Rock is a Zombie

There's something about economies of scale and lost definition at high volumes here.

Rock is a zombie. It is upright and moving about, albeit slowly and with a shuffling, aimless gait. It stinks dreadfully, and hangs about with its mates. The zombie's sound is a desperate grunt, a moan of pure need, barely articulated. It's been dead for a few weeks now, and is looking very ugly. ("Oh, they're lookin' ugly to me now" as Lambchop sang).

Rock is a Vampire. It can look momentarily like a handsome devil in a certain light, but up close the reek of panstick and lipstick and facepaint leaves an emetic yeasty miasma up the nose. It lives on and on, unable to bring itself to hibernate such that it might be able to revitalise itself with a period of underexposure. But no, it's a hammy, preening, self-regarding old hack. It's been technically, medically, culturally dead for a very long time.

Rock is a ghost. Insubstantial, invisible in the light. Chilly and clammy. Leaving only Kirilian images, strange smudges on negatives, a drop in temperature.

Rock is the Dead and the Undead.

The Drones are a fierce group, unpredictable and wiry-of-sound. There's a slightly dashing desperado-ism about their widescreen dustbowl songs. But there's no mistaking them for anything but ghosts of metal-prospectors, Walkers-about, refugees from the now-abandoned City of Rock.

Not From Bury

Scenes come and go. Fashions and fads fly by in the post-everything breeze. Holes in the ground open up, and are filled by Landfill Indie. Empires rise and fall.

Camden remains a ropey old place, on a chilly weekday evening, 7.30pm. I wait at the World's End for Mark, as pale characters and hurried youngsters drift and rush at the junction of Camden High Road and Parkway. There are plenty of people about, but nobody really wants to be here. There's an echo of an echo.

So when better to be seeing the Fall?

The support act at the cavernous (though eye-poppingly full) Koko is the band that MES harvested the 2nd- or 3rd line-up ago of the Fall from. Darker My Love. Yes, it's a shocking name, and their charisma-free Doors & Byrds lite is teeth-gnashingly uninspired. Going through the (bowel) motions. The sort of group that tribute bands think is pinching their audience.

I don't think that I've seen anyone in the Fall look more worried than the new guitarist did. Even in the days of Steve Hanley (who looked almost permanently on edge; the first time I ever saw The Fall, with Vanessa back in '92 at the Brixton Academy, I couldn't even begin to understand how performing with this creature could be so anxiogenic) there wasn't a brow so figuratively furrowed as this one.

Smith is back on form. We know this, because he is now noticing enough to want to faff about with the controls on the amplifiers. We also know this because he tolerated his partner, um, guiding him away from her keyboard with a gentle hand, without so much as a scowl. We also know this because a lean and muscular and very well-organised Fall punched through the (almost entirely new) material for an hour and more with little ceremony and just a hint of gruff, gritted-jaw panache; Smith was with them every step of the way.

"Unseen Facts" indeed.

Apple-Hard-Seed-Core

"Appleseed" is a frenetic, frenzied

military-political thriller, driven by an apoplectically technical plot involving the storage of genetic material, hidden species loyalties, and a plot to save humanity from itself using "Bioroids", a Philip K Dick-esque race of emotionally and reproductively suppressed lifelike robots.

The movie's most affecting passages are those where the deliberate deadening of the Bioroids' emotional responses is debated by hovering Council of Elders; the political and governmental benefits of keeping the Bioroids in a state of technical ecstacy. The action sequences are far in advance of anything that Hollywood was producing at the time, amid a juicy mixture of decayed dystopian and Star-Trek-Shiny environments.

When Proggers Get Dumped

Chris asked if I'd been too traumatised or outright disappointed to actually blog this. We met up with Sean for Porcupine Tree, at the Hammersmith Odeon, with high hopes of an evening of florid arpeggiating, hopelessly overblown musicianship, wildly optimistic conceptualising, time-signature-changes coming thick and fast, and an overall picture that would make Tales From Topographic Oceans look like Closer.

Crashing disappointment broke over us, though.

No solos. None to speak of, anyhow. How can you be in a prog band and not pepper your songs with solos, for crying out loud?

Woeful slo-mo, out-of-focus video montages of vague malaise. The sort of thing that made us want to see Meatloaf's masterpiece of histrionics, backlighting and windmachines, "I'll Do Anything For Love". Well, it made me want to see that, any road up.

No pretension. Where is prog without pretension, I ask you?

The audience looked like the uncles of the audience we were expecting. The band issued an announcement demanding no photos or videoing, and, get this, the audience did as they were told.

If there's one thing that prog doesn't need, it's real feelings. The singer's pinched employment-consultant's soul was all over this gig like a rash.

We admired the drummer for all the technical ecstacy he provided, but the poor bugger is in a band that has read the manual from cover to cover, and has learnt all the requisite tricks, but has no idea why.

Up Close and Personal

This is a blog that has needed writing for a long time. Mark and I saw Psychic TV at the old Astoria 3 years ago, and spent several hours in the Cro-Bar afterwards, downing bottles of Budvar and trying to come to terms with what we had just witnessed. That's a story for another time.

