Wednesday 6 June 2018

Everything I Saw at All Points East Presents

Saturday

Cavetown
Solo singer songwriter with a guitar and a loop pedal. He looked so young that it seems cruel to be rude about him. And he was fine! But if he was on at an open-mic night, you probably wouldn't remember him the next morning.

The Districts
Crunchy, self-serious indie rock. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with crunchy, self-serious indie-rock, but you need some sort of lyrical or melodic spark in order to stand out. I only stuck around for the first three songs.

Cosmo Sheldrake
Fantastic. Whimsical, sample-heavy mad-scientist stuff, it sounds like Alt-J when Alt-J are at their best. In between songs we are informed that some of the beats are made from US-navy recordings of fish, or that some of the melody lines are made of pitch-modulated birdsong.

Rostam
Odd pop from a former member of Vampire Weekend. Lovely melodies, charismatic vocals, and the string quartet backing him are great, especially when one song blossoms into a series of country-style fiddle solos. It's a bit of a shame that a lot of this stuff is clearly tricky to arrange live: for a fair proportion of the gig he's singing to a backing tape.

Friday 19 January 2018

The Last Jedi is More than a Machine

The final scene of The Last Jedi made me cry a bit. And at first I put this down to attending a midnight showing, immediately after my office Christmas party, and therefore being more susceptible to its manipulations than I otherwise would have been. But then I saw it again a few weeks later, and it happened again, which was a surprise. And it took me a while to work out why.