions to years of drug addiction and a sharp decline in mental health (about which Lincoln described himself as becoming “not a person”) to his newfound appreciation of the Manchester fruit juice delicacy Vimto. He was so addicted to nicotine that the transatlantic flight to the UK was a huge struggle, he would later tell me. When asked for wise words from Ewan, “don’t do crack!” was the half-jokey response, a sadness detectable in his muted laughter.
Ewan managed to grab a signature on their vinyl sleeve of Ohio before returning to the concert hall just in time for the appearance of the night’s main act, Penelope Scott. She is one of a new breed of TikTok star, unusual for having gained millions of monthly listeners with little to no mainstream coverage. Perhaps her wild success is down to just how much the Internet age dominates her music, which sounds like a corrupted, freakish video game soundtrack, restlessly lurching from punk rock to cutesy acoustic guitar to plodding 8-bit synths with a joyous disregard for the traditional rules of hit making.
There’s a limit to the mind-boggling numbers, though. The Deaf Institute, for one thing, is a humbling venue, housing just 250 fans at its capacity. Artists with her volume of streams – albeit largely coming from American shores – can at least aim for Gorilla’s 550 capacity, or perhaps even the 1,500 capacity O2 Ritz across the road (incidentally a venue which hosts the abysmally named Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs at the end of the month, a traditionally established metal band with a poxy 60,000 monthly listeners on Spotify). Alas, it seems streaming numbers aren’t everything in today’s gigging circuit. In fact, often they can be completely misleading.
Penelope Scott was in desperate need of a band to support her songs.
Scott’s lack of a backing band was perhaps even more underwhelming than Lincoln’s, largely neutering the tumultuous edge of much of Scott’s louder tracks. Feel Better, for instance, is home to Scott’s most impolite punk riff and was duly screamed in Manchester, but ended up sounding impotent with minimal support behind Scott’s vocals. More often the songs resembled a campfire singalong on a school residential trip, complete with awkward chat between songs and a proudly singing crowd that often drowned out Scott’s weedy amplification. The whiny vocals, invariably pitchy and occasionally nauseating, would have been acceptable from an overconfident middle schooler, but at a show like this were simply below the bare minimum required from a headline act. It was a shame there was no supervising schoolteacher to tell Scott that maybe it was time to give it a rest.
It didn’t help that the songs Scott was singing lacked much of Lincoln’s depth, often reading like stream of consciousness posts from a 15-year-old American girl’s Tumblr page. American Healthcare was typical of Scott’s general rage at the establishment without being able to pin down any specifics beyond scorn towards all those “corporate fucking pricks”. “I bet my shit all sounds the same to you,” she railed at an unappreciative ex on genuinely promising new piano number Cabaret, unaware that, at least when she restricts herself to plonky piano songs and flimsy mid-range vocals, the guy might actually have a point.
The real nail in the coffin, though, was the dearth of professionalism on show. Like Lincoln, although with a less obvious excuse, Scott seemed to have no plan when it came to a set list, nor even when it came to what key to play her songs in; at one point she completely restarted a song after deciding the starting note ought to be a bit lower. Instrumental sections were needlessly injected with lines like “just bear with me here” and “ooh I like this bit” as her tempos veered faster and slower like a bucking bronco.
The evening’s nadir came when Someone Like You began playing through the speakers after Scott left her laptop playing on shuffle after one backing track had finished. I say nadir – it might have been the musical highlight of the night had Scott just sat back and let the Adele classic ring out. Instead, she fumbled her way to the back of the stage and instructed us to talk amongst ourselves as she wrangled with her audio files for two excruciating minutes. As Isaac and Ewan pointed out, it was hardly Mitski-level artistry. With a bored-looking Soap, Scott’s set was over, an hour long reminder that sometimes TikTok success just doesn’t make sense.
