This has swollen into something massive hasn’t it? Like the entire Dark Tower series crammed into a putrid basement. Um, let’s start again: Balloon nights should be imprinted on your internal calendar by now as top drawer celebrations of live music, spoken word and the heavy drinking that connects the two. They also seem, for reasons that may appear suspicious, to avoid using the same venue twice. Hence, the glorious Undertone cellar, and a line up bulging with weirdo jewels. Cats & Cats & Cats have played round these parts a few times now, and their scrappy mix of shouty indie and mischievous post rock always warms that awkward part of your heart. See them. And Catsx3 are only the nominal headliners of a spread that includes the post-everything post rock of Delta Sleep, the sleepy-eyed pop slackness of Effort, and three shy, drunk authors keeping the literary end up. Why is it called Balloon? Because balloons are great.
The latest in Balloon’s 2011 series of events. More great music and top class prose. Not as scary as the last one.
Cats & Cats & Cats
This is what The Joy Collective said about them in 2009. ‘What place do bands like Cats & Cats & Cats spring from? Hard to believe there was a group meeting where someone said “Let’s write songs that flit between shouty post rock, thumping waltz numbers, jinking indie and clattering noise every thirty seconds, with a load of violin on top. It’ll be great.” Such mutant unruliness comes from nowhere: they sound like themselves and this a very good thing. Cats & Cats & Cats may sound deceptively shambolic, but their chewy sugar rush gives me headaches in a good way.’
The violin has gone, they’re down to a four piece and they’ve released an amazing album. The songs are more focussed but no less varied. If anything, they now exude the ramshackle, twisted charm of Okkervil River. They’re an amazing live band and one that’s only getting better.
Delta Sleep
Delta Sleep hail from Canterbury, their music combines guitar driven melodies, held together by jazz influenced percussion and relentless bass, topped with sprinkles of left-field electronica. To coin Delta Sleep’s sound is a hard task indeed, but has once been described by a wise old man as an “enchanted battle between At The Drive-In and Mogwai for the city of Radiohead in the land of Aphex Twin”. Their playfulness invokes sugarcoated riffs, and their hospitality will warm you through on a crisp winter’s day. If that sounds a bit pompous, just take my word that it’s a bit post-rock-y with some shouty bits but is still really melodic and ace.
Effort
Effort are a two-piece (duo sounds wrong) that are relative newcomers to the Cardiff music scene in this guise but veterans in their own right. Frost plays guitar and keyboards for The Automatic and Jen Long presents BBC Introducing In Wales on Radio One.
The band were formed in 2010. In early 2011 the band recorded demos at Long Wave Studios with producer Romesh Dodangoda. Their debut 3 track EP ‘No Effort’ was released for free on March 28, 2011 through bandcamp.
The band’s sound recalls the early nineties UK indie scene where in the pre-Nirvana landscape, bands wrote simple songs about being in love and sounded vaguely American, this has come around full circle with US bands like Best Coast now following a ploughing a similar furrow. If you don’t tap your feet, grin and start singing along to their choruses then chances are you have no soul.
Leeum Johnson
In Leeum’s own words: In summer 2007 I wrote my first block of prose-poetry about some beetles I found in Italy, two years later I ran off with second place and the audience vote at the John Tripp Award for spoken poetry, and when the hangover wore off I was part of the Cardiff spoken word scene and one of the buttons had come off my shirt. Another six months after that I had a festival slot in Anglesey and an old man was giving me free shots of some kind of home-brewed honey and lemon schnapps. I’m still not completely sure what’s going on, but I really, really like it.
Holly Muller
Holly is in the band Hail! The Planes and because she’s very clever she writes poetry and stories too. She’ll be reading you one of her stories this evening and it may involve pie.
Richard Owain Roberts
Richard Owain Roberts has two stories in the forthcoming Parthian Books anthology, Nu2, out in July this year. He blogs at http://youhavebeenpromoted.blogspot.com/. He lives in Cardiff. He is writing a novel. He is a stand up guy with many relevant skillsets.
Tickets £5 Adv/£6 Door
