The Shed, Cambridge, August 4th
Still catching up with the gigs from over a week ago:
Okay, so I was mean about female singer-songwriters in my last gig review. It's not that they're bad, just that there are so damn many who do roughly the same kind of music. So I wasn't really expecting Thao Nguyen to be anything special... but hey, living with
Laura Veirs got off to an unpromising start with a rather bland and unclear song whose title I've long since forgotten, but made a marvellous recovery thereafter. The Souls didn't sound terribly Tortured to my untortured -- I mean, untutored -- ears, but they made some lovely noises nonetheless, scratchy and mellow all at once; particular kudos to the keyboardist who played at least three different parts, one of them on the trombone. And while Laura's dress sense may have been Veir-ing (do you see?) towards a deliberately kooky take on (sigh) librarian chic, her singing was always a delight.
It was a long way in more than mere miles from the genteel jazz-club atmosphere of The Shed, with its comfortable seats and pre-ordered interval drinks, to the more traditional indie venue of Oxford's Zodiac, with its sticky floors, smoky air, and more or less complete absence of anything bearable to drink (until I spotted the bottles of Newky Brown hiding at the back). But the venue has to suit the band, and this was clearly the right place for the Saturday night's offerings...
Seafood + The Race + Rock of Travolta
The Zodiac, Oxford, August 5th
The Race, on the other hand, managed to go on too long without actually being any good in the first place. No more of my precious blog-inches for you, Mister Gurning Glockenspiel Man!
And then finally, the moment we might conceivably have been waiting for since the year 2000 or thereabouts... Seafood! What do you mean, you don't remember them? They were good in the late 1990s, they were good at Glastonbury 2002, and they're great now: much tighter and more confident than I remembered (though that could have been just the effect of the Glastonbury New Bands tent's acoustics). They're very much in the same vein as Idlewild, but before Idlewild went all fuzzy and folky; this, much though I like Roddy "remember you're a" Woomble's sensitive side, is a Good Thing. To cut a long story short, they rocked out, and I pogoed along delightedly with da kidz (to
Listen for yourself:
• Thao Nguyen [myspace]
• Laura Veirs [myspace]
• Rock of Travolta [myspace]
• The Race [myspace]
• Seafood [myspace]