The three of us lingered in the venue until security told us to leave. I was surprised by how much passionate Scott fans Ewan and Isaac agreed with my general disappointment. The gig had left a bitter aftertaste for us all given the toils involved in getting to Manchester on a Wednesday night in the first place. Ewan slipped backstage and bumped into both performers whilst Isaac and I waited outside, Ewan eventually emerging with a pizza-hungry Lincoln following behind. We stood in line with Lincoln at Domino’s – a genuinely surreal experience – before relocating to a shady bench where we chatted happily despite the growing chill and the unsettling number of beggars approaching us. We said our goodbyes to Lincoln at midnight and walked to Piccadilly still in disbelief. Ewan seemed dazed after a meaningful conversation with a deeply influential musical hero, leaving Isaac and I to be giddy on their behalf. The journey home would be gruelling, but discussing the most impossible events of the night – Lincoln referring to Ewan as a friend, the fact the embattled Lincoln had even agreed to chat in the first place – it was clear to all of us that this venture had been worth it, albeit for everything besides the music.
On a damp and dreary night in Glasgow, Theo Katzman showcased his exemplary songwriting and impressive technique despite a set bloated with solos in one of those gigs overshadowed by my own circumstances.
Another gig, another nervous train journey. This time I was gazing out the window somewhere on Scotland’s central belt, the outside world so uniformly dark it was genuinely difficult to tell whether or not the train was passing through one very long tunnel on the way to Glasgow. I’d already had plenty of excitement for a Tuesday night – I sprinted in a failed attempt to catch an earlier train in Edinburgh, my overnight bag bouncing uncomfortably on my back – but the biggest challenge was to come: making it to the renovated church of Òran Mór in Glasgow’s West End before American singer-songwriter Theo Katzman took to the stage bright and early at 8.15 p.m.. Glasgow was damp and gloomy but jogging through the dimly glowing backstreets in search of the flat where my friend Fionn was waiting for me felt enjoyably like a movie, at least until I soaked my trainers in a puddle. I buzzed in to find a nervous Fionn, and understandably so. He’d had to buy a dodgy ticket online in the days leading up to the gig and was, crushingly, denied entry on the door. Neither of us had the guts to do a runner – this was, in truth, hardly a high-security venue – so we just stood there stunned for a few minutes, waiting for a solution to reveal itself which never came. Only when we heard the cheers heralding Katzman’s punctual appearance were we triggered to say a sad goodbye and part ways. Fionn made the 10 minute walk home alone whilst I shuffled into the already stuffy Òran Mór to find almost nowhere to get a good view. I settled on a spot just in front of the bar, my view of the main man largely obscured by pillars, and tried to focus on the music.
It was in these circumstances that I first saw Theo Katzman in person. His was the third name on my bucket list of Vulfpeck members to see live after prolific guitarist Cory Wong and fabled bassist Joe Dart, who happened to be stood right next to Katzman in Glasgow, the glints from his customary sunglasses dazzling even in the short glimpses I got from the back of the room. A guitarist, vocalist and drummer for Vulfpeck, Katzman’s showmanship instincts have sometimes felt squashed in that band by the zany presence of frontman Jack Stratton, but whilst Vulfpeck have taken an extended hiatus Katzman has grasped the opportunity to show the world exactly what he’s made of. Showing up tonight sporting a skew-whiff oversized baseball cap and loose, exposing denim jacket, Katzman has always felt a little different from the rest of the Vulfpeck gang, even if he can funk just as hard as the rest of ‘em. His distinctive take on country rock has only the barest resemblance to Vulfpeck, the link most clear in those moments he opts for a particularly perky funk bass line or indulges in a gleeful, improvised falsetto run. Lyrically, Katzman’s solo discography is so smartly written and heartfelt it makes you wonder what heights that Michigan band might have scaled if they chose to sing about something more stimulating than self aware ducks and whales with feet.
