Pärt of the trouble

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I was hoping to bring you a review of last Friday’s concert at the Musikverein by the Bruckner Orchester Linz conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, performing two pieces (including the highly acclaimed Symphony No.4) by Arvo Pärt – after Philip Glass, my favourite living composer of classical music. Having only been to the Musikverein once in my life before, I felt like an injection of high culture for once, and the fact that Pärt was attending the performance whetted my appetite even more. However, I missed the concert due to an unbelievable scheduling fiasco. The running order was billed as something by Stravinsky and something or other by Rachmaninov in the first half, with the Pärt kicking off after the interval. Since I have no interest in either of those Russian guys, and since a 7.30pm start feels pretty alien to a Rhiz regular like myself, I cleverly – or so I thought – rolled up at 8.45 or thereabouts, all ready to claim my Stehplatz after the break. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I glanced up at the screen helpfully provided in the foyer to see beardy composer and baldy conductor engaged in a touching embrace, prior to exiting stage left along with the entire orchestra. A quick ask around confirmed what had happened. The running order had been changed at the last minute, with Pärt unceremoniously shunted to the first half and Rachmaninov moved to the second.

What the fuck? What kind of venue is it that switches the running order of a concert around and then expects audiences to accept this kind of behaviour as the norm? It’s hard to avoid drawing a comparison with the rock venues I normally frequent, where something like this would never happen. As a confirmed hater of most support bands, wherever possible I time my arrival at the venue in order to avoid the opening act’s invariably mediocre contribution to the evening. I do this secure in the knowledge that I’m not going to miss the part of the concert that I actually want to see. Any venue that decided on a whim to switch the headliner and the opener would swiftly receive very short shrift from the paying audience. I think Throbbing Gristle may have done this once or twice, but that was probably done to “subvert the expectations of the audience” or some such. I do realize that the running order of a classical concert is different, in that it lacks the hierarchy implied by the headliner/opening act binary. But it’s still a pretty shoddy way to manage an event, no matter how much gold leaf is on the walls.

I’m planning to have another go at the Musikverein for a performance of Philip Glass’s Symphony No.9 in June. I guess I should get there early.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Vienna Gasometer, 24 November 2013

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Nick Cave is one of those artists I’ve always found it easier to admire than to love. He’s a gifted songwriter, a phenomenal lyricist and a mesmerizing live performer, but despite all these things I’ve never counted myself as a great fan. I think my reservations have something to do with the swampy, bluesy nature of much of his music, a style I’ve never really got along with, as well as the general air of louche ribaldry about the man. Having been a great admirer of Cave’s first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, I was hugely disappointed by the 2009 follow-up, The Death of Bunny Munro, which struck me as an infantile piece of work; and I felt the same about the Grinderman project which has occupied much of Cave’s time in the past few years.

Although I can certainly appreciate the unhinged power of Cave in full-on sulphurous preacher mode, I like him most when he’s being a Mature Artist, sitting at the piano and delivering a carefully considered and beautifully constructed ballad. There were plenty of those on The Good Son, the first Cave album I ever heard and one that remains a favourite; and even more of them on the pitch-perfect The Boatman’s Call, to this day Cave’s crowning achievement. Later records such as Nocturama and Dig, Lazarus, Dig, however, contained their fair share of clunkers alongside a few undoubted classics.

However uneven Cave’s recorded legacy might be, he can always be relied upon to put on an excellent live show, and I’ve usually made the effort to catch him when he’s played near me. I remember a fine concert at Tate Britain in London, billed as a solo show but actually featuring one or two of the Bad Seeds as well. I may also have seen a full Bad Seeds show or two in London, my memory fails me. (Like many residents of Brighton, I used to see him around town as well; once on the train up to London with his sons, once – unsurprisingly – at a Dirty Three show.) Following my move to Vienna, there was another quasi-solo show in the magnificent setting of the Konzerthaus in 2006.

