Birmingham live music and gig guide

Formerly Gerl then Girl before arriving at the current appellation, the Rotherham quartet have recently inked to Drowned in Sound. providing a home for Uno, their follow up to 2002’s Short Strut To The Brassy Front. And since recent gigs have seen them refusing to actually play any of the old material, that looks like pretty much what you’re getting. No bad thing, it’s a far more textured collection of post hardcore/emo that embraces the straightforward rock of recent single Hallelujah, the jazzier flavours of Coffee And Giro Cheques or Master Blaster, Inshallah’s Eastern rhythms and the simple folksy acoustics of Drake which, you don’t have to be a genius to assume is a reference to winsome folk legend Nick. Unlikely though it might sound, but Oscilloscope Love and Der Der Der Der even vaguely call to mind the early non bombastic work of Queen while the closing St James Gate Marylebone could even find favour among old progheads.
Beeping At Pedestrians and Cartwheels shows they can still turn on the sonic funky hard rock thunder but for the most part this is the sound of a band pushing their boundaries. Besides anyone who has a track called You Are But A Draft, A Long Rehearsal For A Show That Will Never Play has to be worth a look

Reformed for their first album in 22 years, ONoffON (Matador) sounds like the influential Boston punk noiseniks (without them there may never have been a Sonic Youth) have never been away, racing out of the starting gate with the urgent flurry of The Set Up where Gang of Four meets Husker Du and proceeding to show wet behind the ears upstarts just how you do politically aware angry rock n roll and still find room for big pop melodies.
Case in point Nicotine Bomb which suggest where REM might have borrowed a few early influences, the plangent air fisting intensity of The Enthusiast and the Husker folk veined Falling while the jangly orchestral ballad Prepared calls to mind the work of Love. As indeed, for different reasons, does Max Ernst’s Dream. Three cuts, Dirt (the new single and long standing live favourite), Hunt Again and the hammering hardcore Playland are reworks of left over outtakes and don’t sound quite as forceful as the new material, but that’s a small quibble in what’s an otherwise stupendous return to ferociously meltdown form. One for the new generation to discover and a welcome blast from the past for their mom and dad.
Support’s from labelmates Seachange who describe their sound as a mix of Sonic Youth and Fairport Convention.

Well, there’s certainly some interesting folk flavours on their debut album Lay of the Land - the spooked violin and dark woods intro to Anglokana and the dank moods of The Nightwatch - but inevitably they all collapse into squalling indie noise while the rest of the album dispenses with the preludes altogether and gets right in on distortion and twisted guitar pain.

Since anyone with functioning ears will recognise that this New York trio are going to become very big indeed, this intimate little pub gig really looks like the last chance you’ll have of catching them in such humble setting. They arrive on the back of recently released album proper Now Here This Is Nowhere (679) flaunting their psychedelic and prog rock colours and an ability to swing from Spirtualised meet Pink Floyd fragility (The Leaves Are Gone) and delirious pop rush (Sad And Lonely) to the Kraut rock title track and a pounding First Wave Intact or the Hawkwind cum Led Zep of Light’s On.
There’s a danger that such epic spaceprog as Pharaohs Daughter could slip into over-indulgence live, but if that’s the price to pay to get to hear My Bloody Valentine reborn on Road Leads Where It’s Led then open wallets have to be the order of the day.

Seemingly forever on the road, the Bath outfit slip into town with their own small scale headline tour to spread the word for debut album Raw Nerve (Music For Nations), a heady brew of short loud guitar stabbing indie rock represented by the likes of One More Razor, Racketeer and Fallout stirred in with more considered emotive and melodic rainbows such as swelling (occasionally Oasis) single Thirteen, the gentle lapping Last Chance and a muscularly urgent five minutes of Zero. They like it big and loud and years of gigs have forged their live set into a blistering, wired and energetic explosion that may well see them elevated to next Idlewild status.

