Tonight, we're on a trip down to the wild frontier between the city and the festering pits of the olde Shore Ditch running as it is with festering sewage and all kinds of ne'er do wells lurking in the alleyways and doorways between the overhead railway and this olde den of iniquity turned clean and spruce bar. We're here to see Kitchen to see Frontier Ruckus Frontier Ruckus online have a hoe down with Still Parade and Early Ghost in the sort of joint that as recently as 40 years ago you could of seen guys step up to the bar with their horses!!
I arrived just after EARLY GHOST came on and wish I had seen all of their set as they were pretty amazingly good. When I walked in the line-up was playing bowed banjo, trumpet, violin, drums, guitar and keyboards but they never kept the same configuration for any tune and often swapped two or three instruments each per tune! Either way as the singer kept saying he must be the one, I was grabbed. Their next song sounded like Echo and the Bunnymen and Certain gGneral go country rock, but it worked well with the two guitar, bass and banjo frontline that just cooked along.
Your Forgotten Soul added some trumpet and mandolin into the mix and a hint of mariachi madness. In the prairies of their minds they had everyone there captivated and well into it before they morphed into a Spaghetti Western Belle & Sebastian with some cool banjo and saxophone interplay that suggested they would go down a storm at Gypsy Hotel!
They did a song with a switch of lead singer to the group's one female member and the regular singer went and played banjo and keyboards. It was a treat just watching them try to outdo The Urban Voodoo Machine for musical chairs while playing. I was sold on what are a really exciting young group who I hope to see regularly in the future.
After the break, however it was a very different story. Sadly, STILL PARADE were more like a still birth to my ears; a band with a concept so horrifying to my ears I walked out after 3 songs as they seemed to be trying to marry Prefab Sprout to Coldplay and Mumford and Sons and then throwing in a dance beat to really make it sound like they are vomiting all over your ears. The fact that on the opening song the twat who was grooving like he was at a rave was playing a rack of gadgets plugged into an Apple mac and a tambourine while attempting to play bass with an ineptness of feel or context was making me think of the bar next door even before the first song was done.
But I stuck around to give them a second song. Bad move. It had some truly horrible harmonizing over a bed-wettingly wimpy dance muzak backing. It stunk, frankly. At the end of that song the main singer gave a speech about how it was the band's first London gig. I had to stop myself from shouting how I hoped it was the last one too, before they started playing a song called Judy which rapidly sent me running into the other bar til they were done. I sat listening to Lykke Li et al while winding up Theo, the record label boss who had also fled from Still Parade as did most of the audience.
Once it was safe to go back into the gig room, it was quickly time for FRONTIER RUCKUS who were playing as a three piece tonight due to their the drummer heading home early from tour to go back to college. I guess the rest of the band followed him as this was the last date of the band's current European tour.
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Yes they are a young band and also seem to have a lot of adoring female fans who spent most of the set drooling at them. Now I never thought that looking like you're a cross between Bo Duke and McCloud (as Fontier Ruckus' David W. Jones does)would have that effect, but damn, the girls are swooning all night long as Matthew Milia lead us into the backwoods of Michigan.
They are also another band at home swapping instruments and in Zachary Nichols they have a multi-instrumentalist come mad professor of the saw, trumpet and Keyboards on the first song alone. I'm not familiar with the songs but they are all telling, complicated tales of life over all sorts of interesting country grooves and twangs as you wonder what it was that happened to Momma and Lenny. Either way, Matthew Milia mostly sounds like a college rock singer gone country and it really works well when they sound a bit like the Drop Nineteens gone western instead of psychedelic. They did a really cool instrumental on Saw and banjo too.
One of the best songs of the set was Eyelashes. This is the tune that opens the current double CD Eternity Of Dimming: Frontier Ruckus at Loose Music that goes into Black Snake Moan-type territory. I really need to listen to the lyrics to hear it all.
At this point in the set the band abandoned the stage and unplugged all the instruments. They jumped into the crowd so we all gathered up close and they continued, totally acoustic, with (I think) Careening Catalogue Memorial. t's a song about going to a prom topless or so the video would have you believe. Either way they managed to play to absolute silence in the audience which is pretty incredible as literally no one spoke while they played. It was brilliantly effective even if switching instruments was a bit more difficult. Still the sad old journey they then sang about seems to unite us all, quietly listening or taking photos. They then finished the set with a song about The Sweetest Record.
It was no surprise when they were soon back for an encore and again played in the audience, treating us to a song that my notes look like hieroglyphics for, but it was one more slice of great college Americana whatever is was called. A nice end to an all too short set as this should have been a two band bill to allow for a fuller set from Frontier Ruckus. Oh well, next time.
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