The place was heaving, and the tightly packed bodies inside steamed up the windows of this long and narrow venue as they moved closer and closer to the stage, building up an intensifying atmosphere complete with sweltering heat.
The radiators must be on full blast. CELEBRATION are onstage, and their last minute soundcheck heightens the anticipation as the lights go down with the sunshine outside.
Their analogue bass was plugged in at the very last moment, and seconds later this electrifying Brooklyn three piece outfit kicked in.
With Katrina Ford on vocals/primal screams, and dark incantations, and David Bergander’s biorhythmic drum patterns forming an unsafe, unsteady ledge, the winding corridors and enchanted carousels ground out from amidst the layered keys and analogue bass signals that came courtesy of the talented multi instrumentalist, Sean Antanaiatis - he manned the Hammond organ, keys and Moog bass pedals that faced us, and I tried in vain to look over his shoulder as he picked out delicate threads of lead guitar during the early part of the set, whilst still sitting at the keys.
Their set was spellbinding, and trancelike, and the sweat began to drip from me and off the walls as this deep-seated sonic wall of noise was generated, slowly at first, until it became thicker, deeper and more and more hypnotic. By the end, all three band members were cavorting wildly under their own twisted spell, with basic wooden percussion driving the organic freakout firmly into our hearts.
‘Lost Souls’ sounded somehow like a disjointed and funereal soundtrack from directly beyond all hope or reason. The beautiful music box melodies are surely meant to haunt, and do, as the Hammond churns up the darkest thoughts of its player. It’s a hopeless search, and an eternal limbo, and it’s quite, quite beautifully played out for us here. There is always that second before each burst of appreciative clapping, with nobody willing to cut through the beautiful and thickly textured sound that seems to be coming from somewhere via the band.
Are they a medium? Or is this a séance? In your mind’s eye you live again reborn through the wild and frantic chase that is ‘Foxes’ (Remember Mia, from Space 1999?) or reminiscently concentrate your willow-patterned gaze at the ancient misty past during ‘China’? There are eyes rolled back in heads near the front, and the winding path that is created isn’t something that you see with your eyes. This seems to be the connection: there is a driving pulse, and a rewiring of the senses that disorientates you whilst also offering a fresh perspective.
They finished with the chiming wall of anger and regret that is ‘War’, an ongoing and always relevant protest that only seemed to symbolise their affinity with life’s hurdy-gurdy pulse. It brought us back to life, not down to earth.
TV ON THE RADIO’s third (I think) appearance in Manchester turned out to be a pulsating storm that threatened to shake the building off it’s hinges -much like the piercing voice capable of leaving a glass in smithereens. It’s the same technique, with only slight variations (I’m totally convinced) – It’s all frequencies and textures in here, and the steaming air resembles a monsoon.
Kyp Malone’s falsetto deliveries are heartfelt enough but as they leaned in close to the grinding mechanisms present in the manic and majestic sound that swirled and gurgled they spewed up sparks of beauty so full that the spasms within you would have occurred without you. You cannot digest it - it comes from several octaves below, masticated and saliva covered, but still recognisable: your hands must be holding your head or your knees will surely cover your ears. Either way you are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with an unidentifiable noise: I hear the thud-thudding of bodies bumping against glass as the magnetic pull sucks the passers by against the glass frontage of the jam-packed venue. Next door, its ears to the wall on either side, as TVOTR’s visionary audio emits a signal that makes X-ray vision seem like a taken for granted luxury rather than a necessity that cannot be attained. Not by opening your eyes, in any case..
How do they get such pain across? As an organic whole, they live and breathe against a sea that threatens to wash us all away, and tonight there were beautiful harmonies cast against tidal waves of gurning feedback, as this genre defying act took us slowly back to another place that lies at the edge of or perhaps beyond all reasonable perception.
Like peripheral vision? That isn’t so peripheral any more……..
Here you may turn your head slowly and stare full in the face all the split-second mini-epiphanies that which appear in the corner of your mind’s eye - all wisdom retained, through a mish-mash of broken hearts and barbershop harmonies that tell of love and loss. The destructive, regretful and irreversible are all documented, and the long-forgotten re-emerges vividly, though isn’t always fondly remembered. It’s simply enchanting, and we cannot rule out perfection either, despite being tainted or taken to the brink of casualty, or permanently out of ourselves by this ethereal din.
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Like Celebration before them, they are akin to conductors of lightning-forked or kinetic energy, as the huge, huge sound threatens infinite destruction. Are there spirits in possession of their souls? I don’t believe in that mumbo-jumbo, but that’s what this Philadelphia-bred act have me thinking as the mental pictures project themselves on the backs of my eyelids in time to this haunted and mentally scarred chaos.
The new songs mix like blood and water, with material from 2004’s debut full player ‘Desperate Youth, bloodthirsty babes’. But onstage, TVOTR aren’t out to replicate the recorded versions. Live, they rely instead on the reinterpretation of their songs, which are destined to evolve for eternity, asking question after question of the recorded versions captured in time.
In order to get an accurate measure of the audience reaction you may need to imagine a heavy nosebleed in a sauna, with the album material reminding us that this band’s recorded work just single snapshots of a tantalising, and many-tentacled whole. If they recorded their first album again, I would buy it again, knowing the same tracks would be different. Yet I’d probably still be unable to comprehend how much that this perfect chaos had been developed and improved upon.
With great music you can see. This is the moral insight that comes with physical blindness. Think about it.
Or surrender to it, as we all did. ‘Young Liars’ pulled me to pieces, and celebrated something that lurks within us all. Like everything else, it was orchestrated and replayed according to the laws of itself when applied to the pulse of the jam. It discordantly emitted waves of a long forgotten radioactive past and again, there was a sense of E.S.P, as the murmurings mimicked déjà vu by toying with the settings for long and short term memory within us all. ‘Providence’ was beautiful, sailing through the hole in the wall left by ‘Dreams’. Solid matter stands no chance against resonance like this.
Harmonies and feedback continued to play nice cop/nasty cop until the venue was melting like an ice pop left on a on a sun drenched windscreen. My sensory signals crammed themselves into a place just a fifth of their collective mass, and left my brain to alter the resulting velocity. So much I will have missed then, and how different your interpretation will be to mine, that the songs that themselves are reinterpreted from one live show to the next will vary according to the changing of the seasons and the passing of time. Always in perfect sway with what you carry inside, they underlined the fact that live performances offer fresh artistic perspectives.
‘Ambulance’ is the show’s highlight, a beat-box driven version brazier that glowed as it wound itself around the experimental percussion provided by the members of ‘Celebraton’ (by way of an encore), along with the non-drumming members of TVOTR. The drummer? I think he was playing melodica somewhere near the front.
It was a thorough examination, resulting in chilling findings. We are human, and capable of massive thoughtless evil. However, you are invited here to pit your most rancid thoughts and notions against the twists and turns of fate. It brings home the truth of the accident in question, the notion of it, that accidental destruction can devastate us all forever, and in ways that your sworn enemies would never in a million years dream up.
The scope of accidental horrors far outweighs the evil streak of calculated evil in the vast majority of us .It’s a concept that proves too weighty for me to tackle whole really, but I had to give it a go. Please register and help me, especially if you recognise what I’m driving at or can put me back on the right road.
Anyone who was at this gig will draw upon that shared reality, and come up with an alternative piece of writing. Please comment – the results will be as unique as yourself and just as beautiful as your purest thoughts. The only consistency with this reviewer’s take will be your maximum rating of the earth-shattering, mind blowing, hip shaking, trance inducing and quite simply stunning performances from two of 4AD’s newest recruits.
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