2006, you say? Gosh. Seven full years after I’d last seen Cave, he showed up in a sold-out Gasometer, this time bringing the Bad Seeds with him. And what a formidable group they are, giving flesh, bone and blood to the raging drama of Cave’s songs. Inevitably it’s the early material that takes the breath away, songs like “Tupelo”, “Red Right Hand” and “The Mercy Seat”: blistering, hellish psychodramas that bring Cave to places no other performer has ever visited, stalking the wide stage like a feral beast and declaiming his texts with savage fury. I was transfixed too by the piano section, with “Sad Waters” and “Into My Arms” demonstrating Cave’s unerring ability to articulate vast universes of longing and resignation in song.

In comparison the Push The Sky Away stuff sounded mannered and inert to me, although it’s an invidious comparison to make when this later material still stands head and shoulders above pretty much everything else being done in the name of rock music in 2013. But that’s the curse and the burden of an artist like Nick Cave, forever fated to have his present ventures judged alongside the legendary triumphs of his past.

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, Vienna Arena, 6 December 2013

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Much to my surprise, these anonymous stoner/doom/hard rock merchants from Cambridge crept up behind me just as 2013 was drawing to a close. I didn’t really know what to expect, having heard little of their music in advance. But the aura of mystery surrounding them, not to mention their image, steeped as it is in Altamont, the Manson murders and late ’60s acid comedown, compelled me to attend. And I’m very glad I did, since Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats slapped me round the back of the head that night with one of the very best gigs of the year.

However contrived that image might be, there’s no denying that Uncle Acid evoke a primal and nightmarish atmosphere with their music. This comes in no small part from the monstrously heavy riffs that power their songs, with the lead and rhythm guitars intertwined like writhing snakes. The sludgey dominance of those riffs extends most of the songs to an ideal 5-10 minute length, where they make a formidable impression without grinding on so long as to outstay their welcome. But there’s a good deal of melodic inventiveness there too, steering the group well clear of the dire abyss that is heavy metal. Lyrically, pain, torture, blood and death are recurrent themes – excellent topics, all of them, sung in a distinctive Lennonesque tone that brings light and shade to the group’s grim obsessions.

There’s an unsettling exhilaration about Uncle Acid, a feeling that the negation they remorselessly conjure is something to be savoured, even celebrated. Compounding the sense of dread and unease, the back-projected videos playing out behind the group make frequent reference to that moment in time when the ’60s hippie dream was turning into a blood-drenched nightmare. I was disconcerted, to say the least, when I looked back at the one photo I took during the concert and saw that the slide being displayed at the time was the famous Life magazine cover of Charles Manson, a man who more than anyone else embodies that disintegration. But I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised, given the way Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats bring the sound of past horrors remorselessly into the present.

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats live in Vienna, December 2013

The Thing, Vienna Blue Tomato, 22 November 2013

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As I wrote in my round-up of 2013, these pages are seriously backed up for one reason or another. So over the next few weeks I’m going to try and fill in some of the gaps in what was a very full and exciting conclusion to my year of concert-going, while at the same time documenting what is shaping up to be just as busy a kick-off to 2014.

And where better to start than with another storming performance by The Thing, cementing their unassailable position as the most powerful and creative force in free jazz. With Mats Gustafsson on searing form on saxes, Paal Nilssen-Love the sweeping master of his drumkit and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten laying down run after volatile run on electric bass (no double bass tonight!), the impact was as stunning as the band were loud. Kicking off on baritone before switching to tenor, Gustafsson led the trio through a long, searching improv that gradually resolved itself into the old Don Cherry tune “Golden Heart” (recorded by the band on The Cherry Thing). The song’s smoky abstraction spoke eloquently of The Thing’s position as admirers rather than iconoclasts, working in a tradition they both understand and respect. When the Swede finally turned to the mighty bass sax, his physical connection to the instrument was miraculous. A slow and mournful solo evolved into an electrifying “Call The Police”, a staple at Thing gigs these days but no less welcome for all that, its steamroller riff leading the trio into delirious zones of rhythmic ecstasy.

