eing literally that, and the most universal of themes. Makers of the pop of now and tomorrow – vocalists, performers, songwriters, roleplayers, magpies, The Young and self or critic-anointed relevant – go back to your constituencies and prepare for opposition. Look at your game, fatherfuckers: you’re being bested out of sight, and that tells us how relatively comfortably many of you fit within the power structures of <strong>2016</strong>. As of this show, Merrill ‘Peaches’ Nisker is 50 years old. SLOW CLUB Girl Ray HD Concerts @ The Magnet Tom Bell “You can buy our T-shirt. It has snakes on it, and our heads.” What kind of hydra are GIRL RAY? They’re a chimera of stomping basslines, an onstage suitcase, synchronised 360º hopping, and an all-hands-on-deck attitude to backing harmonies. 6Music listeners might recognise Ghosty’s lurches in tempo from their session on Marc Riley’s show in March. Their set teems with bushy brown be-sideburned 70s Hammond organs sounds. They’re not throwbacks, though – I’ll Make This Fun has shades of Pavement, and they do make it fun! There’s no false modesty about this North London quartet: they seem genuinely thrilled to have this support slot, and to be playing in Liverpool. The first rule of SLOW CLUB is: you absolutely must talk about Slow Club. Tell everyone you can, because they’re a solid live act these days. They’re enjoying having 10 years’ of songs to harvest, from “golden oldie” Our Most Brilliant Friends to Ancient Rolling Sea (off this year’s album One Day All of This Won’t Matter Anymore). Effortless, too, is their stagecraft. I defy anyone to spot the seam between Rebecca Taylor’s awkward guitar-tuning patter and Rebecca Casanova’s suave vocal, delivered with a Presleyan sneer. They’re a five-piece tonight, but Slow Club’s core is still the duo of Taylor and Charles Watson. Sure, he plays while she sings and he sings while she drums, but it’s when they’re both on vocals and she sings low while he sings high, you get a voice greater than the sum of its parts. That said, any harmonies are judiciously employed. While the rest of the band squat comfily on the stage during Watson’s rendition of The Sweetest Grape On The Vine, Taylor lingers to one side, drifting past the microphone maybe three times at most, to gild her voice with his. It’s hard to spot, but American as Slow Club’s sound may be, they are anchored on this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps it’s the word “dashboard” (instead of just ‘dash’) in Everything Is New or shades of The Beatles’ Yesterday in Watson’s fingerpicking… a clearer illustration would be Tears Of Joy, three songs in, when the room really comes alive. Considerably cranked up since its appearance on 2014’s Complete Surrender, by now it sounds of the club – by which I mean Brian Potter’s Phoenix, not Berghain. As “the twilight of the set” approaches (Taylor’s poetic turn, that), the playlist positively bristles with its hooks. One Day…, lead single on In Waves, is followed by Two Cousins from 2011 and the magnificent Suffering You Suffering Me. Then they leave: the duo who supported Darts here in 2007 are nowhere to be seen, and it’s over all too fast. Stuart Miles O’Hara / @ohasm1 SLEAFORD MODS Mountford Hall Never have a band like SLEAFORD MODS been more essential. At a point when society lurches in directions unfamiliar in modern times, pop music has a responsibility to pick up the baton. The baton of hope. The baton of protest. The baton of holding prevalent views, positions and fucking megalomaniacal dynasties to account. I see little across the pop music spectrum to give me much hope that this challenge is being met. Fuck me, pop music is scared to ask the question. Jason Williamson stalks the stage like a hunched velociraptor, sweat pouring off him, steaming like a piping kebab spit. A silhouette of rising perspiration and rapidly delivered phlegm hangs around his head like a twisted halo. His side-on delivery and exaggerated tick – it’s so fabulously awkward. Great performers always perch on the edge, straddling the chasm between wonder and a bloody nose. Danger is always present, always part of the allure. Andrew Fearn bobs along, bottle in hand, play finger at the ready. His bulging eyeballs tell tales. “Marmite,” you may say. “What on earth does the skinny guy with the cap actually do?” is the common retort. Fuck that. Sleaford Mods are modern pop’s gastric band; a direct retort, a last-ditch wake-up call to a bloated art form. The kids are getting fat, square-eyed and disengaged. We need this band. In Face To Faces Williamson spits, “…in our failure to grab hold of what fucking little we have left we have lost the sight. And in the loss of sight, we have lost our fucking minds.” Despite it seeming to be to our plughole detriment, we human beings are a tribal species. We are drawn to our own – whether that be an ‘own’ based on collective outlook and shared values, or one based on some drip-tray nationalism. In theory, this should be for our collective betterment; however, it takes a braver person than me to subscribe to that view right now. I’m not alone in the
NEW YEEZY EVE 31 DEC 16 WWW.THEMERCHANTLIVERPOOL.CO.UK
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