Ist Ist

@ Omeara, London

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

We’re at Omeara for the first time and having just ordered a White Claw, served at room temperature for £7 quid, it left us wondering who even the fuck we are anymore?  To those bothering to look, probably an unrecognizable protoplasm cutting a dark, slim and brooding figure; Balzac deep in A Harlot High and Low.  Awaiting, excruciatingly we might add, through two of perhaps the worst opening acts in recent memory in a venue that reeked of fried eggs, the whole night through we leaned heavily against the wall.  Each act’s sound was worse than the last.  It left us thinking was Omeara’s sound-tech legally deaf, or were the bands just tone deaf?  Maybe both?  What in Christ would Ist Ist sound like?  We sincerely did not feel like sticking it out long enough to find out.  Surrounded by too-drunk, past-their-prime seniors pretending to be middle-aged men, wearing the band tees of the band they were here to see.

Just then we were reminded of a friend that not so long ago told me she swore by David Goggins’ philosophy, which had weaseled their way into our psyche with his ‘what if’ mentality.  What if we could make it through these two abysmal opening acts, defying all the odds, would it be worth it?  Hope is the last to die, so they say, and probably us along with it.  Inevitably, we held up our end of the deal and saw our commitments through to the bitter end, as always.  For one brief shining moment the sun shone upon us for it too.  In reality, it was the intelligent light system searing through our retinas.  Even so, with intensely directed light piercing through and sizzling our optic nerves, we managed to hold steady and witness a set worthy of hope.

Through what must’ve been arguably the greatest amount of fog used since the filming of The Mist appear Manchester’s favourite sons, Ist Ist, with just a splash of bravado.  The previous stage setups, clumsy and cluttered, strewn with keyboard alleys and telephone wired extension leads crawling across the floor, were now replaced.  In their stead, a cleared centre stage framed a relaxed setup in the same vein a smile would on Willem Defoe's face.  Mat’s, donning an epic Slow Drive tour tee by the way, pull up to a double stacked keyboard rig which looms phantom-esque stage right.  Adam’s guitar and Andy’s bass taking up center-left.  As usual, the drummer Joel, is left floating in the background like a ghoulish apparition with only his face and arms swinging around wildly throughout the set.

The 18-song set that ensues kicks off with ‘Stamp You Out’s gnarly down picking bass and Adam’s Paul Banks-esque vocals helped remedy a sore start with a set that would surely soar.  What they lack throughout the evening in a showy stage presence throughout their set, they more than make up for in the volume of quality songs played, sheer talent, and of course a fuckload of fog.  It was an incredible relief to realise it wasn’t in fact the venue’s sound, or the tech’s fault either, for the previous poor soundscapes.  Every instrument came through in crystal studio quality surround sound.  Neither vocals, percussion, keys or bass, which slapped as prominently as it did awesomely, interfered with one another.  The set design feels like an orchestra shoehorned into, well, a shoebox.  Real dark matter vibes, bruh.  It is, and will remain, exceptionally impressive.

Ist Ist effortlessly cruised through a set filtering through their back catalogue as much as promoting their latest, Protagonist, released just last month on Violence Records, without so much as breaking a sweat.  Their sound lays somewhere between metal and grunge, Soundgarden chic?  Even as an interloper at a gig surrounded by die-hard fans, it wasn’t difficult to fall in step whilst enjoying ourselves, guilt free, in the sullen inclusivity that still managed to bring about an uplifting experience.  You don’t want to be left without a chair when the music stops.

Ist Ist are touring now.

Slow Readers Club

Academy, Dublin

The last time our paths crossed with Slow Readers Club, they were an independent band peddling their second album.  One major label deal and three charting LPs later, they are headlining Dublin’s Academy and have developed their sound to suit the larger venues they are accustomed to these days.

We arrive early for Amy Montgomery.  People were raving about her after her headline set at Vantastival in September.  It’s a different gig opening for an established act when you don’t have your normal stage set up and lighting.  We’re pleasantly surprised to see Nolan Donnelly, guitar player/producer from Mosmo Strange, take the stage to kick off Montgomery's introduction.  The Northern Irish singer emerges in front of the sparse crowd but sings as if the room were full, dropping onto her back after the first chorus.  It's a classic rock sound that manages to avoid the cliché-ridden pitfalls that can overcome such bands.  Montgomery and Co continue to kick out the jams for 35 minutes of hard rock screamer mayhem.  We make a note to follow up with their next headline gig.

