Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Cor blimey mate, get a butchers at those curtains!

I was in London recently, where everyone talks like that. I did surprisingly little of a musical nature. Well, I met some friends in a café and had the recurring conversation about how I really ought to engage with the music of Steely Dan sometime. I visited some record shops but nothing caught my fancy and I was conscious of having a mountain of new music to try and absorb, so buying anything else was a bit less than appealing.

But I did follow an old friend and quaffing partner to a concert event in Islington. I resolved to follow him to this event, which was taking place in the upstairs room of a swanky enough pub similar enough to that Lexington place where we saw Oneida. When I arrived, Kat Flint was just starting. She was something of a folkie and played an endearing version of modern folkie music, with other musicians. If you like that kind of thing she would be worth investigating.

Then we saw The Unrecorded. They were interestingly experimental but not in a way that stopped them being immediately appealing. They included bass playing (with impressively threatening lines) as well as a variety of synthy keyboards and stuff. And drums. And they had a woman doing vocals who was doing that sampling herself and singing over it thing. It felt a bit like Fursaxa fronting an experimental rock band, which would obviously be the best thing ever. The self-sampling made for an endearingly avant-garde quality, while having a load of musicans there as well stopped things falling into that predictable self-sampling pattern of doing a succession of songs that simply build and build in complexity.

As well as their own songs, The Unrecorded did a couple of covers – some folkie tune called 'In the bleak midwinter', a song called 'the deep blue sea' (or maybe it was by a band called the Deep Blue Sea, I am so out of touch with today's hip sounds) and a Radiohead cover (wait, come back!). But the overall effect was very impressive and I recommend them to anyone who likes interesting music.

They have a website.

An inuit panda production

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