There is an iceberg. An iceberg of edgy London Jazz. Below the surface, you will find a few dozen bands that are generally brilliant, boldly avant-garde, and built out of the same jazzy-family of a dozen people or so. There’s too much going on under there for me to say much more about it. Maybe another day. For, you see, the iceberg also has two peaks, and one of these peaks is the subject of this here bit of text. Not the wonderful Polar Bear, who were the token Jazz-nomination at the Mercury thingy a little while back, but Acoustic Ladyland, who shocked arty Hoxtonians into Jazz a few years ago with their stunning 2nd album, Last Chance Disco.
The ‘Land are soon to release their fourth album, and decided to try it out at The Lexington in Angel last week. It seems to be that each of this iceberg’s pointy bits has a different helmsperson, and on this one, it is saxophonist Pete Wareham. Whether through choice or Musical Differences Syndrome, Pete has replaced 50% of the band. Tom Herbert has been downsized to Ruth Goller, who is far more punchy and energetic. Where Tom used to slickly stand around like a cool pimp, fingering effortlessly, and pretending not to sweat profusely in his dapper suit, Ruth’s dressed for Reebok Step and premeditatedly lunges at her fretboard, like a wolverine. More dramatic still, is the replacement of Tom Cawley with Chris Sharkey, who doesn’t even play the same instrument. Tom and his hi-lo-fi Nord Electro synth were one of the defining features of Last Chance Disco. Sharkey is a guitarist. Is this the same band?
Yep. Overall, the show came across as ploughing the same furrow as LCD, but with more heavy-heavy intensity and less melodic reliance and repetition. Drum-legend Seb Rochford plays it like Dave Lombardo of Slayer would play it. Anger is fun. Wareham gets caught up in that vibe, honk-honk, then bollocks to tonality, hurtles through the Ornette Coleman barrier, and parpsqueaks about in the Zornosphere. Ruth’s knotted brow keeps it all together until, until, STOP! The song’s over, we made it, it was good. It’s all tense, 94% of the time. I’m going to call it Agit-Bop.
And the guitar is a real surprise. Sharkey has noodly fingers. He can scribble across the strings with precision and flair, but he’s a texture guitarist. A line-up of pedals laid out before him makes it possible for you to think that Tom Cawley’s ghost has been zapped into a boutique stompbox. It’s bizarre how similar he can sound. It’s that same distorted, imbalanced end-of-level-baddy sound, but with a completely different note-sense: Cawley was Duke Ellington riffing as petulant teenager. Sharkey is kind of Jeff Beck or maybe LA Rocker lead-soloing as electro-sophisticate. In fact, Sharkey probably has a wider range of sounds in his repertoire. I wasn’t expecting it to work, but it does.
Yet this is a deja-vu moment for me. I caught AL gigging a preview to their last album, Skinny Grin, in 2007.So I know that the live sneak peek is not necessarily what you’ll get on the CD with Pete’s gang. That show gave me the impression that they’d turned metal and more relentlessly intensely consistently so (with a couple of single-aimed guest vocalist tunes). But when the album came, it was awash with depths far beyond LCD, depths that simply hadn’t been in the teaser-gig, that couldn’t have been there. While some of the CD’s high points came across well, like Road Of Bones or Red Sky, others weren’t represented (check out Hitting Home [swoon] or The Rise [swoon again]) So, it is with much confidence that I can say I haven’t really got a clue what the new album’s going to sound like. But this band is tight. Ruth and Seb have a lot of fun, and Pete and Chris are pretty cleverly interacty, too (deep within the iceberg, you will find these two in The Final Terror, in which they perform Olivier Messiaen’s complex, modernist, classical masterpiece, Turangalila – pretty highbrow for apparently chaotic punk-jazzwits). So I’m expecting gritty, pounding, intense bombast. But I’m also expecting a surprise.
Album #4 is expected in July. Meanwhile, Kinder Eggs are available at your local shop.
Similar Posts:
- Pete and the Pirates Live at Lee
- Music Listings
- Rolo Tomassi and Fucked Up!
- Polar Bear – Peepers – Album Review
- Meet Submotion Orchestra, a new musical collective from Leeds