The set-up of this concert, though, left plenty to be desired. At the insistence of the promoters, Trost Records, the Blue Tomato was transformed into a standing venue. Since The Thing play jazz, the Tomato is a jazz club and jazz clubs have seats, this was a perverse decision, presumably borne of some hipster desire to take The Thing out of a ghetto (jazz) that they don’t actually need to be taken out of. It also had the effect of alienating the Tomato’s core audience of regulars, many of whom were conspicuous by their absence. At some point during the evening, the doors were flung open and no further admission fees were charged. The resulting influx of hipsters rarely (if ever) seen before or since at the Tomato, combined with the low height of the stage, meant that anyone further back than the first few rows could see nothing at all. The sound wasn’t a problem – The Thing have never had any difficulty making themselves heard, to put it mildly – but since a large part of The Thing’s appeal rests on the trio’s immense physical engagement, their impish onstage togetherness and even their matching Ruby’s BBQ T-shirts, it was unfortunate that, for many of the audience, that visual impact was largely lost. Still, this was a massively enjoyable concert by a group at the very height of its powers.

Concerts and records of 2013

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These pages are horribly out of date due to various other commitments giving me no time to work on this blog. I do intend to try and fill in the missing gaps at some point. In the meantime, here’s some kind of list of my favourite concerts of 2013:

1. Roger Waters: The Wall, Vienna Ernst Happel Stadium
2. Steven Wilson, Vienna Gasometer
3. Naked Lunch, Vienna Arena
4. Van der Graaf Generator, Prague Divadlo Archa
5. Philip Glass: Music in Twelve Parts, Ostrava Multifunkčí Aula Gong
6. Schlippenbach Trio, Vienna Porgy & Bess
7. Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, Vienna Arena
8. The Thing, Vienna Blue Tomato
9. Mats Gustafsson/Didi Kern, Vienna Blue Tomato
10. My Bloody Valentine, Vienna Arena

I find myself listening to less and less new recorded music these days, but here’s ten albums I enjoyed this year:

1. Steven Wilson, The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)
2. Okkervil River, The Silver Gymnasium
3. The Thing, Boot!
4. Naked Lunch, All Is Fever
5. Boards of Canada, Tomorrow’s Harvest
6. Sagor & Swing, Botvid Grenlunds Park
7. Julia Holter, Loud City Song
8. Tindersticks, Across Six Leap Years
9. Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, Mind Control
10. My Bloody Valentine, m b v

Steven Wilson, Vienna Gasometer, 2 November 2013

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I’d been waiting a long time for this concert, and it really didn’t disappoint at all. I’d been aware of Steven Wilson’s project Porcupine Tree for some time, and attended their concert at the Arena in 2007, but I was never entirely convinced by their particular brand of progressive metal. The progressive part was fine, it was the metal part I had problems with. I’ve never been much of a headbanger, put it that way.

So when Wilson put Porcupine Tree on ice and struck out on his own with the Insurgentes LP in 2008, I quickly sat up and took notice. It was a superb album, ranging effortlessly in tone and atmosphere between neo-prog and avant rock and thereby fulfilling pretty much all of the criteria for what I want from rock music at the moment. More importantly, Wilson was finally shedding the vestiges of metal that had taken Porcupine Tree down some stylistic dead ends. 2011’s Grace for Drowning was a worthy follow-up, but it was this year’s magnificent The Raven that Refused to Sing (and Other Stories) that really sealed the deal for me. A collection of long songs with supernatural themes, the record immediately catapulted Wilson into the forefront of my musical consciousness, where he’s remained ever since.

When Wilson played at Gasometer last week, therefore, I wasted no time in getting there early and grabbing a front centre spot. I don’t normally put photos on this blog, but I quite like the one I took at this gig, so here it is:

Steven Wilson live in Vienna

The evening started, somewhat unnecessarily I thought, with a film of a busker slowly going about setting up his pitch. The film can’t have lasted more than 15 minutes, but it seemed a lot longer. When the busker finally got going, he was replaced by Wilson himself, kicking off the evening in fine style with a solo acoustic version of the Porcupine Tree song “Trains”.

