Thursday 23 October 2008

Isn't t'internet Brilliant (at least when compared with...)?

Thursday 23rd October: Whatever format you prefer to purchase (or otherwise) your music in, you can't possibly disagree that the internet is the best thing since sliced bread.

Whether it's tracking down long deleted albums through auction sites, buying regular stuff from mainstream sites or simply trying something new from small bands' websites/networking pages, the sheer volume of stuff out there is mind-blowing. Vinyl, CD or digital download, whatever format you want is at your fingertips whenever you want it.

Why am I suddenly spouting off like this? Well, to put it simply, it's because I came to realise yesterday how poor the bricks-and-mortar version of HMV is, at least in York.

There are two HMV outlets in our fair city - one in the centre and one on an out-of-town shopping park. I try to avoid the latter. It's the smaller of the two and, with limited floor space, generally limits its stock to mainly newer stuff. I had, however, been given a not inconsiderable amount of HMV vouchers so off I trundled into the centre to spend them, thinking that the bigger store would have a lot more choice.

It used to be that the vast majority of the downstairs was given over to rock/pop/chart CDs. Yesterday, there was probably less than half of that floorspace given to music at all. The rest had been taken over by DVD boxsets and sale DVDs, presumably in the run-up to Christmas. I don't mind DVDs. I've got quite a few. I just didn't want to buy any yesterday.

So I meandered about the (small) selection of CDs, trying to find something to buy that would get me the best return on my vouchers. There was a 2-for-£10 offer on, which meant I could have walked out with ten CDs. But there was very little decent in it. I'm not a big fan of most chart CDs (and those that I do want are on my Christmas wish-list anyway) so I checked out the full price selection and walked out with just five CDs (after adding nearly a tenner cash to the vouchers...)

It's not that I'm picky when it comes to buying CDs. I like a wide variety of music and if I were ever to win the lottery there are probably hundreds of CDs that I'd like to own. It's more that HMV's selection, if you don't want the latest WestZone or High School Aloud album is extremely limited. I went in with a few ideas of what I was after and walked out with completely different CDs. And their prices are astronomical. I know I wasn't actually paying for the stuff but three of my purchases cost me £16 each - all of them are cheaper not only at the likes of Play.com but also on HMV's own website. The trouble is, you don't seem to be able to spend the gift vouchers online.

So, what did I buy?

Queen: - Jazz
Queen: - A Day At The Races
Asia: - Live In The USA
Asia: - Phoenix
Roger Waters: - In The Flesh

Despite the above rant, I'm looking forward to hearing them all and I may even get time to write reviews of some of them.

In the meantime, whenever I'm planning to buy music I'll stick to sending my credit card details over the web. More choice, less cost works for me every time.

Classic Covers and New Material

Saturday 18th October: Being honest, I wasn't planning on going out this weekend. My original plan for this year was to try to average a gig every other week and, given that I'd been to two gigs last week, I thought I'd better stay home with Debbie for a change.

However, Freeway were playing the Roman Bath so we settled for a compromise. Our Daughter was dropped off at the grandparents and Debbie and I went out together, starting the evening with a nice Chinese at Happy Valley in Goodramgate and then heading to the Bath for some musical entertainment.

Freeway, you may remember, are a heavy metal covers band who perform songs by the likes of Thin Lizzy, Whitesnake, Gary Moore and the like. This was the first time I'd had a chance to see them since the sad and untimely death of drummer Howard Sparnenn and, while members of his family were present in the audience, this time there was no guest vocal spot by daughter Livvy.

The music was good - the usual mix of tracks, played excellently - and a good time was had by all.

Howard had been replaced on drums by Paul Gibbons who, as well as handing over a pair of splintered drumsticks to a female fan at the end of the gig, is also the drummer with Morpheus Rising which, in turn, is the long-time project of Pete Harwood, Freeway's guitarist. Also, featuring Andy Smith (Mostly Autumn), with Grae Tennick on vocals and newly announced guitarist Damien Sweeting, Morpheus Rising promises to echo the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. They list their influences as the likes of Saxon, Iron Maiden, The Cult, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and more. With a pedigree like that, they sound as though they are worth looking out for.

They have a single - An Ordinary Man - available for download from their site from the 27th of October and all proceeds will be going to Help for Heroes, a charity supporting injured forces personnel. According to their website, the band are currently fine-tuning their music before unleashing it on the world. I'll be looking out for them playing live around York.

Monday 13 October 2008

Mojos and Minors

Monday 13th October: Musically, last week was a funny sort of week...

It started with a bit of a disappointment. We had planned (and, indeed, had tickets) to see Curved Air at the Duchess on Thursday. But, on Monday, we discovered that the promoters had cancelled all gigs outside of the South-East of England. Had the credit-crunch hit the band's travel budget? Maybe hardly any tickets had been sold? We don't know and I doubt we ever will. I'll admit that I knew hardly anything by this re-formed 70's prog-rock band - I have one track Back Street Luv on a compilation CD - but I was looking forward to seeing them live. I think that, if I ever had to chose to listen to just one style of music it would be prog-rock and we don't get that many opportunities to hear it live in York. (Up-coming gigs by Breathing Space, Mostly Autumn and the original Asia notwithstanding...)