You can forgive Jordan many things but not resurrecting the career of Aussie Andre who had mercifully vanished into oblivion until I’m A Celebrity dug him up and a few gropes for the camera sent an exhumed Mysterious Girl back to the top of the charts. And now he’s not only got a new album, The Long Road Back (East West) he’s also got a scent named after his annoying I’m A Celebrity buzzword and recent eco-themed single Insania.
Avoiding obvious cracks about bad smells, the fact remains that Andre pretty much defines the term ‘bland’ with an unmemorable voice and lightweight summery soul/reggae pop that’s generally so devoid of imagination he even has to borrow other artists’ titles for his songs. Indeed Never Gonna Give You Up has you positively yearning for Rick Astley.
It’s not especially crap - well, not unless you count his cover of Let’s Go Dancin’ (Ooh La La La) - and listening to things like his Jordan-massaging ballad All Time Girl, the Motownish The Right Way and boy bandy That’s Where I Belong isn’t painful, but there’s just so little to hang on to that memories of the music, and I suspect his comeback, just evaporate into thin air.

Two years on from the last roster showcasing label tour, the package returns with a rotating line up of acts and an accompanying 17 track sampler, Breeding Disloyalty- Campfire Songs For The Disruptive Element. In no particular order of merit this stop over rolls in with rowdy punksters Captain Everything (There Is No ‘I’ In Scene), ska punk outfit Adequate Seven, (Gotta Stay Focused),

Da Skywalkers (whose Where Do We Go sounds like a meeting between the Clash and UK Subs)

and Kenesia, the only outfit not to feature on the compilation. Sweaty, loud, mosh pit action all round then.

One for devotees of the Matthew Sweet and Lemonheads brand of skinny kid guitar based power pop, Kweller used to be in grunge popsters Radish and has endorsements from both Evan Dando and Adam Durvitz. He's not got the greatest voice in the world, but his somewhat naive nasal tones (reminiscent of the Violent Femmes on occasion) are well suited to the hummable melodies and bruised love songs that provide his material.
Although Believer and the title track recall the more acoustic sounds of debut album Sha Sha, his latest, On My Way (679) is a fuller sounding and slightly lyrically darker affair with I Need You Back, My Apartment and Hear Me Out all bouncing with a sunny 60s vibe while The Rules and Ann Disaster show a rockier side of his garage guitar pop and the piano jaunty Hospital Bed sails away on thoughts of Ben Folds with whom he worked as part of The Bens. Nothing quite has the same infections quality as Wasted & Ready off his debut album, but anyone who can sneak the word ‘wobbly’ into a song and get away with it deserves your love and support.

Having broken big with Wherever You Will Go, Daredevil song For You and the debut Camino Palmero album, core members guitarist Aaron Kamin and falsetto warbling blonde singer Alex Band have wisely opted not to mess with a proven formula. Follow up album II (RCA) serves much the same radio-friendly brand of sincerity and gruff emotional rock (themes include suicide, faith, domestic abuse and self-belief) that sounds like a meeting between U2, Neil Diamond and Pearl Jam.
So, big soaring rock anthems then, perfectly embodied in the like of Things Will Go My Way, One By One, Chasing The Sun and Anything with recent single Our Lives showing their soaring pop colours and cello accompanied domestic abuse number Somebody Out There provides the sensitive side. The chugging acoustic bluesy live cover of The Clash’s London Calling on the single was probably not a wise move and they’ll hopefully not be tempted to include it in the set here, but otherwise those who want to raise stadium fists to the sky should be well served.

Pronounced Mee-noos, the Icelandic indie guitar crew return for a headline tour on the back of The Long Face (Bad Taste), an urgent rush of psychotic Queens of the Stone Age meets the Stooges rock with parping brash and thrashing guitars that’s probably the most direct single yet taken from Halldor Laxness, their follow up to the bizarrely titled Jesus Christ Blobby. As likely to please Fugazi fans as the new wave of garage rock devotees, they have the aggressive power and the arty sensibilities to become frighteningly big indeed.

