Brain Surgery
Feb. 15th, 2005 02:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaThat's no good. Someone's just forced me to justify myself in an argument about why Robbie Williams' Angels is sentimental and meaningless pap. I've gone and woken up me pontificating brain now.
There were suggestions that perhaps I just don't like any sentimental music and therefore am going to condemn anything even remotely like it; by good fortune I was listening at the time to It's Coming Down by Cake, a three minute forty-five, mid-paced rock song with simple mostly root-note bass and a familiar verse-chorus-instrumental-bit structure and backing vocals in all the right places, which is about the end of a relationship, by way of rain. In short, if the carefully-dosed meaningless vague sentimentality of Angels (is it about mother-figures? religious comfort? mindless optimism?) is the closest we're allowed to get to emotional music, we're in deep shit. Cake manage to produce a simple song that suggests more emotional and real-world experience than the entirety of Robbie's output, with a far more interesting brass section, better percussion and, the subtle feeling throughout the song (without resorting to cheesy samples, mentioning no Didos) that it's raining outside. It's just possible that they might be musicians.
Anyway, Friday. I'm certain that I saw one genuinely ace musician on Friday night. I'm not entirely certain about anyone else that passed across the stage but there were plenty of other qualities on show to make up for it.
I went to the 100 Club in Oxford Street and saw Ed Tudor-Pole. Now, he comes across as a disppointed dad, really, complaining he's never had to be bottom of a bill before, and by himself with an acoustic and a mike and an audience yet sober, driving us into a musical frenzy was never going to happen. The songs were blues covers, though unconventionally done, and possibly ill-advised whimsical ditties of his own. Having said that he tried hard and is an obvious source of energy and probably ought to be seen being a frontman and not the rest of the band too.
John Otway is a very silly man. You probably knew this. There's clearly a set of running in-jokes that his fans know, mainly stuff like Rocky Horror Picture Show style feed-lines for the House Of The Rising Sun. But that's still the best use of a pedal-triggered MIDI drum set and a theremin I've ever seen; let me tell you that whatever you can think of that he might have been doing with them, I bet it wasn't this. More of a school science teacher than a musician but prepared to be decently daft in the name of entertainment and thus gets away with it very well.
The unquestioned musician of the evening is Al Bouchard, once the drummer of Blue Oyster Cult and now of a band of his own called the Brain Surgeons. I get very disappointed when I see musicians who are no use any more, whether that's by raddled ineffectiveness and shocking loss of ability or meaningless note-perfect carelessness, watching the money roll in regardless. Whatever else Al may have got up to or now be living on, he loves to play the drums, to sing, to play music with and for people and is very good at it. I've got a list of a half-dozen drumming ideas and precepts to bear in mind as a result of watching him from the side for a few songs at the start. I'm no BOC fanatic and I don't think I can hum you a single Brain Surgeons song but that didn't matter. Again, I'm less sure of the rest of the band; none of them were bad. The lead guitarist, ex-Manowar, irritated me with his on-beat sterile accuracy and (I admit the triviality of it) ridiculous regulation black Levis, as stretched over fat thighs and ruched over freakishly non-existent calves of those who don't consider walking a viable mode of transport beyond indoor level. The other two did the job with never a problem where I saw and plenty of good nature and enthusiasm; it's probably just difficult to tell through the sheer radiated force of musical effectiveness coming from behind the drumkit. Lots of the songs would have been, honestly, dead boring played by anyone else, but the life in the drums saved them. It wasn't complexity or showy jazz chops or any of that, it was approaching drums as a full instrument to be used all accordingly.
And then they did a really storming version, I can't imagine how any contemporary stadium version would have been much better, of Dominance and Submission. It's good to know that life and enthusiam can still do so much.
There were suggestions that perhaps I just don't like any sentimental music and therefore am going to condemn anything even remotely like it; by good fortune I was listening at the time to It's Coming Down by Cake, a three minute forty-five, mid-paced rock song with simple mostly root-note bass and a familiar verse-chorus-instrumental-bit structure and backing vocals in all the right places, which is about the end of a relationship, by way of rain. In short, if the carefully-dosed meaningless vague sentimentality of Angels (is it about mother-figures? religious comfort? mindless optimism?) is the closest we're allowed to get to emotional music, we're in deep shit. Cake manage to produce a simple song that suggests more emotional and real-world experience than the entirety of Robbie's output, with a far more interesting brass section, better percussion and, the subtle feeling throughout the song (without resorting to cheesy samples, mentioning no Didos) that it's raining outside. It's just possible that they might be musicians.
Anyway, Friday. I'm certain that I saw one genuinely ace musician on Friday night. I'm not entirely certain about anyone else that passed across the stage but there were plenty of other qualities on show to make up for it.
I went to the 100 Club in Oxford Street and saw Ed Tudor-Pole. Now, he comes across as a disppointed dad, really, complaining he's never had to be bottom of a bill before, and by himself with an acoustic and a mike and an audience yet sober, driving us into a musical frenzy was never going to happen. The songs were blues covers, though unconventionally done, and possibly ill-advised whimsical ditties of his own. Having said that he tried hard and is an obvious source of energy and probably ought to be seen being a frontman and not the rest of the band too.
John Otway is a very silly man. You probably knew this. There's clearly a set of running in-jokes that his fans know, mainly stuff like Rocky Horror Picture Show style feed-lines for the House Of The Rising Sun. But that's still the best use of a pedal-triggered MIDI drum set and a theremin I've ever seen; let me tell you that whatever you can think of that he might have been doing with them, I bet it wasn't this. More of a school science teacher than a musician but prepared to be decently daft in the name of entertainment and thus gets away with it very well.
The unquestioned musician of the evening is Al Bouchard, once the drummer of Blue Oyster Cult and now of a band of his own called the Brain Surgeons. I get very disappointed when I see musicians who are no use any more, whether that's by raddled ineffectiveness and shocking loss of ability or meaningless note-perfect carelessness, watching the money roll in regardless. Whatever else Al may have got up to or now be living on, he loves to play the drums, to sing, to play music with and for people and is very good at it. I've got a list of a half-dozen drumming ideas and precepts to bear in mind as a result of watching him from the side for a few songs at the start. I'm no BOC fanatic and I don't think I can hum you a single Brain Surgeons song but that didn't matter. Again, I'm less sure of the rest of the band; none of them were bad. The lead guitarist, ex-Manowar, irritated me with his on-beat sterile accuracy and (I admit the triviality of it) ridiculous regulation black Levis, as stretched over fat thighs and ruched over freakishly non-existent calves of those who don't consider walking a viable mode of transport beyond indoor level. The other two did the job with never a problem where I saw and plenty of good nature and enthusiasm; it's probably just difficult to tell through the sheer radiated force of musical effectiveness coming from behind the drumkit. Lots of the songs would have been, honestly, dead boring played by anyone else, but the life in the drums saved them. It wasn't complexity or showy jazz chops or any of that, it was approaching drums as a full instrument to be used all accordingly.
And then they did a really storming version, I can't imagine how any contemporary stadium version would have been much better, of Dominance and Submission. It's good to know that life and enthusiam can still do so much.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 08:42 am (UTC)A good drummer can really make a band much better than it might otherwise be.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 01:04 pm (UTC)recreate the Otway version.
That sounds somewhere between unwise and damaging.
here, another thing
Date: 2005-02-15 10:35 pm (UTC)Re: here, another thing
Date: 2005-02-16 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 12:48 pm (UTC)You write so passionately and articulately about music, it's great.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-16 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-18 12:35 pm (UTC)