Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh
Wed October 15 2008
4 stars
Back in the dark(er) ages, The Creeping Nobodies were an imaginary band immortalised on a demo tape which adorned the typically slap-dash cover of The Fall’s 1980 ‘Grotesque (After The Gramme)’ album, addressed to ‘A Famous Ape.’. Well, praise be to Smithsonian music biz pre-cog, because twenty-eight years on, a combo of the same name have become flesh in the guise of this Toronto-born boy/girl quartet, who, on their first sojourn here, beguile, bewitch and bewilder in equal measure.
For sure, initially their bass and tom-tom heavy scritch-and-scratch actually resembles Salford’s finest circa 1983 if Mark E Smith had been bumped off and the (No)bodies of Valerie Uher and Sarah Richardson had been possessed with the quietly hissing spirit of Kim Gordon. With junior Thurston-Moore-alike Chuck Skullz(?) on bass and wiggy recorder solo and Dennis Amos pounding out the beat, the studiedly spindly result is ooky, kooky and insistently ethereal. In a set drawn largely from 2007’s ‘Augers and Auspices’ vinyl-only album, they reference Hungarian folk songs, incant obliquely and loosen up enough with a captivating presence that suggests they may yet be famous apes.
The List, October 2008
Ends
Wed October 15 2008
4 stars
Back in the dark(er) ages, The Creeping Nobodies were an imaginary band immortalised on a demo tape which adorned the typically slap-dash cover of The Fall’s 1980 ‘Grotesque (After The Gramme)’ album, addressed to ‘A Famous Ape.’. Well, praise be to Smithsonian music biz pre-cog, because twenty-eight years on, a combo of the same name have become flesh in the guise of this Toronto-born boy/girl quartet, who, on their first sojourn here, beguile, bewitch and bewilder in equal measure.
For sure, initially their bass and tom-tom heavy scritch-and-scratch actually resembles Salford’s finest circa 1983 if Mark E Smith had been bumped off and the (No)bodies of Valerie Uher and Sarah Richardson had been possessed with the quietly hissing spirit of Kim Gordon. With junior Thurston-Moore-alike Chuck Skullz(?) on bass and wiggy recorder solo and Dennis Amos pounding out the beat, the studiedly spindly result is ooky, kooky and insistently ethereal. In a set drawn largely from 2007’s ‘Augers and Auspices’ vinyl-only album, they reference Hungarian folk songs, incant obliquely and loosen up enough with a captivating presence that suggests they may yet be famous apes.
The List, October 2008
Ends
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