Wednesday July 14
Todd Rundgren

Hands up, I have to confess to not being caught up in the babbling tide of critical excitement that greeted Liars (Sanctuary), Rundgren’s first new album since 1995 and his first to get a full UK release in 14 years. Truth be told, while quite liking I Saw The Light and Can We Still Be Friends and fully adoring his overkill production duties for Bat Out of Hell, I’ve never been much of a Runt fan.
So, while I can appreciate the musical skill that’s gone into Liars, I simply can’t overly warm to its 80s infused technosoul. That said Soul Brother is a fine piece of Ball of Confusion era soul funk and Past and Sweet are as authentic recreations of white boy Philly as a non Hall & Oates album made with synthesisers can get, junglist drum n bass smoothes effortlessly through a Curtis Mayfield evoking Wonderful, he crafts a remarkable fusion of electro funk, Eastern rhythms and operatic overkill with the angry post 9/11 title track, and Mammon takes on thundering Bowie funk at its own game. But with Living and God Said the missing links between Yes, Air and Barry Manilow, for all the caustic lyrics and lush electronica it all eventually floats away into the ether of middle-aged coffee table pleasantness.
I daresay, peppered with favourite samples from his lengthy if erratic career, the live show will be suitably sonically and visually impressive but I’m just going to have to remain in the ranks of the unconverted.

7.30pm, £24.50-£19.50, Symphony Hall.
Mike Davies
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Wednesday July 14
Eamon

Dirty talking white rude boy urban hip hop, or as he calls it ho-wop, a musical world of misogynistic r&b where women are ho’s whose only purpose in life seems to be act like a whores and then accept being dissed and cast aside for the same thing. Equally girlfriends should know their place and keep their mouths shut, paying servile respect to their trainers. Hardly the most enlightened of attitudes, and yet somehow the middle class New Yorker has managed to parlay this politically incorrect sexism into a platinum selling career with his debut album Don’t Want You Back (Jive) and the expletive deleted eponymous No 1 single that must have had tweenies parents tearing their hair out.
There’s no denying that musically speaking he can whip up some fabulous r&b, but liberally filling his depressingly irony free macho riddled chauvinistic songs with similarly sexual and four lettered language just makes him sound like some playground Eminem who’s just learned that swearing can shock the grown ups and is looking to gain cred with the older boys. Probably not one for the 10 year old girlies then, no matter how much they beg.

7.30pm, £17.50, W’hampton Civic Hall.
Mike Davies
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Friday July 16
Katherine Williams

There’s always the suspicion that when a singer-songwriter known for their deeply personal material releases an album of covers that the well of artistic inspiration has run at least temporarily dry. Even though Williams admits it was a battery recharging exercise designed to respark her love of music, that’s far from the case with Relations (EastWest).
Bringing frequently inspired new understated acoustic arrangements complete with double bass and cello she applies her husky breathed tones to an idiosyncratic selection that ranges from a wistful folkie reading of Python Lee Jackson’s bluesy In A Broken Dream to a dreamy sunstroked version of The Byrds’ Ballad of Easy Rider and a hushed, gossamer and jangled nerves take on Nirvana’s All Apologies.
Reflecting her own frequently melancholic moods, there’s a fair degree of mellow mournfulness, among them a simple strummed guitar sad and fragile version of Neil Young’s Birds, a cello accompanied Hallelujah by Cohen, a spare fractured lullaby of Tim Hardin’s How Can We Hang On To A Dream and even a gorgeously wounded interpretation of the Bee Gee’s I Started A Joke.
Elsewhere she calls on Pavement (Spit On A Stranger), Big Star (Thirteen), The Velvets (Candy Says), Jackson Browne (a lovely but rather too obvious These Days), Ivor Cutler (Beautiful Cosmos) and, rather wonderfully, Lee Hazelwood (Easy and Me), but if the sun shines on this outdoor set then the one you really want to fit the occasion will be her lazy jazzy country-blues creek baked shuffle through Mae West’s A Guy What Takes His Time.
Quite how heavily she’ll draw on the album and how much she’ll be renewing her relationship with her own muse remains to be seen, but either way it promises to a splendid evening.