Katzman arrived in this damp Scottish city after, like many of contemporaries, having undertaken something of a creative (and, perhaps, personal) reinvention during the pandemic. He spent much of his chat during this gig discussing a formative year or two alone in the wild woods of the American midwest, doing little else than simply “thinking”. He cut himself off from the Internet for long periods, becoming self-sufficient and discovering the counterintuitive yet ever trendy hobby of extreme cold water swimming. It all amounted to a spiritual awakening that seemed destined to result in either powerfully profound or powerfully pretentious new material. A monologue played through the speakers as the band took to the stage in which a disembodied Katzman espoused the “universal law” that “everything in nature has a cost” and insisted that “we ourselves are nature,” dangerously teetered towards the latter, although in the remaining brief speeches that would pepper the rest of the gig Katzman came across as far more a humbly passionate advocate of spirituality than a self-absorbed ‘enlightened one’.
That said, Katzman’s latest album, Be The Wheel, is hardly a George Harrison-level musical departure from his earlier work, the change instead making itself clear in a notable decrease in the specificity of his lyrics. The title track and Hit The Target got things moving in Òran Mór, and although Katzman’s calls to “be the wheel” and “put down the pistol” seem indecipherable to anyone other himself, there was plenty to love in the consistently interesting composition, particularly than it came to the writhing retro synth in the latter track. 5-Watt Rock was an outlier in its directness – an endearing, self-aware tale about wooing a lover despite an underpowered guitar amp – but was tellingly one of the most enjoyable tracks of the night, the harmonised group vocals in that unforgettable chorus sounding even more glorious in the flesh.
Katzman performed to a sold out Òran Mór.
Katzman was blessed with a stellar live band, not least when it came to Mr. Dart, who is as far as I’m concerned one of the finest bassists active today. They were kept busy with a daunting quantity of solos – almost every song found eight bars to lend to one of the musicians who, whilst clearly very capable performers, occasionally struggled to justify every departure from the standard rock formula. At their best these improvisations were transformative – Dave Mackay’s blues blast on piano on Trump-bashing You Could Be President was a thing to behold – but other times, like on 5-Watt Rock, the solos added little to the original. At least Dart’s superfluous diversion on She’s In My Shoe added a degree of interest to an otherwise uninspiring plodder. Still, we were left wanting more – the cutting of a few solos would have been a small price to pay had Dart or one of his bandmates been given enough airtime to fully explore his instrument within a single song.
The new material may have its fair share of duds, but there’s no disputing what an exceptional songwriter Katzman is – unmatched by any of his Vulfpeck peers. The remarkable What Did You Mean (When You Said Love) is his best song and he knows it, drawing it out in Glasgow with a pretty yet convoluted piano intro followed by a stripped-back, overly theatrical first verse that showcased both Katzman’s expressive vocals and the song’s undulating harmonic foundations. Virtually every phrase was followed by an increasingly dramatic pause, culminating in a lengthy silence that verged on mick-taking before the band’s entry. “Do it, ya bastard!” one unmistakably Glaswegian man couldn’t help but blurt out from the back, somewhat puncturing all the romantic tension Katzman had worked so hard to construct, even if he had been playful about it. He did, eventually, “do it”, throwing in a jazz piano solo and rampaging electric guitar solo for good measure. The song came out perhaps a little overcooked, stretching out into a six minute epic, but if any Katzman song can withstand this sort of abuse, it’s this one. The Death of Us came as a welcome contrast, the sticky funk groove light on its feet yet still offering an electrifying extended jam that had these five musicians operating at the peak of their powers.
Katzman’s unwaveringly earnest inter-song talks about the new worldview he acquired during that forest retreat were hit and miss. A speech about bravery before You Gotta Go Through Me was genuinely compelling, Katzman urging us to take that crucial first step outside our comfort zones, starting tomorrow morning; cue a muted applause. “Yeah, that one never goes down that well,” he admitted. It was a pity that all the oration came as a prelude to one of Katzman’s sleepier numbers, but at least the song gave me a chance to make the most of my back row spot and get hold of a queue-free delayed Coke. There were also a lot of ‘prayers’ at play: The Only Chance We Have was “a prayer for listening”, followed by Corn Does Grow, which was both a “prayer for nature” and “a prayer for us”. Really, Corn Does Grow was just a rollicking country rock song, delivered in Glasgow without the excessive vocal distortion of the studio recording. Instead, there was the most head-banging guitar solo of the night and plenty of intense riffing – by the end, the temperature in an already stifling Òran Mór seemed to have gone up a degree or two.
