Skip to main content

Alex Rex

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh
Four stars

“I’d like to welcome to the stage, Mike Heron and Samuel Beckett,” says Alex Neilson following a lull after the ever restless drummer introduced the now seventy-something former Incredible String Band icon as his special guest for the final song of a generation and genre spanning night. Named with a nod to Greek tragedy, Neilson’s latest incarnation casts himself as king, sporting a skeleton t-shirt while sat behind his drum-kit throne to declaim what he styles as ‘songs of love, loss and loathing’.

By this time, a stripped-down Storm the Palace has opened the night with a magnificent fusion of Sophie Dodds’ flying-V guitar and Reuben Taylor’s accordion, with Dodds’ vocal at times resembling Dagmar Krause at her Brechtian best. This is followed by surprise guest, Aidan O’Rourke, from Lau, who gives what is quite possibly the first ever solo fiddle rendition of traditional folk tunes to grace the Sneaky Pete’s stage. O’Rourke calls upon Neilson to read James Robertson’s 365-word short story, The Room is in Darkness, accompanying him with a cracked underscore.

This sets the tone for the arcane-sounding chorale that opens Alex Rex’s set, which, with guitarist Rory Haye, bass player Audrey Bizouerne and keyboardist Georgia Seddon in tow, mines the spirit of Desire era Bob Dylan and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. Like both of his forebears, the tumble of Neilson’s lyrics possess an uncensored candour delivered with gallows humour beyond the life-and-death gravity of some of his subjects. This year’s second Alex Rex album, Otterburn, after all, focuses on the premature death of Neilson’s brother.  

Despite this, Neilson wisecracks away between the likes of The Life of a Wave and Please God Make Me Good (But Not Now), from the band’s debut, Vermillion, and the gospel-tinged Latest Regret, from Otterburn. Occasional guitar wig-outs by Bizouerne are pulsed by the busy thwack of Neilson’s drums before things take a gothic turn, and Heron eventually makes it to the stage alongside fiddler John Wilson for a rousing massed finale to a rolling thunder revue in waiting.

The Herald, November 20th 2019

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