Coffee-Table Notes

alt.gallery, Newcastle September 5-November 10 2007 They may be selling Daniel Johnston t-shirts across the bridge in the book shop of Gateshead’s Baltic Centre, but, despite the tendency of this vast multi-story space to resemble the domed city in ‘Logan’s Run’, this first UK retrospective of the cult savant singer/songwriter would probably boil over with excitement in alt. gallery’s bijou back-room space in one of the most out-there record emporiums anywhere. Because seeing the faded customised cover for Johnston’s very first home-recorded cassette, ‘Songs Of Pain,’ even out of arm’s reach beneath glass, it’s clear how his musical exorcisms of his inner demons pre-dated and even predicted what’s on offer on the other side of the room. The row on row of hand-crafted, make-shift artefacts wrapped around the overload of primal squalls, screams and screeches contained within the uber-limited, lo-fi, DIY and undoubtedly dysfunctional recordings released on whatever primitive outlet t

Limbo@Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh  Thursday January 3rd 2008 Dirty Summer Where they smuggled in the back way? A trio, 2 teenage boys and a school-girl; Fergus on Korg, big specs, baggy cardy, mushroom-head-hair-do; Brodie on pop-eyed lead vocal, goth-fuzz-bass as patented by The Fall, cider-n-black indie disco t-shirt; Emily, aka The Bannister, on stand-up snare and floor-tom. From Dunfermline, a hard-nut satellite town just across the Forth. Out of this spews a cock-eyed DIY maelstrom of wonky mongoloid geekery without any of the novelty-act cutesiness which usually afflicts such stuff. During the first song Fergus gets so worked up he knocks his Korg off its stand, more adolescent clumsy-clot lack of spatial awareness than punk rock frenzy. On one song Emily reclines on the floor in front of her kit to play a second keyboard. It’s the only seat she gets all night. On another, she finishes by reading from a paperback. ‘Get On Your Knees And Colour Me In’ The best bag of

Pleasance Upstairs 3 stars Wil Hodgson is now sponsored by Chippenham Athletic Football Club. For now, anyway. Because if the club’s camel-coated directors ever make the Edinburgh trek to see the pink-haired chubby-chasing punk-geek tattooed love-boy, he might end up getting a kicking. Hodgson’s latest outsider’s rant against his less than idyllic home town takes stock of how he got here, from West Country misfit to third division pro wrestler to the most dolefully deadpan of top light-entertainment machine-gun raconteurs. For an incisive and scabrous observer of a white-trash hamlet where a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show is a rite of passage bonding exercise with your dad, this is pretty much business as usual. Hodgson’s subsequent willingness to stand alone, possibly with Bull mastiff shit on his shoe, makes for a state of the nation address Channel 5 documentaries can only dream of. Where Hodgson goes now remains to be seen, although he really should think about reviving his wrestling

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, 4 May 2008 Without British Forces radio, Ulrich Schnauss’s brand of transcendent electronica wouldn’t be quite so lovely. In early 90s small-town Germany, it was the only way quintessentially English bands such as Ride, My Bloody Valentine and other purveyors of insular, FX pedal heavy, drone-based whimsy laden with the derogatory Shoegazing tag could be heard. “I always liked music that takes you to another place,” says Schnauss on the eve of a European tour that takes in his first ever Edinburgh date. “I used music as a way of escape.” His own output suggests likewise. Schnauss’ first two albums, Far Away Trains Passing By and the sublime A Strangely Isolated Place, fused laptop-generated melodies with the sort of dense guitar washes Schnauss absorbed in his youth. Last year’s Goodbye took such ethereal obsessions to their logical limit. “I’ve fallen in love again with more pure electronic things,” says Schnauss, who moonlights as keyboardist with Long

The Lot, Edinburgh November 14 2007 Neil Cooper 3 stars “Fucking technology, eh?” spits drummer Stu Ritchie by way of an abrupt end to a mid-set melodica-led number, shattering the chummy mood of this launch gig for Trianglehead’s just-released second album, Exit Strategy. The outburst over in an instant, the Edinburgh-based trio re-convene their meeting of Paul Harrison’s wiggy electric keyboards, Martin Kershaw’s airy sax and Ritchie’s driving Downtown drums they’ve been manning since 2004. While there’s not much in the way of edge, Trianglehead nevertheless pursue an eclectic array of moods and tones which occasionally squelches into part Fusion groove, part Nordic flightiness. More reflective tunes drift off in several directions at once before jump-jacking back onto the same route with a polite kind of fury before a partisan crowd. Guitarist Graham Stephen, who played earlier with the equally inventive Newt, joins them for the final number, the most choppily exploratory of

Old St Paul’s Church Hall, Jeffrey St, Edinburgh, Oct 12 2007 A tracer trail is the streak of light left behind by a speeding bullet. It’s also the name of the micro cottage industry who’ve consistently promoted some of the most charming live shows in Edinburgh over the last year. To celebrate, a very special anniversary do will feature ex Appendix Out frontman Alasdair Roberts supported by PuMajaW, the spectral collaboration between vocalist Pinkie Maclure and John Wills, formerly of proto-shoegazers Loop, alongside DJs from Tracer Trails equally hand-knitted kindred spirits from Beard fanzine. With previous shows having featured the likes of Jeffrey Lewis and all manner of sensitive troubadour types from the more melodic end of the current wave of alt-folk-pop-whatever, the emphasis of Tracer Trails is on the low-key. ““I don’t know if we achieve it,” chief Tracer Trail Emily Roff admits, “but I think there are people looking for more of an event. We’ve no ethos as such, other

Henrys Cellar Bar Tuesday November 15 2007 4 stars The name is misleading. Because, rather than some mellowed out, magic-carpet-riding, back-packer-eyed mystics as may be implied, this bi-aural, bi-lingual, buy-now-while-stocks-last quartet are up-tight, in-tense and simmering with enough evil stares you sense they might give you a semiotics lecture any minute. With a frontman who’s a dead ringer for original PiL guitarist Keith Levene sneering like a corrupted Little Lord Fauntleroy throwing Howard Devoto shapes, and at least two veterans of 1990s agit-punx Badgewearer in the ranks, this Edinburgh/Marseille/Droitwich (the most important brine and salt town in England) ensemble fly like antsy, dancey quicksilver. Driven by a tautly plucked bass sound not heard since John Peel circa (but not C) ’86, the barricades are there for the taking, whatever it is they’re against. Think McCarthy, The Cravats and The Prefects. Think Biting Tongues before the new-generation turned post-punk-fu