Bishop Morocco (Procedure Club / Little Girls)
The Shop under Parts & Labour. Saturday, August 28, 2010.
"Due to the nature of lemon-flavoured rum," as my notes indicate, my memories of this night are a little fragmented. A delightful summer evening of backyard hanging out and barbeque had me sipping beverages since late afternoon, so I was pretty wobbly by the time I headed off to the gig. Which put me in a hyper-observant and obsessively documentary frame of mind. My notepad has page after page of observations from this night — a good chunk of them from before I even got to the gig, as I was apparently trying to tease out mystical signifiers on the Lansdowne bus ("this is the holy route into Parkdale") and considering the virtues of "fake mental text messages" (?!). Unsurprisingly, of course, even when my scribbles were legible, it was mostly drunken woo-hah.1
Though I was slow in getting down to Parts & Labour, I had the drunkard's serene egotistical belief that they wouldn't start without me, and as I stepped in I indeed had time to grab a drink — oops — as Little Girls finished setting up. It'd been awhile since I'd seen Josh McIntyre's combo — in fact, all the way back to their fourth show, just as the project was transforming from bedroom-based recording project to buzz band. As that bubble of hype was waxed and waned, there's been the full-length Concepts and a pretty regular slate of local shows. And, beyond the momentary flash of hype, some genuine forward movement.
Live, the quartet created a murky, underwater sort of vibe. After an opening instrumental, the remaining songs featured McIntyre's deeply buried vocals mired in layers of reverb, sometimes sounding like they might belong in a slower song entirely than the rest of the surrounding band. Generally speaking, the music was spiky two-guitar stuff. There were some points where the guitars got muddled like the vocals, but there was still room for the band to get catchy on songs like the jaunty "Youth Tunes". It all created a somewhat dissociating vibe ("this is happening," my notebook reads, as if I was trying to reassure myself) but there was a more consistent sound than I remember, and some moments where it all blurred together rather deliciously.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Slotted in the middle was the band that I had come down to see: Procedure Club, a two-piece out of New Haven, Connecticut with Adam Malec on guitar and Andrea Belair on keybs and vocals, with the drum machine sitting on a stool beside her. I'd rather enjoyed their Doomed Forever album2 on Slumberland — one of the best labels going right now. With their hazy bedroom pop offering flashes of Black Tambourine via the Jesus and Mary Chain, Procedure Club fit well on the Slumberland roster, and I definitely wanted to show my support on their first visit to these parts, even if I was vaguely worried about how the lo-fi duo were going to pull it off as a live unit.
As they got going, the potential frailties of their setup were evident, but more than overwhelmed by the pop sensibility behind it all. The songs were generally built up from a steady drum machine beat, rhythm guitar and fuzzy keyboards which sometimes sounded like there was a loose connection somewhere, with Belair's vocals tying it all together, even when they were the lowest thing in the mix.
It was a largely stripped-down sound — a bit too so much at times — though the economic virtues of not adding any extra hands to tour with are pretty clear. It did make it a little harder for the pair to break through to a non-rapt, semi-chatty room but I was taken with the uncluttered sound. Songs sometimes came off a bit more straightahead than on the album versions, as on "Feel Sorry for Me" with one less layer of haze to draw attention away from the popnugget underneath. That didn't always work as well — the ridiculously wonderful "Rather", slowed down from its album incarnation, didn't quite capture the magic.3
If there's a criticism to be made here it's that the songs are sometimes a little indistinguishable. But I really love the sound so that doesn't matter so much to me. And there is a bit of a limit to what two people and a drum machine can replicate live. But if you thought labelmates Pains of Being Pure at Heart were getting too commercial, this is a band worth checking out.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Having gotten what I came for, seeing the night's actual headliners was just gravy, although I was curious to see Bishop Morocco — mostly to see what kind of musical common ground had been negotiated between the band's two principles. A partnership between Jake Fairley (ex-Uncut, though also with some solo work to his name — most notably his big beat album Touch Not the Cat4) and Jim Sayce (ex-Deadly Snakes as well as co-founder of the late Tangiers), long-time friends whose music to date has not been particularly overlapping.
The upshot of their collaboration was something that initially sounded closer to what I would have expected from Fairley, inasmuch as there was a synth-y sensibility to the whole thing with beats a few steps closer to the dancefloor than the garage. Along those lines, the first song featured atmospheric synths over a metronome drum machine beat. The tempo picked up after that, but the material was still synth-heavy in a dark disco kind of mode — my overall first impression was that for them "Last Year's Disco Guitars" wasn't just a song title so much as a statement of purpose.
Starting as more of a studio project, the pair played everything themselves on the tracks that'd become their self-titled album, but live have grown into a four-piece. Even then, it wasn't until a half-dozen songs in that the drummer joined the fray, which added a bit more of a "rock" sound — though at a few places that was rock in the manner that, oh, New Order was rock. Sayce and Fairley traded off vocals from song to song, but there was a unified underlying vision.
Ultimately, the vibe was plastic permagrim, and it was okay to listen to, but nothing in the set really reached out and grabbed me. Mind you, I'm not sure if the muffled sound they were getting here helped. And, to be sure, I was sobering up by this point — my notes by this point are more focused on the vast number of pedals in the band's employ than in the deeper meaning of what they were doing — so that might have something to do with their music affecting me differently than the preceding bands.
They played an eleven song, forty-minute set which pretty much represented their entire output so far. I wasn't won over, but I wouldn't say I was turned off. If we manage to cross paths again, I'd give 'em another go.
1 Perhaps all-too-aptly, I made some breathless notes about being on the verge of aphasia, though in retrospect I'm really sure I meant synesthesia.
2 You can download two of the best songs from the album over at Slumberland's website.
3 I don't know whether to be sad or relieved that the band didn't attempt "Seventh Circle of Hell", another of my faves, which sounds like the work of someone attempting to write an ABBA song where their only point of reference was a slightly warped cassette copy of The 6ths' Wasps' Nests album.
4 I note that Fairley was a couple years ahead of the curve in the indie rock cat sweepstakes.
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Hell, that would almost certainly kill me. Once or twice a year is more than enough.
ReplyDeleteI must say that I've been amused by the synchronicity of the flowing liquor bottle that was drawn on the behind-the-band blackboard that night.
This is happening. Deal With It.
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