Rip-roaring new tune Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day was the best surprise of the night, Katzman asking desperately “but how long did it take to fall down?” as chugging drums and guitars gathered pace around him. The other uptempo Rome-themed song in Katzman’s canon, As the Romans Do, would have made for a worthy finale but instead we got That’s The Life, a disappointingly middle-of-the-road choice of closing number but a neat encapsulation of the Katzman appeal, with lyrics about searching for life’s purpose set to the sound of a light-hearted hoe down. Heads bobbed politely in the crowd in front of me, but there was a sense that we weren’t quite seeing Katzman at his uninhibited best.
It was still drizzling when I found Fionn waiting outside for me, needlessly apologetic. I joked that it had been a rubbish gig anyway, but it was true that Fionn’s absence hadn’t been the only disappointment of the night. Katzman remains a consummate entertainer – his free-wheeling falsetto feats were so consistently remarkable it became easy to take them for granted – but it seems when he found himself in the woods he partly lost sight of what made his music so much fun – namely uncomplicated, joyous rock hooks. Unlike a good deal of his contemporaries, Katzman has plenty of worthwhile things to say, but on this sad night in Glasgow I was left wishing he’d let the music do more of the talking.
With rambling tangents and a confused mix of genres, Jack Stratton fails to deliver on an otherwise promising new identity yet again. Matthew Rowe gives a track-by-track rundown on why the latest album doesn’t live up to the potential harboured by Vulfpeck frontman.
To call Vulfmon interesting would be an understatement. Jack Stratton has always been known within Vulfpeck as a wildcard, not standing out musically like Joe Dart and his iconic basslines or Theo Katzman with his incredible vocal range but as a personality, known for doing the unorthodox. From this, you would gather any solo project of his to be very experimental and unlike most of Vulf Records, and you wouldn’t be wrong. The two albums he has released so far, Here we go Jack and the most recent, Vulfnik, do exactly this but have been quite a letdown. Unlike coherent albums where a full listen feels natural, listening to these albums often feels like you’ve hit shuffle on your liked songs, but they don’t hold up to the standard of the genres they’re exploring into.
With the announcement of Vulfnik, I didn’t feel the general excitement I had a few years ago whenever a new Vulf release was announced. Recently they have fallen short of my previous expectations of them, struggling to hit that old, funky minimalistic feel that helped them flourish (The Fearless Flyers being the exception). A while back I looked forward to their weekly releases, but the first song didn’t set my expectations high.
This was I Can’t Party, in which Jack tells us a story about getting hit on at a coffee shop and him having to turn down the offer due to the fact he can’t party. The issue with this song is that it sounds like he’s trying to make a song specifically to become popular with millennials on TikTok; looking this up, you’ll see several videos of millennials frankly embarrassing themselves. For reference, if you’ve heard “coffee shop bop”, it’s a very similar vibe. But you’ve got to give it to him: he has some serious leg strength in the music video.
In the same category of lacklustre songs in the first half, we also have Harpejji I and James Jamerson Only Used One Finger, both of which could not even be seen as songs. Harpejji I does what it says in the title, consisting of Jack playing a harpejji with a basic drum beat in the background. In comparison to the short list of artists who show off this instrument, it falls short of the standard given by artists like Jacob Collier. The latter of these two songs is three and a half minutes of Jack rambling on about Motown bassist James Jamerson. There isn’t much to say about this other than the fact that the Vulf compressor makes a seemingly random speech even worse to listen to, leaving zero replay value.
Listening to Vulfmon feels like you’ve hit shuffle on your liked songs.
