Skip to main content

Et tu Brutus 


Henry's Cellar Bar, Edinburgh
Wed March 20th 2013
Edinburgh scene super-groups don't come along every day, yet the 
arrival of Et tu Brutus opening a four-band House of Crust bill 
headlined by Californian punks, Fracas, is a tantalising prospect. 
Initiated by Edinburgh School For the Deaf/St Judes Infirmary/Young 
Spooks/Naked auteur Grant Campbell and The Leg's Dan Mutch as a studio 
project, the pair have drafted in a rhythm section of Leg drummer Alun 
Thomas and former Sara and the Snakes guitarist Andy Brown to put flesh 
on the skinny-assed bones of Campbell and Mutch's avant-garage hardcore 
template.

With Campbell wielding a microphone/intercom set-up that looks and 
sounds like it was looted from a 1950s black cab, the muffled fuzz 
gives the words he reads from A4 sheets of paper a rawness that's 
accentuated by the band's wilfully no-fi sound helmed by Mutch's 
guitar, which is played relentlessly, veering off into all kinds of odd 
angles before barraging its way home.

Thomas' intricate guitar patterns give things an equally adventurous 
air, while Brown's meat and two veg bass playing recalls Steve Hanley 
during classic era Fall. Until he starts playing it with a 
cheese-grater, that is, which is when things really start to shake, 
rattle and roll.

The six song set is all Et tu Brutus have for the moment, but the 
hellfire intensity that pulses them is still worth getting stabbed in 
the back for.

The List, April 2013

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more