White Lies - Newcastle O2 Academy - 17th February

Tonight is a little puzzling to me. See, I still think of White Lies as being a small, 'cultish' band with a loyal but limited following. This makes no real sense because they have bags of tunes and wide appeal, even so this thought prevails. I'm strangely excited then to see they've filled the Academy to bursting. An even more impressive feat when you consider their average audience member is a tiny fifteen year old taking up no space at all.

They're popular then. Radio hits. The new album 'Ritual' draws in a new audience too. And they’re still accepting goodwill for their excellent debut album. All very much deserved and earned. Touring continually. I get it, I really do.

I'm a genuine fan of their songs. 'Bigger Than Us', 'Farewell to the Fairground', 'To Lose My Life', 'Strangers' - these all possess the melancholy and anthemic edge on stage that they evoke on the albums. The crowd of tweenies, and a few of us older souls, revel in singing every word. We dance and surge, raise our hands in praise and generally give it some welly throughout.

So, I'm puzzled why? Weirdly, I think we, the crowd. are working harder than the band. The reciprocal love isn’t felt coming from the stage. There are some cursory 'Thank you's' but doled out with a lack of passion. It feels pretty clinical and by turns insincere. Late in the set launching into 'Death', still by far their best song, I'm almost prepared to forgive their formulaic approach but really would have killed for some enthusiasm along with the cracking tunes.

PLANK! - EP

PLANK! are a three piece who play (mostly) instrumental music. Repetitive, hypnotic music which flirts with Krautrock and in particular stalwarts of that 'genre' Neu! and Amon Duul II. They've even nicked Neu!'s punctuation.

It's within this context of heavily patterned drumming and bass melodies, of trance-like grooves and repeating loops, that each song finds its own heartbeat and forms a structure out of seemingly nothing. There's a buoyant but melancholic arc to the (bad)punningly entitled 'Arse Nick' whereas '1001 Nacht' toys with 'kosmische' avant-gardist psychedelia by throwing a bit of experimentalism the listeners way.

Once 'Phlaa' gets going the song's similarities to Neu!'s seminal 'Hallogallo' are too obvious to be coincidental. They clearly have an affection and appreciation of the musical legacy to which they are adding their own stamp.

Personally I could do with more, a lot more, the songs on the EP are way too short and at an average of four minutes that's a rare thing indeed. The impetus just about begins before the music levels off and ends with an often abrupt flourish. Sadly. I'd happily take a full length album of this music if they're willing to spend time putting one together. EP closer 'La Luna' is a beautiful example of spaced ambiance that is treated with the throwaway frivolity of a band easily bored with the rhythms they've discovered. Pity.

The musical interplay throughout comes from the synchronous drumming and bass although the occasional guitar riff gets a look in particularly on 'Arse Nick' which creates musical spirals which reach into each other and draw out some interesting results.

It's arguable where PLANK!'s music sits within the current musical context, it's certainly not populist and deliberately so but it's also drawn aside from the plethora of post-rock, psyche-rock bands of the last ten years or so. PLANK! could be viewed as custodians to this marginal sound and one which is much deserving of rediscovery. Bloody good ones too.

www.myspace.com/plankuk
www.mekongdelta.co.uk

Murcof - The Versailles Sessions

The Versailles Sessions shouldn’t be considered as a follow up to Murcof’s Cosmos album of 2007. In fact this music isn’t really an album at all as it’s a collection of aural compositions commissioned for a site specific artwork on display at the Jardin du Roi.
All of the music is played and/or sampled on original 17th Century instruments and filtered through the Murcof brain to generate expansive, looming passages of intense and occasionally regal sounding noise this is a pretty big leap from what where minimalistic beginnings but Fernando Corona seems to have a firm grasp on the powerful sounds at his fingertips.

As with all most music classified experimental The Versailles Sessions requires a certain listening shift – there are no pretty songs in here anywhere, nothing remotely approaching a tune in the classic sense – but of course that’s not the point. The powerful, evocative noises and interplay of instrumentation feels more like music for film, amped up and monolithic. Anyone who enjoyed Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood, for instance, will hear good things in this Murcof offering but let’s be honest that is a niche crowd.

My preference would have been release this on DVD where the music and visuals of the installation compliment each other but as this isn’t the case you have to become enveloped in the wash of sounds, in the interplay of the bangs and clatter and the hugely evocative choral passages – and give yourself over to imagination.

www.murcof.com/
www.mekongdelta.co.uk

Kyte - Two Sparks, Two Stars EP

I’m an unashamed lover of Kyte’s cinematic style and otherworldly music. The seemingly simple way they build songs from a few glockenspiel notes and piano chords into a quiet roar of Nordic sounding majesty is utterly spellbinding. They really do evoke a twilight fairytale world of mystery populated by curious sounds and emotions which seems perfectly at home as winter draws in.

The orchestrated sound of Two Sparks, Two Stars sees a progression from the band’s more precise eponymous mini album earlier in the year which was much more about the cyclical building of tracks upon tracks and for all the album's beauty, and it is a thing of aching beauty, this EP shows the band with more dimensions, more experimental yet retaining their ability to write superbly lush songs like opener Eyes Lose Their Fire.

Not that it’s all their own work. The cover of Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill will probably sneak up on a fair few people as it’s so perfectly molded into the Kyte oevre that it takes a little time to actually realize it’s not their own tune, a rare thing to achieve well and rarer still with a familiar song.

Of the EP’s four tracks it the final installment Light Outside Here which tugs on the seasonal heart strings most of all. Not for any specific Christmassy references though simply down to it's texture and ambience. Kyte make you want to curl up in front of a warm fire and dream impossible dreams.


www.myspace.com/kyteband
www.mekongdelta.co.uk