Playlouder - Music is the Network

That’s a lot to squeeze in to one night and such is the enthusiasm with which Junkboy are anticipating the evening that they’re not joking with the 8:00 start. 

The venue has hardly had a chance to fill up when Junkboy, having recently swelled to the magic number of three members (and I thought there were about eight of ‘em when I heard their latest LP ‘3’!), take to the stage and begin their swirling maelstrom of duelling strings and built beats, dispensing with vocals and simply indulging in their own charismatic brand of jam-band-gone-right post-folk compositions, at first acoustic, then moving in to electric, and, as they put it themselves: “in typical Junkboy fashion, we’ve just found our groove, and now we’ve come to the end of the set.”

And a beautiful set it was, lacking only in length, but kudos to the boys – it’s their night and they’ve brought together some prodigious talent from across the land, (at least in the case of Rothko, who haven’t played the city for eight years), and they seem more keen on seeing the other bands than hogging the limelight themselves.

Snorkel are by far the weirdest of the bunch, comprising a junkshop’s supply of pedals, knobs, L.E.D.s and keys, being a ragbag bunch of hairy men who pretty much typify the “experimental” non-genre and spend their time on stage building, cementing and deconstructing soundscapes of electronica, drums and, moreover, general noise. There’s absolutely no observance of a pop ethos within Snorkel, or even much of an acknowledgement of an audience: when you’re making music like this, you probably never expect much of an audience anyway, but what they lack in popular appeal they certainly make up for in esoteric enjoyment and nerdy determination. It’s nice that they have found each other.

By comparison, Epic45 are a marketing person’s dream. They are perhaps the least memorable of the bunch for being closest to what I’ve seen before, but that’s not to say that in any other line-up they’d not stick out like a sore score, and it’s not to say that in this line-up, their songs don’t shine. In fact, their own take on electronic post-rock shoegaze etc. etc. is quite affecting, and only when you take in the lyrics do they lose anything in the translation from stage to soul: there’s something about “birds don’t fly they just avoid falling” or something similar that sounded a lot more like a (flawed) matter of opinion than any kind of scientific or philosophical revelation.

And finally, Rothko, the daddies of the day, having been in this game longer than any of the other bands, or certainly Epic45 and Junkboy, I wouldn’t like to speak for (or to, for that matter) Snorkel. Rothko were, in the past 3 bassists making sounds to a largely indifferent public from a post—rock heyday. Rothko are now two bassists doing a similar thing to a perhaps even more indifferent public in a time when post-rock is perhaps somewhat passé. However, in this environment it becomes apparent that they’re not so easy to slot in with that scene. 

The music that Mark Beazley makes, (whichever of the two that make up Rothko today he actually is), is more explorative and brooding (if you can imagine that) than any of your anorak-fodder post rock also-jogged.

Though an unlikely headliner in terms of the ultra-subdued pace and propensity to be talked over by those who were dragged along at the behest of the handful of true enthusiasts here, Rothko’s music becomes something quite otherworldly and transporting if you can invest in it; it demands concentration and it rarely follows any predictable paths, and ultimately it has much more artistic individuality and emotional resonance than you’d be likely to expect from two nondescript chaps with bass guitars. For those who have waited eight years for their return, or indeed for those who came with a degree of open-mindedness, Rothko truly do not disappoint.