There is some redemption in the first half. Louie Zong helped to make an upbeat, beautiful-game-era sounding song in UCLA, with a solid bassline, tight drum beat and fitting keyboard to serve as the hook. The music video for this is quite special since Louie Zong is involved. It’s only right he has complete control over the video, which consists of an animated bear dancing through UCLA and performing in front of a judging frog, who was impressed. With the positive tones the song gives and the good vibes from the music video, it makes for a redeeming second song in the album. This is followed by Bonnie Wait, a very solid song which reminds me of Here We Go Jack, showing Stratton’s ability as a vocalist. Lyrics in this song show both outwards melancholy towards Bonnie’s situation and internal anger and jealousy towards Bonnie’s fiancé but unfortunately this is the only strong instance of Stratton’s vocals in this album.
Unlike the first half of the album, the last 5 songs get released at the same time and during my first listen of this half it was obvious there were too many wildcard songs thrown in there, even for Vulfmon. This side of the album had its fair share of disappointing songs but does have some redeeming factors. The three songs that took me aback were Harry’s Theme (Lite Pullman), Nice to You and How Much Do You Love Me.
The ending brings celebration for getting through Vulfnik and being frankly upset with Stratton.
In the first of these, the first few minutes is a nice chill song made up of two guitars, a bass, and Jack playing the drums using his thighs, naturally. This segment of the song is reminiscent of Grandma and other older Vulfpeck songs. But this isn’t the only part of the song. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere we get Lite Pullman which would probably work as its standalone song given how out of place it is. After some research, a lite pullman is some sort of travel bag, but where is the correlation here to Harry’s theme? Nice to You follows. This is a punch to the gut and Jacob Jeffries’ only new vocal appearance on this album, and he isn’t living up to his potential. On the debut Vulfmon album, he sang How Much Do You Love Me which gave him an impressive start in Vulf. However, this song is a satirical take on the emo genre, where Jacob draws out a lot of words in an unbearable accent, which would probably work fine as a parodical YouTube video, but it doesn’t hold up on an album. As well as this, Bonnie Wait covers similar themes in a much better way.
This album is wrapped up with a new take on the Jacob Jeffries classic How Much Do You Love Me. Seeing this on the announced track list, I was excited to see what they could do with it, expecting a more fleshed-out band version of the song but was let down. I hadn’t done my research on who “Ellis” was before listening to this song and nothing could have prepared me. The song kicks off like the original before dropping into an EDM version. When this happened on my first listen, I was speechless for about 5 minutes. Afterwards, my mix of feelings was a blend of feeling like celebrating getting through Vulfnik and being frankly upset with Stratton for his choice of collaborator and song direction.
Thankfully to save this album from being a complete travesty we have some highlights in the second half. This half opens with some of Vulfpeck’s most influential collaborators – Antwaun Stanley and Joey Dosik – on Lord Will Make a Way. This duo brings much-needed revitalisation to the album and even with a tiny mic, Antwaun’s vocals shine like they usually do and gives a good improvement to the questionable vocal decisions of this album. On top of this, Joey’s sax solo is very well-fitting and brings some good jazz vibes into an otherwise jazz-free project. However, there are drawbacks to this song as, much like a lot of recent Vulf, it’s a cover and I find the Al Green version to have much more impactful instrumentals where Stratton has dulled them down significantly. Another decent song in this half is Blue, is a relatively simple jazzy/blues song. The piano, performed by Jacob Jeffries, slightly redeems his efforts in this project.
I have found that this album is successful in branching out into areas Jack would most likely be too cautious to lead Vulfpeck into. However, in these attempts they haven’t reached the levels I hoped they would, often being too satirical or going too far to fit the theme of Vulf. Comparing this to the first Vulfmon album, it also doesn’t live up to that, with the first album being much more consistent. Stratton needs to pull off a miracle to bring Vulf to its former glory.
Jet Set Radio was once long forgotten, but following recent news that the game could possibly be making a return, Alex Walden is here to analyse the musical side of the game and the soundtrack’s cultural significance.