If that was his way of signalling that Wilson in solo mode is not just Porcupine Tree with a different line-up, it was a point that was amply reinforced throughout this gripping concert. Leading his hugely talented band through the demanding territory of his solo music, Wilson proved himself to be a supremely skilled and engaging frontman. Although lead guitar duties were ceded to the unnecessarily hairy Guthrie Govan, Wilson made telling contributions himself on both acoustic and electric. His voice, meanwhile, is a beautifully versatile instrument, utterly lacking in histronics and equally at home with tender ballads and driving rock anthems. Tracing worlds of lost love, false hope and shattered dreams, Wilson’s songs take flight in a thrilling and unique blend of ghostly prog, out-there jazz and angular, discordant rock.

Shampoo Boy, Vienna Rhiz, 13 October 2013

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A couple of years ago Peterlicker, an Austrian noise rock band with a silly name who were originally and briefly active in the late 1980s, reformed to make an album and play a few gigs. Peterlicker were notable, among other things, for having Peter Rehberg in their line-up. Reviewing their gig at the 2011 Waves Festival, I urged the group to “please try to stick around this time”, a forlorn hope as they split up again soon after. But fear not, as Rehberg and guitarist Christian Schachinger have regrouped to form another band, the equally daftly named Shampoo Boy, which also features Christina Nemec on bass. Having signed to Blackest Ever Black Records, the group played their début Vienna gig last weekend at the Rhiz.

Shampoo Boy may lack the tormented vocals that Franz Hergovich brought to Peterlicker, but Schachinger and Rehberg made up for his absence with a set heavy on explosive guitar and harsh analogue drones. It was a pleasure, indeed, to see Pita using an analogue synth, although it was of course hooked up to a laptop rather than anything so retrograde as a keyboard. His head bowed as he focused on his various dials, never once looking up at the audience, Rehberg issued a constant stream of uneasy atmospherics which lent some needed structure to Schachinger’s psychotic soloing. The guitarist hacked frenziedly away at his instrument, making extensive use of effects pedals to render his playing ever more venomous and thrilling. At one point he ill advisedly took a violin bow to his strings, which didn’t last long before it got wrecked. Standing coolly and unflappably between the other two, Nemec was an unassuming presence on bass, her contributions tentative and frequently inaudible.

All too soon it was over, the group having played for no more than 35 minutes. Coming in the wake of No Home’s gig the other week, which also clocked in at well under an hour, I’m beginning to wonder if playing abbreviated sets is some kind of avant thing these days. Compared to the world of free jazz, where two 45-minute sets are standard, or even that of rock, where gigs also normally go on for at least 90 minutes and often more, audiences at these events are entitled to feel short-changed. I hesitate to make this observation, for fear of sounding like some blimpish value-for-money merchant. But it wouldn’t hurt these avant types to stretch out their live repertoire somewhat, lest people start to think that playing short sets isn’t so much about being extreme as it is about running out of ideas.

Peter Brötzmann/Full Blast, Vienna Chelsea, 5 October 2012; Caspar Brötzmann/No Home & Primordial Undermind, Vienna Chelsea, 29 September 2013

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I never got around to reviewing Peter Brötzmann‘s concert at the Chelsea last year, but now I have a good excuse to rectify the omission. In what was a rather nice alignment, the saxophonist played there last October with his longstanding Full Blast group of Marino Pliakas on electric bass and Michael Wertmüller on drums; and then, almost exactly a year later, Pliakas and Wertmüller showed up at the same venue with Brötzmann’s guitarist son Caspar as No Home. It’s a measure of the Swiss rhythm section’s skill and versatility that they sounded just as right for Caspar as they always have for Peter. Trading squally sax for sheets of guitar noise as their front end, the bassist and drummer provided a dense underpinning for the lead instruments’ wild and disorderly conduct.