7.30pm, £13.50, mac arena.
Mike Davies
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Friday July 16
Tim Booth

Three years on and almost total silence following his departure from James, their former frontman finally returns with beard and Bone (Sanctuary), his debut solo album (ok, he did release Booth and the Bad Angel back in 96 but that was in collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti) and accompanying tour.The opening Wave Hello and recent Down To The Sea single aside vaguely aside, there’s none of those old chorus friendly soaring pop anthems like Sit Down, Laid and Come Home that grabbed you by the scruff of the neck but if not instant it is a grower for the prepared to give it the time. It’s not as experimental as his old band’s work with Eno on Wah Wah but he’s clearly exploring possibilities, chilling on a narcotic bluesy title track, talking his way through the moody electro swampy In The Darkness, hitting spacey mantras on Monkey God and filtering in Eastern shades on the bitter Redneck, sounding like Air crossed with Bowie with added treated falsetto on the whispery spiderish drift that is Love Hard. There’s hints of early Bowie too on the intense self-examining Discover while a reworking of Bad Angel track Fall In Love turns things into dreamy 3am lullaby soundscape. Unless he’s persuaded to revisit the back catalogue, there may be no scarf waving going on tonight but while the rowdy Eh Mamma suggests there may well be some rock n roll Jaggerish strutting for those who’ll at least metaphorically sit down and soak it up then this should indeed be good right down to the bone.

7.30pm, £13.50, Carling Academy 2.
Mike Davies
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Wednesday July 21
The Alarm

Rescheduled from April, although Mike Peters is the only member of the original line up in the Welsh guitar rockers’ latest incarnation, there’ no mistaking that storm the barricades rock, punk, folk, pop sound. Well, perhaps there is given that they released recent Top 30 single 45rpm under the name of The Poppyfields and no one twigged. Peters and his boys now hit the road under their real moniker to promote In The Poppyfields, packed with a dozen quintessentially likeminded call to arms guitar anthems, The Drunk and The Disorderly sounding not unlike the youthful Who, Close evincing a touch of early U2 (and borrowing the riff from New Order’s Love Vigilantes), Trafficking nodding to Peters’ Bowie and Bolan collection and New Home New Life giving the Manics a run for their money.
Well fond of the swelling chorus and big melodic crescendo but equally likely to slip into the acoustic moods of The Rock n Roll, Peters has never been exactly part of the fashionably cool brigade, but from the rousing glory days of 68 Guns, Blaze of Glory and Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke though his solo, Coloursound and Dead Men Walking projects, he’s consistently turned out passionate, hook friendly, committed rock n roll and, as anyone who’s ever heard his solo double live album knows, he gives fantastic gig. This will be no exception.

7.30pm, £12.50. Carling Academy2.
Mike Davies
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Monday July 26
Kate Rogers

Toronto born Rogers’s debut album, St Eustacia (Grand Central), has seen her dubiously hailed as the Canadian Dido. You can see the reference points, but there’s little of the coffee table polish here. Beth Orton and perhaps Natalie Merchant might be more appropriate comparisons. With influences that range from the Allmans and Neil Young to Ani Difranco and Nina Simone it’s a cocktail of spare folk, electronics, acoustics, blues, madrigals, wintery backwoods and urban evenings; a multi-layered affair that moves from the rich arrangements of Welcome to the stripped down bluesy moods of Odyssey or the Arabic textures that ripple through spacey folk Nothing Appeals To Me Here, a song that surely owes a debt to Seal’s Kiss From A Rose.
She can do bedsit power balladry (Joan, Mighty), skittish jazzy ska (Sidelines), noir funky grooves (Sum It Up) and trip hop beats (This Collective) with equal ease, the title track rounding things off with a reminder of that keening radio friendly dizzily dreamy rootsy pop that seems set to make her the darling of the nieces and nephews of all those Norah Jones fans.
Opening the evening will be Elaine Palmer, a Yorkshire singer-songwriter whose debt album, Into The Spotlight has been produced by Inspiral Carpets man Clint Boon and released on his own label.