I woke up and ate some cereal and began checking the news like any other day. It wasn’t until I opened YouTube and watched a video reviewing an alleged leak from SEGA headquarters that my day began to change. After over 20 painfully slow years, I couldn’t believe that one of my biggest influences on me as a kid Jet Set Radio was supposedly getting a new addition to its catalogue. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if no one who read this had even played the game. I had forgotten about the game until earlier this year. It was a cool game but it lost its popularity very quickly so you can understand why I wasn’t jumping around my room in excitement yet. I was still interested though so I thought I’d see the footage and it wasn’t until I heard that classic tune of Hideki Naganuma’s Humming The Bassline that it all came flooding back to me. It was like a flashbang of nostalgia had blinded me, the rush of how the game used to make me feel came back so suddenly. I instantly knew I had to put on the soundtrack again while I tried to find my PS Vita to play the game one more time.
After playing I realised that Jet Set radio is the same as any action game to come out of the 1990s/2000s era of video games, in being that it includes an incredibly awful set of controls (seriously, the camera controls are almost rage-inducing), no ability to explore without a timer over your head and the equalizer that makes everything bad about it not seem so bad after all: an absolute banger of a soundtrack, courtesy of composer Hideki Naganuma.
Jet Set radio was renamed to Jet Grind Radio in the US due to licensing issues. The US market is also why the game features the New York-based Grind City map.
As I played through the tutorial, all I could think was “damn I used to want to be these people so bad”. I paused and looked around my room. I realised that if young Alex could see himself now, he’d be pretty impressed with how the influence of Jet Set Radio is still rooted within me. But what makes this game so incredibly influential? I mean I played hundreds of video games as a kid yet for some reason this was one of the few that helped shape my life.
The soundtrack – a melting pot of sounds
Don’t get me wrong, tearing around the streets of Tokyo-To on magnetically driven inline skates tagging every wall I see with my own custom graffiti is incredibly cool, however, much like anything I do today, it’s no fun unless I have a killer soundtrack, and Hideki Naganuma takes care of that problem with ease. Yes, the self-proclaimed “CEO of funky fresh beats” manages to gather up numerous genres and cram them into a tiny little mix. For a video game soundtrack, it does an amazing job of putting through your main character’s thought process. It sounds erratic and high intensity, yet it also has this smooth undertone that keeps you collected as you hope and pray that your character skates land on that rail without falling over on the ground incredibly hard. The soundtrack has a good clash of songs that keep you hyped up (e.g., Let Mom Sleep and Grace and Glory) as well as songs that keep you chilled out (e.g. That’s Enough and Moody Shuffle).
Funk, electronica, hip hop, rock and acid jazz are squashed together, fighting for their chance to be admired.
There’s a nice balance of songs that give off a futuristic vibe as well as keeping in style with that classic hip hop sound. A good example would be when the character Combo is introduced and you play your first mission as him. The game’s soundtrack gives you a smooth simple beat on the track Everybody Jump Around that fits well with his 80s New York hip hop reminiscent style, but the song is filled with scratches and chops of audio samples to throw you off. By doing this your brain becomes scattered on what to focus on and gives you this psychological rush to match your character who’s racing down the streets of Tokyo-to.
It doesn’t just stop at hip hop though. Throughout the soundtrack you can notice elements of funk, electronica, hip hop, rock, acid jazz and many more. It feels like this cluster of genres that are all squashed together fighting for their chance to be admired, making the soundtrack sound erratic and abrasive, yet Naganuma is able to make all this work through the magic of sequencing all the songs together one by one so the party in your ears doesn’t stop. This feature is a subtle one, for first-time players you’ll hardly notice it because you’re too busy rolling around the speed of sound trying not to be shot by police. But when you notice it, you can’t help but realise how much it assists in creating a different world that only you and your console are in for a short period of time. You begin to realise that these are no longer just a bunch of street rat vandals whom you get to play as; these are artists who are making their own paths in a city where what they do is not tolerated and they do this by throwing all their interests together and seeing what comes out of it. It feels like you’re hanging out with the cool kids in high school TV shows who smoke behind the schoolyard. You know that they’re kind of bad news but they just look so cool you can’t resist. It’s not often I say this, but as someone who DJs in their spare time, it actually has me looking forward to the end of each song, in a good way of course. Now can you tell me a soundtrack that makes you feel like that? I thought not.
