PoiL Ueda (live at The Jam Jar)

Bristol
24 August 2023

Right from the offset, Junko Ueda’s vocal chant holds its own like an ancient weathered stone, a deep undulating drone to a lightly feathered hum and clattering abstraction from PoiL.

A brilliant splatter-cake of oddly bent zithers that prism the room, orientally lighthoused into a glowing tension. The acoustic bass player Benoit Lecomte curving some excellent shapes which are intuitively picked up by drummer Guilhem Meier’s effects-soaked wares, an intensity that percussively explodes.

Ueda’s metal prayer paddles aloft in rattling baptism, added to by seashells and firefly frets, her voice soaring on through, hands outstretched, as the keys and guitars jiver-jade a proggy reverie, her face clearly smiling from within the ricocheting richness of it all.

Compared with the album, this reaches a whole new level, burning far brighter. Between tracks, Ueda explains the historical background; the above was a ninth century protection from evil and the next was pin-boarded to a twelfth century battle-scape that has her reaching for her Japanese lute-type instrument called a satsuma biwa, something that remains with her for the rest of the night.

The next track begins with a pointillist prodding of frets from Boris Cassone and Antoine Arnera’s mutating keys. A nimble rub into which the barnyard wood of that acoustic bass grumbles then swoops at Ueda’s taut twang – a lucid latchkey that erupts into a delirium of pyrotechnics. A tonne of sparking invention pouring percussive volleys into the repetitive span, interjected by the reverbed electrocution of Meier’s self-made cage of wire within a hollow drum’s body.

The keyboardist’s hands scurrying spider-like across the keys, or knuckle-Kentuckying a ream of crunchy dark notes. Undulating snippets that popcorn the crazy guitar tangle either side of Ueda’s anchoring voice, the bassist throwing some great lunged gurns into the mix as all assembled convulse to the flow. An insanely hot affair full of driving tempo and switching focus, the Far Eastern flavours melding a seamless union with PoiL’s eruptive zeal.

Ueda’s droning tapers of voice thrown to some satisfying fireworks and curious chorusing, at one point sounding like a hand-cranked Birthday Party on a Latino holiday, setting up a host of infectious shapes that go straight to your hips, puppet you into helpless rag doll submission. Some reviewing objectivity may have been lost, but the goods were far too joyous to stoically ignore.

Later, they document a lord and samurai’s flight across Japan, capturing the tenderness of the warrior’s wife’s teary goodbye, then scenically saturate the elasticated bow-knotted transcript of a sea journey beset with ghost attacks. An energetic leap barbing your mind with their contagious enthusiasm. A sonic storm during which the pianist at times looked like he was undergoing a cardiac arrest.

That triangle bone plectrum-come-spatula of Ueda clips the strings, shockwaving her droning verse as the wavering song is mosaic kindled in periscopic purr and metallic canters. Effect-whirring wonderment with a lovely soak of lingering melody which quickly becomes a fracturing convulsion riding that huge vibrato.

Later, the musicians retract from their instruments for Ueda to go solo, her voice sliced in the stalactite twang of her satsuma biwa. A traditional soak that is slowly bullet-pointed and collectively gathered into some concussed intoxication by the rest of the band, leaking to full-on freak-out, then scimitar-switching a drifting drone overtake and a gently spoken goodnight.

An amazing show of force that far exceeds the already excellent studio version.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-