The Tea Time Shuffle is a once-a-month gig at the classy basement HiFi Club in the bowels of Riot Prediction City. Tonight's line-up was shifted a week because headliners STATELESS had been working with DJ SHADOW in New York on a collection of tunes for their new album. Excitement, as they say, was running at flood levels. The place was solid. STATELESS apart, four other serious-quality acts (of whom, more later) had put grandmothers on the market to be on the bill.
As Chris James and band set up command posts on the stage the house lighting dipped and flickered into a climactic twilight zone and surges of good chemicals rushed through the veins. "Prism" injected science and emotional delirium into the audience's shared bloodstream. While James hogged the visual attention in his stubble and skinny black t-shirt, working his seductive voice like the subtle instrument it is, Kidkanevil (turntables, sampling, programming), Jon Taylor (bass), Jimmy Sturdy (drums) and Rod Buchanan-Dunlop (FX, programming, keyboards) did magical things with complex instruments. It was the delicately traced, powerful stuff that most bands can only furrow brows at. Their sound is acid sweet, cavernously deep and utterly absorbing. Jon Taylor's bass is a masterclass in doing less to create maximum reverberation of lower body parts. The whole band's polyrhythms and harmonic swirls of textured sound fire up the intellect and dazzle the emotions with glittering bursts of light and shade.
STATELESS have time to do seven huge songs, every one a chart-bullying tune with enough embedded integrity to stand up with the rock intelligentsia and punch them right in the nose. The instantly recognisable "Exit", the luxurious pain of "Bloodstream" and a moody "Bluetrace" from the impeccable summer EP sit in the august company of "Whiter than Snow", "Radiokiller", "Alive" and the aforementioned "Prism". They play with conviction and power, and seem genuinely happy at the huge response they're getting from the crowd. It’s not hard for a musically sussed out audience to love STATELESS. It's easy to see how their effortless mastery of so many levels of the musical spectrum will scare rabbits in some of the bolt holes and arid foothills of The Industry.
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After a summer of exciting New Yorkshire durr and clang there was something luxurious and sinful about recognising pop music that hadn't forgotten the directions that PORTISHEAD and RADIOHEAD had set off into all those years ago. Music that was as alert and as immediate as something from Anticon, but which also had the potential and (tonight) the confirmation of a large and enthusiastic audience.
To be honest, as long as I get my copy of the album sometime in the next twelve months, I'm going to be a very happy bunny. A tenner on next year's Mercury Prize wouldn’t be a bad punt, either.
THE HAIR had pounded those boards immediately beforehand. Sam Robson, their latter day Sex Machine (get on the scene) bellowed and crooned through a hatful of punkfunk gems with the crispest fourpiece band you'll hear in a while. BIG favourites like "Bunny Boiler", "Right Foot Left Foot" and "Jigsaw Ballard" ripped the place up with the crowd pressing forward and grinning like the dancing fools we were. THE HAIR don’t muck about with a moody swamp of fuzz and reverb. Every twitch, swerve and jerked upbeat rings through the smoke and grabs you in the trouser region. The basslines demand that you to bounce along and the organ part is as fresh and arresting as Booker T and MGs. Infectious is an overused but madly just-right word. There were a lot of unattached females in the crowd … getting just a little hyper.
They treat us to a new single – scheduled for PIAS release this winter and they make it clear that their song writing is just getting better and better. Sam is treated to a full verse and chorus of full blooded "Happy Birthday To You" by a delighted crowd. Big buzz, or what?
(NIKOLI, THE RIC NEALE BAND and CAPTAIN WILBERFORCE also played – see separate review)
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