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.