Back again after a very busy summer, filled with Glastonbury, Berlin, work and volunteering at the British Museum and then starting a Masters degree, so yeah very busy. I meant to keep this up over the summer but it just didn’t happen, access to the internet was sporadic at best. Anyway, I am starting this again because I am going to gigs again on a more regular basis. In the past month I have been to three great gigs which started with Slow Club at the best venue in town the Kazimier, supported by Dead Cities, Stealing Sheep and Sweet Baboo. Of those supports the one that stood out most to me was the folk troubadour stylings of Sweet Baboo. Hailing from North Wales he comes onto the stage guitar in hand and sings some of the most lyrically brilliant songs I’ve heard in a long while, so honest. Songs to check out by him are Who Would Have Thought… and I’m a Dancer. If you have a spare 45 minutes here is a recording of one of his gigs in Cardiff, and you can buy his stuff from his bandcamp page here
Sweet Baboo @ The Pot from Ryan Owen on Vimeo.
Then Slow Club were superb, a very fun set, lots of dancing, and at their merch stand they were selling T-Shirts with Sorry written on, and I just had to get one. Brilliant. Their new album, Paradise, has moved on from their debut, it has a different feel to it. Yeah So was more twee folk, something they didn’t really want to be classed as but, I can’t think of a better way of describing it. It is a really good album, filled with great songs, and the new album is a progression of that, just not so twee, a bit more raucous, maybe a bit more fun but it still has that feel of Slow Club, that great chemistry in the band. I’m not too sure, but anyway, both are very good listens. Here is there latest single, Two Cousins;
The next gig I went to a couple of weeks ago was Emmy the Great, the wonderful Emmy, who is definitely great. Emmy’s set was wonderful, and after the gig she was selling her merchandise and was lovely when I spoke to her. I can’t really remember it that well because I’ve been so mentally busy, but what I do remember is that the gig was seated, which felt slightly odd, but that didn’t matter because Emmy mesmerized the crowd. Here is one of the best songs off her new album, which I reviewed earlier in the year.
Then a week ago I went to what was probably the most spectacular of gigs, followed by one of the most odd. The spectacular one was Laura Marling at the Anglican Cathedral in town. That cathedral is huge, absolutely enormous, which made the acoustics there really really good. The support came in the form of The Leisure Society, a band I have loved for ages but only saw for the first time at a Bandstand busk this summer; here is one of the songs they did then;
They opened with We Were Wasted, which is my absolute favourite of their songs, I immediately broke out into a massive grin and the mood for the evening was set, one of wonderment and mesmerism. Laura was brilliant as usual, her beautiful voice echoed around the building, capturing the audience. At one point there was a bit of a break in the music with her band giving facts about the cathedral, one fact was that it is the longest cathedral in the world, at 189 meters. Night Terror was particularly effective in the building, her amazing whistling caused the hairs on the back of neck to stand on end.
Following that, I ended up in a little bar watching a really interesting gig, a guy called Thomas Truax, his last gig in the country for a while. His band was made up of his own creations, a ‘Mother Superior’ drum machine made with bicycle wheels and various other bits and pieces, other ‘instruments’ included the string-a-ling (I think that’s what it was called), and other marvelous things. This gig couldn’t have been more different from Laura Marling, the music, the venue, heavy metal pounding into the room from the basement. It was all a little crazy.
All in all then a pretty good month for gigs, then October was, and it ended with British Sea Power at the Masque on Halloween. I had agreed with a friend to get dressed up for the occasion, so had procured a sheet and cut eye and mouth holes into it and dressed as a ghost, something I later regretted, dancing in a sheet is not the easiest activity to do in the world. The gig was pretty laid back to start with but by the end the crowd was bouncing and the band playing loud. Due to the fact that I was fairly inebriated the set list escapes me now, but i do remember loving every moment of it.
Right, off to yet another gig now, the wonderful The Miserable Rich are playing St Brides tonight, and I cannot miss them again, I missed them every other time they played due to various unforeseen circumstances and now I have no reason not to go!