Back in June, we saw a Throbbing Gristle show at Heaven, in the black-out arches under Charing Cross Station. The sense of distress, manipulation, preening and cold-hearted acting-out was whipped up as early as the appearance of several expensive and pretty New York style victims with the ignorance and teenaged self-centre that it would take to appropriate the SCUM name for their idea-free, turgid noise-pop. Cheekbones and strutting are nothing to be proud of if your songs are lumpy cold soup.

TG were clinical, precise, surgical. The stage was set up more for a laboratory experiment in unhygeinic conditions than for any sort of pop. There has always appeared to be open space in TG's sound, though more the space of the empty warehouse or abandoned estate.

We were close enough to watch Genesis licking and kissing the tattoos of his late wife on his inner arms, and to glimpse the surgery scars underneath his tits. He appears caught in some sort of terrible limbo between genders, between artifice, performance and memorial. Not between "reality" or anything as ludicrous as that. TG have long since rendered reality the doubtful world it is. It's a dreadful place to be, and only TG have made the sacrifices necessary to raise it to the state of something approaching celebratory.

Give us another three years, and we might just have worked out what we saw this time.

The Host

....A nervousness-afflicted archereuse from Seoul destroys a colossal mutant-fish-beast by the simple expedient of firing a burning arrow into it's eye at just the moment when the creature is coated in petrol, greedily glugging it down.

How else would you devise a denoument for a movie about colonisation, social unrest, and the sticky underbelly of the global city (a riverside squid bar, the concrete tunnels within the entirely automotive bridges over the Han River)?

There is some wonderful black socio-political comedy in "The Host", largely centred around the cruelly bureaucratic, knee-jerking or incompetent political and health-service response to the above described monster attacking unfortunate citizens. It rains, or is foggy, or is near-dark, throughout the film. A family, bickering and confused throughout, tries to save their grand-daughter, despite the 'rescue' effort failing to proceed around them.

A man-made threat, entirely indiscriminate and ruthless, causes havoc. The political-military response is laughable or sinister or distant. A dysfunctional family works, after a fashion, to co-operate and survive.

So, a feel-good family movie, then.

Lady Vengeance

We saw "Lady Vengeance" last night; third film in the Park Chan-Wook revenge trilogy. It was spattered with visual tours-de-force: The initial gaggle of Santas waiting forlornly in the snow outside a cleanly functional prison; the dank and dusty curtain getting yanked across in a cloud of dead skin to illuminate the deserted school where the final, hopelessly drawn-out murder occurs; the regular close-ups of the pearl-esque, opalescent Geum-Ja.

The tone veers wildly from pitch-black comedy ("do you lose interest when women do... this?"), bleakly sparse and suggestive atmospherics, long shots of half-dark stairwells, leading directly to bizarre non-sequiturs and incomprehension (in particular Geum Ja's arrival, blank and blunt ("Yes, I'm thinking about killing someone else"), at her probation job to cheerfully aggressive, sepia and unshowy prison violence.

Incoherent, but incredible.

Discourses (originally: Comings and Goings)

The things that get pushed to the touchlines and sidelines when the sheer unarguable force and flow of life becomes fuller and unequivocal. Fragile and translucent pastimes. The movies. So there was some time to see the second half of "The Red Shoes" yesterday.

The ballet sequence itself is hallucinatorily good. Vast hallways, balustraded promenades, clifftop skyscapes shape-shift and flood into eachother, as Vicky Page pirouettes and leaps across them. Clutches of dream-demons and progressively disfigured statuettes beckon, crawl and grasp. For an ostensibly pleasant romantic drama centred on a ballet company, it's gruesome and oneiric stuff.

The scenes in which Lermontov, the Diaghilev-esque impresario, gives vent to his opinions of the emotions of others are wonderful and ghastly. "Oh. Charming", he intones, with a corpselike mask. "I see", he says, only his teeth appearing to move. A deathly pallor seems to overtake any character who speaks of anything as irrelevant and selfish as their love; particularly Julian Craster, the hopelessly English composer, who appears to lose most of the blood and oxygen in his face as he attempts to tell Lermontov how he is 'feeling'.

Somehow the passage in the hotel, as Lermontov licks the wound of losing Vicky from the company and smokes continuously surrounded by fusty velvet and upscale chintz, reminds me of the late-period Sopranos episode in which Tony holes up in an NYC hotel-room, unsure of how to proceed with himself and over-exposed. Strange times.