The crowd swells ahead of Slow Readers Club.  Tonight isn’t sold out but you’d be hard pressed to tell from the size of the crowd.  They’re that indie band that becomes a dance groove band when they start playing bigger venues, and you won’t hear any complaints from this corner.  Aaron Starkie’s voice fills the venue from the front row to the back of the bar.  The band have had commercial success in the UK but have yet to make a mainstream impact in Ireland. Nonetheless there are hundreds of people here singing back the lyrics. It’s a noticeably older crowd here, suggesting a love of Manchester indie bands rather than a commercial influence.  It's indicative of our globalised world but also of Ireland’s close links with the UK.  Slow Readers Club have the crowd enraptured from the opening bars of their first tune and manage to maintain it throughout the set.

Pairing SRC with Amy Montgomery is a bit of a mismatch.  Montgomery’s set is all flashing lights, eye catching makeup, flailing dreads, and vocal acrobatics while SRC let the music do the heavy lifting.  The stage is relatively undecorated, the lighting plain, and the band barely move.  It’s the audience’s engagement with the songs that pumps energy into the room.  It’s an approach one can respect but we’d rather the balls-to-the-wall, last night on earth performance that the support act gave.

The headliners break out the big tunes late in the set and the audience's response sakes the jelly in our eyes.  The Dublin following is fervent as becomes obvious after ‘On The TV’.  After the songs finishes, the audience sings back the refrain with such resolve that the band join in and improvise a new reprise for the tune.  It’s a wonderful moment and the smiles spread through the room, on stage and off, culminating in a mass of applause and cheers.

It's refreshing after covid to hear the terrace style chant ringing out.  It’s no surprise when the band have a decade of live experience and bring it all to bear on a foreign audience that has been starved of their presence for at least three years.  It's probably only covid that has restricted this band to a venue the size of the Academy.  It would be no surprise to see them opening arena tours very soon.  Check out their tunes and catch them while they’re affordable and hungry.

Index for Working Musik

@ The Garage, London

Words and pics by Captain Stavros

It’s the evening before St Patrick’s Day and we’re propped up (being crushed to death by the crowds) against a bar in Highbury, Islington attempting to order a pint of Guinness.  ‘Good evening, may I have a pint of Guinness please?’  ‘A what?’, a barmaid screws up her face like she’s bitten into a lemon, better yet, smelled milk that’s gone off.  We could just as well have ordered a Mountain Dew or a goat hoof, by their reaction.  We, instead, just point to the tap, in hopes the message will permeate the membrane.  It may not be polite to point but it works.  A quarter of an hour later, my pint arrives, which has given us ample time to take in our surroundings of football supporters, of one team or another.  Which is exactly enough time to be thankful that we’re supporting a gig instead of the football.  Enter, Index for Working Musik.

An elemental gathering of musicians, mainly elements of already existing bands (Proper Ornaments/TOY), found their way to us around 2022 with the release of ‘Wagner’, a single off their upcoming album which, coincidentally, turned out to be their set opener on this evening.  We’re already fans of label mates White Flowers, which share similar musical and visual aesthetics so, naturally, we were intrigued.  Scrolling through the press blurb re-affirmed what we already knew to be true, there was something profoundly unsettling and weird about these lot, just the way we like it.

Index For Working Musik was born on an evening in late 2019 amidst the discovery of a collection of faded black and white photocopies that had been marinating on the floor of a urine-alley in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona.  An assortment of sacred and profane imagery was crumpled amongst an essay on early Christian hermits, entitled Men Possessed by God, the meaning of which was enticingly vague.