Peter Brötzmann seems to have rather fallen off my radar of late. Once a regular visitor to Vienna, he’s only played here once this year, at Porgy & Bess in February, which of course I missed. Full Blast’s gig at the Chelsea was one of only two occasions on which I saw the man play in 2012, the other being a magnificent two-night stint with the now defunct Chicago Tentet at Martinschlössl, which I never got round to reviewing either. Props to the Trost label for putting on the gig, although I must admit to being not the world’s biggest fan of this label or of its sudden interest in Brötzmann, The Thing and free jazz. Trost have been going since 1992, but they only started releasing Brötzmann product in 2011 and Thing product this year, prompting the obvious question, why now? What’s more, they seem to have a strange aversion to jazz gigs. By situating Brötzmann in a grungey rock club rather than a jazz club, they seemed to be trying to take him out of a ghetto (jazz) that he doesn’t actually need to be taken out of. In doing so, they felt the need to appease Brötzmann’s core audience, who wouldn’t normally be seen dead at the Chelsea, by including the reassuring words “seated area available” on posters for the gig. And talking of seating, Trost are insisting that next month’s gig by The Thing at the Blue Tomato is a standing-only affair, another piece of iconoclasm that I personally could do without.

Anyway, Full Blast played that night with their customary gusto, the limitless throb of Pliakas’ bass and the vast tectonic rumble of Wertmüller’s drums successfully navigating the treacherous currents of Brötzmann’s overdriven blowing. Peter’s cry sounds increasingly like a call to arms, the urge to raise consciousness in the listener more pressing and desperate than ever, the revolutionary fervour that gripped Machine Gun undimmed by the passing of the years.

If No Home’s gig never quite reached the ecstatic heights that Full Blast’s had done, that was more down to differences in approach than to any lack of energy and commitment. Unlike his father, Caspar Brötzmann is no improvisor – every note and riff feels carefully considered and worked upon. What Caspar’s playing lacked in spontaneity, however, it made up for in doom-laden heaviness, as these labyrinthine constructions in sound swamped the room with bludgeoning force. Stalking the guitarist’s every move, Pliakas and Wertmüller anchored the set with brazen, attack-dog ferocity.

Having paid the price of early arrival by being made to endure several hopeless support bands in recent months, it was a total pleasure to see Primordial Undermind opening for No Home at the Chelsea on the final date of a Europe-wide jaunt. Forever operating in a state of creative flux, the Undermind have undergone a line-up change or two since I last saw them, and now feature Christoph Weikinger on guitar and Michael Prehofer on drums alongside core members Eric and Vanessa Arn on vox/guitar and devices respectively. On this particular evening the move to a twin-guitar attack paid repeated dividends, since this PU is appreciably heavier than previous incarnations of the group. Weikinger’s mighty riffs splintered mile-wide holes in sonic space, into which Eric Arn soared with repeated mantric soloing. On an unshakeable quest to burst the listener’s head open from the inside, Primordial Undermind’s all-out psych rock remains as forceful and compelling as ever.

Blixa Bargeld, Vienna Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, 6 September 2013

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Highly enjoyable evening of solo vocal performance from the irrepressible and multi-talented Blixa Bargeld. For those of us who first became aware of Bargeld as the emaciated, hollow-cheeked frontman of Einstürzende Neubauten in the early 1980s (see here for my own bit of backstory), it’s a surreal sight to see him onstage in an expensive three-piece suit, exchanging banter with his young daughter and some other children in a leafy Vienna park, but that was just one of the many memorable aspects of this show. The charming Anna skipped happily on and off the stage throughout the evening, frequently hugging her daddy’s legs and scattering grass at his feet, and at one point singing a sweet little song of her own.

As for Bargeld’s performance, it was not at all the kind of spoken word reading I had expected, but a far more creative and interesting animal. Bargeld’s lyrics for Neubauten have always been a key part of the group’s appeal for me. Steeped in multi-lingual wordplay and erudition, the texts revel in language for its own sake and situate Neubauten squarely within the European avant-garde tradition. In the solo vocal context Bargeld seems to use more of a Sprechstimme technique to highlight the words themselves, which are given a strong performative element through heavy use of effects pedals. There’s a certain amount of wordless vocalizing, which is then looped to form drone or rhythm tracks over which Bargeld recites in his distinctive, precisely enunciated tones.