Out From Behind The ApronStrings

"Coldplay's keyboard player". Sends a trickle of cold, shivery sweat a-tricklin' down the spine, don't it? A ghastly world of emotion-by-numbers piano plonking, distinguished from Elton John only by being less camp and less fun. So we were not completely sold on this being a winner. Chris had waxed effusively about the winning electronica and atmospherics that this guy produces, so on the hottest night of the year, we pitched into the black hole that is the ICA concert room to find Jon Hopkins a gawky, geeky, bony individual swigging from a Beck's bottle and putting gaffa tape over the manufacturers' logos on his equipment. So far, so home-for-sandwiches-at-mummy's-place. However, his opening gambit was a wide-eyed euphoric techno workout that went on for far too long to be an accident. Increasingly the music got glitchier, acidic, Acidic, and clearly made by repeated pressing of the button marked "Autechre". Better, in other words. Even the three occasions he switched off the software and played the piano, the tunes were obviously a nod to the total uselessness of his paying job (anodyne sub-soundtrack doodles), and only threw the excitment of the computers into sharp relief. It was hard not to be wearing a smile at the end.

The People's Choice

Chris and I were at Dingwalls in Camden for my much-delayed first (and maybe last, by the look of the health of their guitarist) experience of the mighty, unquestionable NoMeansNo. They are practically progressive punk, with none of the archness that this might imply. Relentessly aggressive, in an inclusive and cheery fashion. They churn, accelerate, stutter and plunge on the head of a pin. "The Night Everything Became Nothing" and "Every Day I Start To Ooze" flash by in a torrent of gurning, precision-tooled sludgerama, and terrifyingly well-organised drumming. Seeing guys who are 10 or 15 years our senior belting this stuff out with no hint of a second thought is inspiring and disquieting. We should also mention the very dysfunctional support act, 'Todd' but only because of Chris's pithy-to-the-max assessment: "Like Unsane, before they started rehearsing".

Now that's no way to be.

"Hotel! Hotel!"

So, it's Sunday morning and we have some time to... watch 'Psycho'. It occurs to me that the individual humans who come into contact with Bates are defenceless and doomed; simple inquisitiveness, vulnerability, are barely registered on the scale of his libidinal drive to erase relations inimical to that with his mother. The crucial moment is the arrival of the couple. Despite it being an asexual pair, the sororitous fearlessness and knuckleheaded masculinity are contriving to protect each-other without even realising it. (The figure of the married hunk is a pitiful one; he is by far the most directionless, tw0-dimensional, easily-led character in the movie). So the murders and explanations are simply 'events' to stage the real film around: Bates scrubs ineffectually at the blood on the tacky plastic bath panel; his neck is gruesomely exposed as Arbogast asks to see the handwriting sample. The dread-ful and fore-boding, fuelled with a painful-to-watch psychical unravelling. Almost too good, even now. Shame on Gus Van Sant!

Cut To Silence

Tonights movie has been "Blow Up" by Antonioni. Quite how this has become a touchstone for the Schwinging Schtixies I have no clue. It's a barren, brutally stage-managed, parade of manipulation and blank-eyed ciphers. Completely brilliant of course, but nothing to do with any kind of retro Carnaby porno. Just occasionally a phrase will echo through the hall-of-mirrors: "Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out". As always, I'm a sucker for films that won't let ontology lie. The scenes in the park ("Fantastic! They're fantastic! In a park!", as if he is describing some barely-believable skin-flick confection) are almost choreographed, a dreadful danse macabre into scenes that only become... more real. It's the most cynical and unforgiving movie I've seen in ages. Was this London there at the time? Or is this film an aggregation of many people's dreams of London, reality seeming ever as far away, the more snaps are taken, the more fantasies are added. Awful. Awe-ful.

Through the Bathroom Window at ATP

Welcome to the news.
All Tomorrow's Parties at Minehead, Somerset, England is a music festival, in a cultural time-warp of a town in the southwest of the country. The fun is mostly in being gobsmacked by groups you hardly believed could exist, let alone thought could be any good. M83 provided shiny, propulsive Europop of a kind that is usually edited out of the strictly regulation rebellion. The drummer had a hygienic perspex screen separating him from the rest of the group. Chris says this is to prevent "spillage". Health dispensed constructions of very controlled and tightly cut noise, rhythmically dense and mutating. They had very little body fat. Liam Finn was an Antipodean guitar songwriter with properly psychedelic ideas about structure and instrumentation. His lady sidekick appeared extremely drunk but in command of events. Killing Joke were a dreadful spectacle of phoned-in performances, red golf visors, contract-fulfilling stances and barely manageable paranoid ideation. Soulless, with no redeeming features. Anti Pop Consortium were technical rappers, built by electro-committee. Devo made everybody laugh ("You have chosen to attend a Devo concert"), and balanced cleverness with cartoonishness perfectly.

"Under the influence of fright and terror"

Tonight's movie has been 'The Testament of Dr Mabuse'. The people are virtually puppet-like, and the more hollow they are, the more believable. The likeable police commissioner seems to belong in an entirely different film, as he is humane, irascible, an 'instinctive' copper. Mabuse's sheer drive, undiluted motive is far too powerful to permit anything as presumptuous as a personality among the criminal gang or the flunkies, turnkeys, petty officials and guards who populate the film. Mabuse's plotting is the plot. The fact of a relentless, undead destructive force is the engine and chassis of the film, and it's as compelling as hell.