And so, with that we left the pub and crossed the street entering into the windowless void that is The Garage.  The set opener, ‘Wagner’, carries with it an intense loneliness.  It’s a tune with nowhere to go and no reason to get there, existing purely for its own entertainment.  It’s a storm with the air let out of its tyres, half in tune with the other half of the seamless noise being carried along by a crisp percussion and methodical bassline.  So far, so good.  ‘Railroad Bulls’ lumbers through the station with the help of a passing slow pulled bow across the bass, right on time as usual.  The double bass really shines through on this song and proves itself more than just a Proper Ornament on stage.

As enjoyable as the set is thus far, it’s sort-of like everything before the four-minute mark of Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’.  That, however, was all about to change with ‘Ambiguous Fauna’.  Hearing the song unfold whilst simultaneously watching it is nearly indescribable, like a fly fruitlessly thrashing against a window trying to escape.  Although inevitably it’ll never manage to evade the glass, you’re still mesmerised by its frantic motions wondering what’ll happen next; set me free!  The entirety of the song was an anxiety-ridden demonstration of how to perfectly incorrectly tune a guitar, each string being over-tuned one pluck and turn at a time.  This is not a criticism, this, the set’s zenith, was exactly where we began to re-engage with the performance.  ‘Isis Beatles’, a track that began with reel-to reel-loops of Afghan music compete with the found-sound overlays of voices recorded at the queue of the pharmacy and drum machines borrowed from Spanish heroes, channeling both far-off climes and snippets from a closer reality.  A bold statement for a mid-set number, the double bass playing throughout was like watching throats played throughout a slasher pic, slashidy slash slash, the horse hairs peeled and broke away from their taut housing.  No going back now.

Finally unshackled, the set takes off in a full upswing, cleaving its melancholy tempo with each bar of ‘Chains’ and ‘1871’.  “Isn’t it fun?”, Max sings to his audience through an emotionless face that’s 90% razor edged cheekbones with sullen cheeks to match.  Hey, Argentina, what are you putting in the water over there?  Although both songs are excellent, our head favors nodding back and forth.  We slap our thighs and our feet restlessly tapping out the rhythm to ‘Chains’.  The percussion surgically manages to cut through, without overwhelming and stealing the show on this one.  We felt it in our shins, and still don’t know how that magic happened but we ain’t questioning nuthin’.  It was the cough in a pregnant silence.  The set finale, ‘Habinita’, would call again upon that sorcery of percussion, along with rest of the band, throwing-off their reins.  This was the point, amongst many in the set, that our eyes were drawn to Natalie Bruno’s Thunderbird bass and smokey vocals which combined with Max’s harmonized into a velvety pool of aural bliss.

It took at least a full five seconds for us to realise the band had left the stage and for reality to set back in.  The fact that the gig was over.  Dragging The Needlework For The Kids At Uphole as an album has a great depth of nuanced tones between the lead and rhythm guitars which seamlessly hands off to each of the other instruments, like the double bass and drums but this, along with almost every other subtlety, is washed away live.  Hushed lyrics, we’re afraid, turned to muffled cotton-ball stuffed mouthed puffs more instep with a cow’s moo.  That’s about the most amount of criticism we can give to the performance which is more of a technical kink to be resolved than a lack of talent, of which there is plenty.  We’d really recommend combing through the album, which is fantastic and switched us on to the gang in the first place, to let your mind fill in the gaps when watching them live.  Index for Working Musik is touring now and next playing at The Seabright Arms on March 23 in the year of our Lord two-thousand-twenty-three, you’d certainly be remiss to miss them.

Death Valley Girls

@ The Moth

Words & pics by Captain Stavros

You're travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.  A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.  That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, The Island In The Sky winter tour, with your hosts Death Valley Girls, The MOTH Club and yours truly, Captain Stavros. 

Hailed as LA’s very own Mystic-Rock-Mainstay and fresh off the heels of their latest release, the aforementioned Island in the Sky.  A thinly veiled albeit creepier version Themyscira, a bizzarro Themyscira if you will.  Where instead of Amazonians, we’ll find Bonnie Bloomgarden giving the audience the business so hard she’ll have to lift her colonial prairie dress to her face to smear it all about, along with her deadly makeup, trying to get all the gunky sweat off her witchy mug to keep the wildest set of the year, thus far, going.

