Having totally missed their recent Bristol outing, I’m glad Upset The Rhythm are now offering a tantalising taste of Earth Ball in action. A duo of live cuts, each gig filling a whole side each.
The first documents a Vancouver show shared with an impressed Wolf Eyes. “Live At The Fox Cabaret” steak-knives an atonal grumble in which a Lydia Lunch-like compassion tarp-twists to a fret-crackled firelight. Jeremy Van Wyck scooping a Sonic Youth-like response to Isabel Ford‘s vocals, beaming lustred, languid.
A delight that murls multiple as that screeching sax and raw rhythmic knots itself up, snakes out in echoic moans. A shouty clash-charabanc gouging tightly, nomading a white-hot ovvvver-driven noise-necked worship, swamping back to an electroacoustic break down, in which her words return unbuttoned and buttery. The drunken direction of side two (recorded at London’s Cafe OTO with Steve Beresford and Chris Corsano) is my fav though, the randomly roasted introduction dispersing into a sinister syrup. That possessed sax / vocal squealodelica grooving in all dark and smouldering.A reactive alchemy that shakes its oily feathers towards that bendy fret / whirling circular that eats a satisfying constant. A strange energy that breeds in the back of your skull, attaches itself to those poetically pigeoned words that eel the atmosphere like some conjured spell. A synoptically slippery conjecture that hangs symbolic, full of loose piano pins and vaporous valour, finally creeping out of view like an electrocuted insect tapping a linoleum floor.
Live albums often fail to capture the goods so vividly, but I’m glad to say this one does. Here’s to Volume 3 and 4.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
