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Friday 6th April 2012
All Day BBQ Festival

Sparrow and the Workshop
6 Day Riot
The Nuns
Singing Adams
Y Niwl
Colours
Dignan Porch
+more tbc

The Windmill
Brixton
Price tbc

On Our iPod

Golden Grrrls - New Pop 7”

Chris Devotion & The Expectations - Amalgamation & Capital (album)

Trailer Trash Tracys - Ester (album)

Throwing Up - Mother Knows Best 7”

Howling Wolf - Complete Chess Masters 1951-60

The Ketamines - A Rotten Bond/1 Yr (from Oddbox Singles Club Pt 2)

Cardinal - Hymns (album)

Proper Ornaments - Taking the Gamble Out of Buying 12”

Darren Hayman - January Songs (album)

Various: Marshall Teller EP 12”

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Album Review

Okkervil River
The Stage Names Jagjaguwar

Article written by Ged M - Nov 26, 2007

“These songs are not meant to be understood, you understand/ They are only meant to terrify and comfort” wrote American poet John Berryman. That isn’t just pretentious quotation on my part; the last track on The Stage Names, ‘John Allyn Smith Sails’, uses Berryman’s birth name and tells a first-person-perspective of the poet’s 1972 suicide, when the words ran out. Words won’t fail Okkervil River; their poetic and literate take on independent music – in the same class as the Decemberists, The Hold Steady, Neutral Milk Hotel – is chock full of fascinating themes and characters.

In the first half of the record there’s a clear focus on the hyperreal aspects of life - TV, dreaming and love - reflected in titles like ‘Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe’. That’s gradually supplanted by character-driven songs. In the alt-countryish ‘A Girl in Port’, the emotional observer reports that “Cindy tells me she’s had fun/ sitting backstage, someone’s plus one” while within the strutting glam-rock of ‘You Can’t Hold The Hand of a Rock and Roll Man’, Marie sits there “hair all mussed into an I’ve just been fucked shape”. ‘Savannah Smiles’ is the true story of an adult movie star who killed herself when she lost her looks in a car crash and is really about how you can’t know someone even when you’re blood related.

As a lyric writer, Will Sheff would make a pretty good novelist. He should also be playful more often; the wondrous ‘Plus Ones’ has a full house of instruments – including guitars, piano, strings, trumpets and accordion – but also works in a string of numerical song titles with an extra number added (“TVC16…cell 45”) to cap a perfectly mournful and melodic song with major geek-appeal.

The year’s draining away and this may be my favourite record of the last 12 months. The music is powerful but no slave to convention (‘Unless It’s Kicks’ dispenses with choruses), the stories are fascinating, the playing is intricate; it’s deep and dark yet there’s a greater sense of fun and quiet hopefulness than before. They’re better than even before too, which is comforting; the only terror is that they may never be more than cult heroes.

Links:
http://www.okkervilriver.com