But who are these ghoulish zephyrs from parts Cal-ah-4-neye-eh?  That, in and of itself, is a tricky thought exercise.  Ever hear of The Ship of Theseus?.  Essentially, the story goes, if you swap out all or most of the original parts, is the thing still the same thing it started off as?  DVG has seen a fair bit of turnover through the years but original founding member Larry Schemel and Bonnie Bloomgarden, long-time vocalist, are still the beating heart of the band and I’d argue that, like Robocop, swapping out pesky human parts for shiny mechanically powered new ones arguably makes a thing even better than it was before.

The current roster shining down on us from the MOTH’s stage this evening was composed of:

Rikki Styxx – can you imagine if this was her name from birth?  Fated to play the drums, and boy-howdy, did she ever?  With a Cheshire cat smile throughout.  She reminded me of the way a young pyromaniac stares with intensity as the flames she’s nursing rise and consume.  Sub the flames for her sticks crashing into the snare, and you’ve got an alarmingly satisfying experience.  

Bonnie Bloomgarden – charismatic frontwoman and fallen Disney Princess who, at times, is possessed by the music itself so much so that when she bends backwards.  She could be confused for someone with a terrible case of scoliosis or a lost limbo contestant.  At one point, she broke out into a make-shift gospel whilst on the keys.  I was in stitches. 

Larry Schemel, founding member who now is more of an apparition wiggling around stage right in the shadows.  

Last but not least, Samantha Westervelt – bassist, singer, actor and Saturn Bar t-shirt wearer extraordinaire.  With “Liquor in the front, Poker in the rear” plastered across it and sporting a “Born Free” electric guitar strap.  I’d get to know her perhaps more personally than most in the audience that evening as her bass’ headstock rapped against my knuckles like a school teachers' ruler as I tried to take photos throughout the set.  Worth it.

For some reason, I’ve written ‘steam roller energy’ in my gig notes and, although those are all words I understand, they make no sense to me and probably never did.  On that tip though, much in the same vein of Ty Segall and King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard, Death Valley Girls seemingly have all the energy in the world for putting out an album every Friday to help us make it through the weekend.  Their latest is album seven.  They’ve also pumped out eight singles/EPs in 10 years, Jiminy Jillikers!  I’ll say this about them, they do not accept the laws of thermodynamics.  They are a perpetual motion machine with no end in sight; after 10 years, they’re still ‘givn’er’, these lot are a quagmire.

Speaking of conjuring shit up, the set starts off with ‘ABRE Camino’, a methodical slowburn that sounds like a record being played backwards.  Ouija vibes man, but soon their set turns mani(a)c with ‘Street Justice’ from 2018’s Dark Rains.  At this point, the audience has been completely possesed by Bloomgarden’s signature vocals, which reach maximum hypnosis when Westervelt chimes in chorus, banshee-esque vibes.

A few songs down the road, Bloomgarden starts coming at us with a few gems between tracks; “You don't know how lucky you are to have this place. We don't have a place like this in our town.”  I dunno lady, certainly we are lucky to have The MOTH (albeit with iconic ‘All children to be off the Dance Floor by 9:30pm’ sign now missing?  How long have I been out for?) but if Bukowski, Stanton or Morrison heard this, they’d probably be spinning in their booze soaked and drug addled graves.  I could easily see them playing at The Mint in LA.  I did especially appreciate, “If you think being a man is cool, then I'm a man too”, introing 2016’s Glow In The Dark track.  Not too long after which, Bloomgarden has a back and forth with a few audience members before diving into the crowd, booths and everywhere in between.  No one was safe but I’m quite confident nobody at that point cared to be.  

They return for an encore rocking ‘Electric High’ from Street Venom, which brought the fucking house down thanks to Rikki Styxx.  I think my friend BobaDebz summed it up best with her review though, “I’m trying to recall exactly what I said because I genuinely want to help you. I remember mentioning about the drummer her Cheshire Cat grin, how insane the last song was and how that made me cream my pants. I honestly can’t recall anything else other than how totally fucking awesome she was.” - BobaDebz

Death Valley Girls are currently touring Europe, wouldn’t miss ‘em if I were you.