If this description makes the show sound like some kind of dry performance art piece, nothing could be further from the truth. Bargeld is a genial and engaging performer, at pains to emphasize the humour in his work – although the vast majority of the material was in German and therefore completely passed me by. Of particular note was an extended routine that had something to do with the position of the planets within the solar system, for which Bargeld divided the audience into two halves in order to provide appropriate sound effects. It wasn’t all played for laughs, though. In one shocking and unexpected section Bargeld unleashed his legendary and fearsome scream, while elsewhere he reached far back into Neubauten history with a devastating rendition of “Negativ Nein”. Contrasting vividly with the innate good humour of much of the show, these raw moments acted as necessary reminders of the anguished and confrontational aspects of Bargeld’s work.

Roger Waters: The Wall, Vienna Ernst Happel Stadium, 23 August 2013

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I’ve never shed tears at a concert before, but I don’t mind admitting that a few burned my eyes during Roger Waters’ performance of The Wall in Vienna. They didn’t come because of the concert itself, though, but rather because my son was a member of the 15-strong children’s choir that graced the stage for “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2”, singing and dancing his heart out to Waters’ bilious diatribe against the excesses of the British educational system. While that was, naturally enough, the emotional highlight of the show for me, this epic, vast piece of music theatre was also overwhelmingly powerful as a whole.

Those interested can go here for a brief history of my liking for Pink Floyd and Roger Waters in particular. Little did I imagine, when I wrote that piece, that I would indeed be seeing The Wall live three years later, albeit as a Waters show rather than a Floyd show, and in a stadium rather than the arenas for which it was originally designed. There was apparently some talk, a couple of years ago, of putting the show on in the Stadthalle, but in the end that soulless barn proved too small to cope with the massive scale of this concept. For years Waters held out against playing The Wall in stadiums, saying that by imposing such a distance between performer and audience they represented exactly what he was railing against in the piece. Recent advances in audio-visual technology, however, have made it possible to mount the show in large venues and still provide audiences with a viable concert-going experience. And certainly from my vantage point a mere seven rows back, the Ernst Happel Stadium was just fine as a setting for the grim psychodrama being played out on stage.

Unusually for me, I seem to have backed a winner in throwing my lot in with Waters rather than with his nemesis David Gilmour. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the way Waters, at the age of 70, has kept the spirit of Pink Floyd alive by taking a scaled-up and redesigned version of The Wall on tour around the world for the last three years. Meanwhile the inveterately lazy Gilmour, who made such an almighty fuss in the 1980s about being allowed to keep the rights to the group’s name, put out two mediocre Floyd albums (which were really Gilmour solo albums in all but name) and since then has sat back in Sussex counting his money. If, as is rumoured, this summer’s Wall shows are to be the last, then Waters will certainly have earned a good long rest of his own, although I wouldn’t bet against him coming back with another project before too long.

That unswerving commitment to the value of live performance was evident in every moment of this monumental concert, in which Waters proved himself to be a remarkable showman as well as a strikingly powerful singer. Prowling the length of the enormous stage, gesticulating wildly to the audience or just to himself, caught up in the mad-eyed terror of the Pink character, Waters is the charismatic centre around whom the whole show revolves. The Bleeding Heart Band, who famously become gradually invisible during the first half of the show and are hardly seen at all in the second half, make up for their enforced lack of stage presence with playing of incomparable energy and toughness.

As for the visual aspects of the concert, there were just too many devastating scenes and images to take in. I was particularly affected by “Mother”, which saw Waters framed by a ghostly image of himself singing the song with Pink Floyd in the 1980 concerts; by the nerve-shredding symbolism and stunning pyrotechnics of “In The Flesh”; and by my favourite Floyd moment of all, “Comfortably Numb”, in which singer Robbie Wyckoff and guitarist David Kilminster appeared on top of the wall to join Waters in performing this most incendiary and soul-searching of songs. What impressed me most, however, was the way Waters has transformed this supposedly self-obsessed piece into an impassioned howl of rage against conflict and a lament in memory of its victims. Proceeding with ominous and tortured inevitability, its haunted solipsism disturbed by livid imagery of tragedy and death, The Wall is a deeply moving and humane intervention.