Vivers: Onto the stage, via a YouTube clip of Jurassic Park, wobble the great Cats In Paris, and into their wobbly keyboard and violin-led wrong pop. They jerk, stop, start, lock down complicated time signatures, and wash cute noise and sweet singing over the top. Everything gleams and fits together suspiciously well: the sugar short bursts of racket, the Casio twiddles, the background clips of fish, moggies and Matthew McConaughey. In fact, from their films, name, merch and banter, Cats In Paris would be fucked without the animal kingdom. That and human talent and God’s desire to put it there: yeah, without animals, humans and God, they’d be nothing.
Saesneg: Seeing CiP at Swn was a mixture of surprise and delight. And I was pissed. Bans are better when I’m inebriated. So maybe CiP aren’t the saviours of the British that I thought they were previously – but they’re still good. CiP is made up of a bassist, a drummer and a ginger beard playing keyboards and violin. The best bits are thanks to the latter – executing an imaginary orchestra of bontempi bleeps and spits, a bit like a twee Depreciation Guild. Songs stop and start at random, and Mr Ginger Beard apologises profusely for song endings that never were. But the playfulness, the up-and-down videogame pitch changes and the fucking awesome visualisation screen at the back, make up for it.
Vivers: I’m still head scratching my way round the critical and hipster drool that accompanies Abe Vigoda. Their most recent album, ‘Skeleton’, is shiny, neat and not at all bad, but maybe unworthy of the massive press boner. Live action adds several layers of noise and face scrunching, and ultimately fails to answer the question. I’ll stop going on about it now: Abe Vigoda’s set of dreamy punk is pretty good in its own right, endless slabs of warped sunbeams, trebly but careering guitars, vocals just another stream of sound. In their relentless dash to the next song they bypass their lack of variety and hit a fairly positive bullseye.
Saesneg: Oh I really don’t know. For a start they were on directly after the Mae Shi, which makes reviewing difficult. There’s nothing wrong with Vigoda, really. But there was nothing life changing either and after seeing TMS raise the bar it’s impossible to judge them on their own terms. This doesn’t seem to bother them tho’, and I understand the bands’ have take turns to go first at each show. Its sad tho that for a double headliner they really are still the support to the Mae Shi. I don’t get the dream pop references here – for me it sounded a lot more sludgy than that. Nothing wrong with their chugging but…. Really not much I can remember.
Vivers: The Mae Shi actually play middle of the bill, but not in my head. Rotating headline be damned, these guys are at the top of any food chain you care to mention. Their permanent, lunatic grinning, goggle-eyed dedication to entertaining is merely the least of their qualities: the Mae Shi play songs like they’re stuffing cake in your mouth. Hyper pop stomps like ‘Lamb And Lion’ and ‘The Melody’ get interspersed with spasmodic minute attacks of furious screaming. Deranged barbershop a capellas sound better in the crowd, underneath a giant overhead sheet. Obscene life-affirming fun that celebrates and counters attention deficit disorders. The Mae Shi may well be the best live band invented. Their last song is terrible, because it’s their last song.
Saesneg: I dismissed their album when I first heard it last year, but now I realise I Just Didn’t Get It – The Mae Shi’s mission is expressed much better live than on an iPod, embracing familiar californian punk sounds and weaponising them for a experimental mentalists arsenal. They turn harmonised shouting into an art, using their voices as a bed to maintain their frenetic tempo, sweating and jumping and kicking the shit out the air until it submits and does exactly what they it to.
And as if playing until they bleed isn’t enough, they’re on a secondary, maybe primary, mission to put a smile on the face of every cynical git (i.e. me) in the audience and will not stop until they are done. Not happy with us using a monitor as a soap box? We’ll get a fucking 10 ft by 10ft canopy and play underneath. Not happy with the canopy? We’ll play on the edge of the stage and make you all sit down, or stand up. Or maybe we’ll wonder through the crowd and sing I Get Almost Anything like a group of lost pilgrims at Lourdes.
And if you still don’t care after all that, you’re clinically dead.