Elaine Palmer

Don’t expect her to sound like them though, with a voice that’s often reminscent of Melanie (with a touch of Michelle Shocked perhaps) and intimate, introspective but snarly songs that deal with the struggles with self-confidence and the harder, uglier sides of love and relationships. Simple yet sensitive arrangements for guitar and the occasional moody cello afford a darkling folk feel to her work, occasionally tinged with hints of late night smoky jazz and shades of Brel as she delivers such dazzling song as Sometimes, Love and Lies, Deja Vu and her seven minute live highlight Space Girls. She’s little known yet, but take note this is one of the most exciting new talents to emerge since Thea Gilmore and Carina Round picked up a guitar.

7.30pm, £6, Bar Academy.
Mike Davies
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Tuesday July 27
Grand Drive

Two years on from See The Morning In, Australian born harmonising Wilson brothers Julian and Danny return with a glorious fourth album, The Lights In This Town Are Too Many To Count (Gravity). There’s a little less of the soul influence this time round and more background hints of electronics but their 60s flavoured folk country pop still shimmers and jangles with thoughts of the Everlys and Sutherland Brothers and, on the gorgeously warm Lady of Mine, maybe even the very best of a folk incarnation of The Beautiful South.
Opening in marvellous style with soaring anthem for surviving and siezing life Love And The Truth, they proceed from the la la la-ing midtempo rock pop Maybe I’m A Winner with a chorus hook that could almost be a less bombastic Runring to a moodily folkadelic chugging The Real Thing, a big music twangy burred guitar Me And My Star and the spare, wearily aching Texmex inclined anchor to cling to Santa Rita. A breathy I Won’t Let You Down sways to a Latin rhythm breathy, classic surfpop meets Doug Sahm on These Aren’t Words (I’m Gonna Write) and I Believe In Love is everything you might expect had Roy Orbison and Gram Parsons been genetically spliced with Crowded House while epic Your Final Hour draws things to a dreamy Hawaiian island flavoured close, leaving you wondering if they really are the antipodean branch of another Wilson family.
In the current climate, for all its Radio 2 friendly melodies there’s probably not a hit single lurking within but it’s unquestionably the finest work yet in an already distinguished career and one that truly deserves to finds its way into the national consciousness.

7.30pm, £6, Carling Academy 2.
Mike Davies
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Thursday July 29
Mindy Smith

Nashville by way of Long Island, Smith found herself in the spotlight when her rumbling blues n mountain cover of Jolene for a Dolly Parton tribute album caught everyone’s attention and she found herself besieged by major label offers. Instead she signed to veteran folk label Vanguard for her debut album One Moment More, a simple but bewitching emotionally charged exploration of relationships, loss and endurance sung in a seasoned but pure voice that variously recalls Alison Krauss (who recorded Smith’s If I Didn't Know Any Better), Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch (on the deeper moments) and Dolly herself. Smith’s religious background (her adoptive father was a minister) surfaces on the swamp funky Come To Jesus, a bluesy rocking Hard To Know and the plaintive hymnal (if a little twee) Angel Doves, but there’s earthy as well as spiritual yearnings here; a defiant Fighting For It All, the wistfully sad acoustic Raggedy Ann, and the highs, lows and constant cravings of love that surface through Train Song and It’s Amazing.
She knows how to turn up the heat when she wants to rock and she plays a mean hard guitar, but it’s the more fragile threads that bind the strongest, the title track’s gentle unadorned tribute to her mother who died when Smith was 19 likely to prove the pin-dropper at what promises to be an exceptional evening.

8pm, £11, Glee Club.
Mike Davies
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