JSR didn’t just break barriers with its soundtrack, it was one of the first video games to use use the now iconic cell shading art style.
Why Jet Set Radio will never die
Although Jet Set Radio had been put away for the past 20 years, the game’s culture, along with the era of the 2000s, lives on – you just have to know where to look. It’s all underground, baby.
Considering the game tapped into cultures like techno music, graffiti and action sports marketed to a bunch of impressionable kids and young adults, it’s no wonder the game has a die-hard fanbase that many artists take inspiration from. A genre of music that resonates heavily with JSR fans today would be the genre breakcore. The genre takes a page out of the book of Naganuma by combining jungle and techno, bringing back this cyber personality to its music that was thought to be long forgotten along with its hard-hitting drum breaks and smooth melodies. With artists like TOKYOPILL, Star Trash and black balloons taking over the scene by storm, we can be assured that music-wise you’re in good hands.
It feels like an insight into the world we were promised as kids but never got because life got in the way.
While I think breakcore captures the cyber aesthetic of what Jet Set Radio was offering us, I have to be honest and say that no matter how amazing and well-crafted the song is, breakcore doesn’t give us that upbeat feeling that we get from the JSR soundtrack. Instead, I’d say that breakcore captures the futuristic unknowing of the 2000s better than the Jet Set Radio Vibe. The beauty of the JSR soundtrack was that it was upbeat but also light-hearted. Yes, you were running around avoiding police, helicopters and in some cases tanks, but it never felt too intense or pressuring. The soundtrack made it seem fun but when I listen to breakcore, I don’t feel like part of a group; I feel like my headphones are my only companion it feels like an exclusive experience just for me, not for anyone else. If you’re looking for something that sounds fresh from your Sega mega drive, look no further than 2Mello’s Memories of Tokyo-to. If having the name of the city where the game is located in the title isn’t enough to convince you, then you only have to listen to hear the odd Jet Set Radio sample here and there. Also, make sure to look out for the soundtrack for the upcoming game Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to hear songs produced by Hideki Naganuma throughout the game’s soundtrack coming August 18th.
The JSR influence is very heavy in BRC, and we’re here for it!
Looking to the future of JSR
Whenever I talk about Jet Set Radio, I always feel a little bit upset or sentimental, though this may have just been a game for some people that they played as a kid. For me, it feels like a reminder of the 2000s era and the culture surrounding it: everything ranging from music and fashion to attitudes towards the future. It almost feels like an insight into the world we were promised as kids but we never got it because life got in the way.
At this point I was going to talk about how not all hope is lost and that the release of JSR’s ‘spiritual successor’ Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was going to save us, but the day after I finished writing this article that whole story got thrown out the window entirely with the news of the new JSR leak. However, I recommend looking into Bomb Rush Cyberfunk if you are looking for some more high-speed combo-building action, Hideki Naganuma decided to bless us with his skills for parts of the soundtrack of that game too. Despite the game not being released yet, fans are already excited about what’s to come.
We can tell from the trailer alone that Mr. Naganuma never stopped perfecting his craft. The way that the drums of the song spit viciously across the track while robotic-sounding lyrics wrestle their way through the song’s techno melody felt as if like all those years that the Jet Set Radio had been forgotten about. All those grooves, those drums, those melodies made me feel as if it had come back with a vengeance and had punched me square in the face. It feels like an explosion of 20 years’ worth of culture that was waiting for me and had just had enough of waiting around.
I feel like the news of the Jet Set Radio leak as well as the announcement of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk best described a comment under Bomb Rush Cyberfunk’s trailer ‘My brain is saying “Nice to meet you” but my heart is saying “welcome home”.’ I can’t wait to rekindle my love for the Jet Set Radio soundtrack once more thanks to Naganuma and Team Reptile. I can look forward to what the future holds, just like how I did as a kid. That’s more than enough for me.
