Facebook Slider

Yuck, Moth Club, London

  • Published in Live

Yuck are bloody cool, and there’s no denying that these Moth Club LP launch shows have been highly anticipated among fans. With the departure of Daniel Blumberg and arrival of new guitarist Ed Hayes in 2013, the past two years have seen a shift in direction for Yuck, a period of anticipation for fans, and with the release of the new album Stranger Things on Friday, an amplified excitement for the gig.

With support from Shark Dentist and Puppy, the beginning of the evening creates a buzz around new music, dismissing all ideas that nothing new is good and building up the perfect atmosphere for the main act.

To say the show was sold out would be an understatement. Rarely do you see people actually spilling out the doors at venues, others having to clamber on tables to get a view. Lots about tonight speaks volumes about Yuck as a band: the sheer amount of people there just the start of it. Very few bands – particularly not massive bands – could saunter on stage almost 45 minutes late and get away with it. Yet with Yuck there seems to be absolutely no bad blood and they get on with the show as though nothing had happened.

Playing through ‘Hold Me Closer’ and ‘Cannonball’ before launching into ‘Get Away’, Yuck proved they know how to work a crowd, and by practically ignoring two stage invaders, prove their completely cool approach to, well, everything. And as the crowd gets progressively rowdier in front of her eyes, her monitor played up and feedback blared through a couple of songs, bassist and vocalist Mariko Doi kept as composed as ever.

Yuck are an odd band to witness live – their offhand, almost too cool to care attitude is one that wouldn’t necessarily bode well for most other bands but musically they’re worlds above anything and else it’s tricky not to find them all slightly charming.

 

 

Read more...

Eleanor Friedberger, Moth Club, London

  • Published in Live

Muriel Spark wrote that she disliked the word ‘experimental’ as an adjective for art because it implied that the outcome was a failure. Eleanor Friedberger’s New View contains songs as experimental as any of the eight-minute opuses on her albums with former band Fiery Furnaces, but ironically New View is not ‘experimental’ in a traditional way, and certainly not a failure. It’s an album of a woman singing twelve, strange pop songs, quite differently. New View is beautiful, but it’s not pop - it’s a three-chord, 45 minute Richard Linklater conversation. And that’s why tonight’s show is sold out.

Eleanor’s first London show is in Hackney, in an ex-service men’s member’s club - the MOTH club (christened in 1927, an acronym for the ‘Memorable Order of Tin Hats’). The venue was in danger of closing last year, so sadly had to open its doors up to the hipsters of Hackney. Hipsters generally don’t wear tin hats, but they do like going to hipster gigs, and despite staunch regulars at the bar grumbling about “the type of people you get on nights like tonight”, the club is heaving this evening, so hey, it’s not all bad, guys. The back room with the stage in is a gold glitter-ceilinged bingo hall. There’s an old machine gun hanging from the ceiling. It’s great.

Friedberger takes the decision to sit on a stool in the middle of the stage for the majority of the set, playing by herself without a backing band. The songs are conversational, but the conversation is wonderfully strange. She opens with ‘He Never Told Me About His Mother’, her audience swaying left and right like beardy reeds. “Have you seen the movie yet?” she asks. “There’s a lot about it in the press.” Yes, I have seen the movie thanks Eleanor. Solid performances, shame about the Oscar snub. “I’m opening a tree museum, that’s my new hobby.” Oh right, sounds great Eleanor. What’s a tree museum?

Friedberger ends her set by coming back onstage for an encore and asking her audience, “What should I finish with?” The answer from the crowd is a resounding “My Mistakes” her first single from her first album, back in 2011. “Oh but that song only has two chords!” she replies. But she sings it anyway, because Eleanor Friedberger is lovely.

Read more...
Subscribe to this RSS feed