Gravenhurst, Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno, Mark Stewart
Malcolm X Centre, 3rd June
'They're better than this', I'm informed as Gravenhurst finish their set at the Malcolm X Centre. I am impressed, because I thought they were pretty good. This is slow-build, loud riffs, quiet-bit music, with the occasional almost tragically painful schoolboy singing. This is a good way to start a festival of variety in music. The Venn Festival web site explains it better than I can.
Everything is blown away by Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno. In just over an hour they play two songs. The music is astounding for its simplicity, the way it rolls along, trance-like and we are carried along with it. Every so often you think it's going to change, they can't add another level of intensity to the same thing and yet there it is, tension backing up, adrenalin poised, surely they're not going to go round again? When the guitarist finally opens up, a huge solo of Jimi proportions, more anarchic maybe, all the pent-up energy is released and there are screams, laughter, people look around as if they can't believe what they are all sharing. When it dies down, the excited crowd begin chatting, much to the frustration of one of the drummers, for this is an ethereal moment. Throat singing in three part harmony, a gentle interlude before the music kicks off again.
This goes on for some time. The second tune, is an energetic psychedelic rock riff repeated ad infinitum, again with the huge solo, the guitarist throwing his guitar around, playing upside down, etc etc. Life seems to move back in time to the days when musicians could actually have fun playing their instruments, improvising, feeling the music. None of this over-pretension or pristine song-writing, no desperation that it be right. No smugness or self-satisfaction, no need to be loved. What they played wasn't amazing in itself, but the execution was incredible.
Not so Mark Stewart. I confess to knowing nothing about The Pop Group, anything that the man has supposedly done for music in Bristol. After Acid Mothers, I had looked forward to seeing the band who had originally played on Rappers Delight, the earliest commercialisation of hiphop as we know it. I hoped that we would be in for a show of funk delights, glorious guitar work and tight rhythms. What we get is a dumbed-down electro dub sound, effected to the max by Adrian Sherwood while a huge angry looking man (Mark Stewart) shouts incomprehensible ramblings. I'm told it's political. 'No-one writes like that anymore'. My impression: here are some musicians, performing off their reputation, sadly fooled by all the drunk people that they are doing something new and exciting and somehow ending up sounding like Phil Collins trying to be cool in the 80's post-Genesis. With added delay and reverb. It was insulting, after such a glorious display from AMT.
On the other hand, I met someone the other day, who hated AMT and loved Mark Stewart, for exactly the same reasons.
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