Anyway, that meant that I had to meet up with the guys on Friday night instead - Roj had something to pass on to me before Sunday (more on that later...) There wasn't a great deal that took our fancy, so we planned to go to the Roman Bath to see The Penetrators, allegedly a 70's to noughties rock covers band. I say "allegedly" because, when we arrived, The Penetrators were nowhere to be seen. (Maybe they were holed up with Curved Air in the South East.) Instead, The Mojos were gracing the stage area. Now, up until Friday I was a Mojos virgin. The other guys, however, had seen them a number of times and had told me that they were pretty good.

The first thing I noticed, however, was the, errrm, let's say disparate ages of some of the band. Well, let's be honest, it was, being perfectly frank, the apparent age of Dave, who could have been the father of any of the other members. If I hadn't heard of them from the guys, I would have had the vague thought that this could have ended up being embarrassing. A bit like finding out that your Grandad played in a rock band. However, the past reviews were right. These guys are really good. Their selection of covers is slightly different to the usual fare and they play them extremely well. Tonight's set was spoiled slightly by a couple of electrical problems - one ending Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall somewhat abruptly (all we need is just another 50p in the metre??), the other making The Mojos' version of The Kaiser Chiefs' Ruby better than the original. A packed set was graced, for me, with many favourite songs by many favourite bands, including Robbie Williams, Bryan Adams, Guns 'n' Roses, Whitesnake, To-to and Queen. Being honest, I'm off the opinion that nobody should ever cover Queen, but that's by-the-by - they didn't do too bad a job at all. The set was rounded off with a fantastic medley containing songs that I can't remember the titles of. (Must start carrying around pen and paper.)

The only thing that remains to be said is that the bass guitar that John was playing is possibly the ugliest guitar I have ever seen. That didn't stop him playing it well, though. A good gig by a top covers band. One I hope to catch again sometime.

And, as the evening drew to a close (or, at least, as we were kicked out of the Bath to commence our usual chit-chat/insult-trading on the streets of York) Roj handed me my ticket for Sunday night's gig at the Duchess, featuring York band Elliot Minor.

Regular readers (I like to kid myself that I have some) will remember that I reviewed their debut album a few months back and that I liked it enough to rate it my album of the year at that point. Sunday night's gig was set up at short notice, was for charity and, given the almost boy-band status of Elliot Minor, I didn't think I'd manage to get a ticket. Thanks go to Roj, who braved the humiliation to pick one up for me.

It's a bit of a complicated story but I arrived at the Duchess at seven o'clock on Sunday evening, thought I'd missed the first band, who were due to finish at seven and couldn't work out what had happened to the second one, The Hot Melts, as they seemed to have morphed from a Liverpudlian foursome into a York-based female threesome who I had seen before. It urns out that The Hot Melts had cancelled at short notice (there's somewhat of a them developing here...) and the girls were the first band starting late. (It was good of them to wait for me, don't you think?)

Anyway, they were Third Conduct (and networking socially) and I had originally seen them at Fibbers over a year ago. Billed as "pop punk", you can imagine their style from the two covers that they performed - Green Day's She and, errrm, The Monkees' I'm a Believer (albeit the slightly rockier version from Shrek). However, they primarily play their own stuff and very good it is too. Kate's pounding drums belie her tender age, Hannah's guitar-playing is electric while Sarah's vocals, despite a slight nasal quality, have improved vastly since the last time I saw them. This was a much more assured performance overall and was thoroughly enjoyable. I'm not normally a big fan of either punk or punk-lite, but these girls are good enough for me to consider getting hold of a copy of their 8-track EP. Unfortunately, I didn't see them after their set finished so didn't get to pick one up on the night.

And so to the main act. I have a vague feeling that if you were to take Elliot Minor's album and rework it slightly (take away the string arrangements, tone down the slightly plummy vocals, crank up the volume a bit) you would have a slightly better than average rock album, rather than the excellent, sophisticated pop-rock album that it was released as. Add in some youthful exuberance, some excellent musicianship and a crowd composed partially of screaming girls and crank up the volume even more and you have what turned out to be an extremely good rock concert.

There can be no doubt that the boys of Elliot Minor have a great deal of talent (and, it has to be said, the looks to make you wish you were part of the same gene-pool). Being labelled as a boy-band doesn't do them justice. Their live set, containing most songs from the album and at least one new track, isn't just a re-hash of those songs but almost completely different versions. Yes, the lyrics are the same but the music is a lot rockier, verging on heavy and the vocals are a lot more raw, losing some of the "posh" tones which were my main criticism of the album, but retaining the variety of having multiple vocalists. They even showed a variety of talent by playing Silently totally acoustically, without drums.

A word about the audience. I expected to be completely composed almost exclusively of screaming girls and fully expected to be the oldest person there. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, while a good deal of the audience was student-aged, there was a fair number of older music fans present as well. Even some who admitted to owning the album. There was even a handful of people older than me and some of them didn't appear to be related to the band.

Whether Elliot Minor turn out to be a flash in the pan or whether they can sustain and build upon the momentum created by their first release remains to be seen. Personally, though, I'm glad that I took the opportunity to see them live relatively early in their career. The only downside to the performance was the somewhat mixed message coming from the band about under-aged drinking - while bass-player Ed was advising people not to do it or they would be kicked out, lead guitarist Alex responded with "f*** the bouncers, let's all have fun tonight." It may be rock and roll but, given the hoops that had to be jumped through to get The Duchess open in the first place, it's probably not what Tim and Michelle wanted to hear.

The proceeds of this gig are going to York Against Cancer and it raised over £3,100. Somehow it feels good to enjoy yourself while doing some good.