Tool Fear Inoculum - Manchester May 2 2022

They mobilised in their thousands to see the Tool juggernaut thunder into Manchester. And what they experienced was nothing short of incredible.

It’ll be hard to put the experience into words that will convey the size, spectacle and intensity of two hours-plus of music and visuals that had the whole place anywhere between hypnotised, mesmerised and astonished.

A 13 tune set, with a 10 minute “intermission” before their final 3 numbers, you’d be forgiven for thinking Tool were going through the motions as they enter their fourth decade.

A three date UK run after a series of Euro dates, with Manchester, Birmingham and London on the itinerary might have left some wanting a more extended series of shows.

Tales of Tool shows and past performances are the stuff of legend. Tonight’s extraordinary experience will go down as that for the many thousands who were there.

Tool music is difficult to truly categorise, if labels many anything to anyone. Yes it’s metal. But it’s way more. It’s clever. Beautiful. Yes it’s big. But it’s also incredibly intricate. When they go loud and come at you and you’re caught in the blast, it’s truly exhilarating. When they go dark and delicate, you get drawn in. But from the start and Fear Inocolum to the roof-raising thundering finale of Invincible, you are transfixed.

Maynard – enigmatic, charismatic, red mohawk-topped – prowls to the left and right of Danny Carey’s huge – and it’s enormous – drumkit (although it is more of a command centre than a drumkit). Maynard moves from one side to the other, turning circles, twisting and his vocals are stunning.

Danny at centre stage is simply a drumming powerhouse. Nothing else describes this guy and his approach. He makes it seem effortless, but at the same time his beats are at the heart of Tool’s music. A signature drummer.

Adam Jones occupies a spot stage left. He barely moves, occasionally meeting bassist Justin Chancellor in the middle, switching sides and strolling back. A casual appearance belies the power of his guitar work. Throwing out beautiful melodies one minute, riffing like the heaviest of heavy machinery the next.

Bass player Justin is simply a musician you cannot take your eyes off. He commands the stage. In interviews he says he’s not a talker and lets his bass do the work for him. His bass lines form a thread through all of Tool’s work. Again, often intricate, then full-on smashing them out.

Just when you think each individual provides the fingerprint of Tool, you realise the beauty of it is that the combination of all four makes this what it is musically.

The stage-setting perfectly captures the connection between the lyrics, the music and the visuals they are so famed for in their video work. Dark, dystopian, industrial, mystical – all are blended in a spectacular stage scene. For the first four songs, the band performance behind a huge curved see-through rope-like curtain on which visuals dance across. It doesn’t matter where in the arena you’re seated, you get a stunning view. When the curtain pulls back, the crowd go into overdrive and the noise exchange between band and audience hits a new level.

The highlight of the night – and it’ll depend on your favourite song, riff, lyric – was for me Pneuma and the last track of the set Invincible. Both feature the perfect blend of all four band members and their instruments. Invincible builds to an astonishing finish, with the heavy end D-tuned staccato riff shaking the venue and everyone in it.

Tool’s amazing back catalogue means they could performance every night and tour forever and you’d barely see the same sequence of tracks twice.

Tool make music like nobody else makes music. Big, complex, and powerful. At the same time, fragile, melodic, and deep. Not only do they not make music like anyone else, the music they make does not feel entirely of this world. There is a distinct other-worldly quality to Tool – elements of it feel deeply tribal and ancient. At one point the screen is dominated by a giant pyramid, symbolising ancient peoples and societies. This is a band that would relish the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, sitting beneath the giant tors.

2020 in 10.

This isn’t an end of year best-of or most-listened-to list. It’s just what’s been enjoyed in 2020.

The Interrupters @ Glasgow Barrowland

Into the bleak midwinter of January, straight from San Diego, The Interrupters and their brand of ska punk was nearly two hours of pure joy. A packed crowd lapped it up, the pit was huge fun and the band fronted by Aimee Interrupter played right into it and seemed to love every minute back.

Frank Carter @ Glasgow Barrowland

Another huge crowd, the famous venue rammed to the rafters and Frank Carter and The Rattlesnakes blew the roof off. Trademark Frank – inciting the crowd surfers, roaming right to the back with the mic and getting the whole place bouncing with slow build ups breaking into the heaviest of riffs. Goosebump-inducing stuff.

Menzingers and Spanish Love Songs @ Glasgow QMU

A dream ticket – two of the best bands on the circuit. SLS support slot with a perfectly-pitched set on just their 2^nd Scottish appearance, combing new material from Brave Faces Everyone – just a week old at that point - and Schmaltz. SLS produced for me the album of the year. The Menzingers just continue to impress whenever and wherever they play. Their set is packed with classics that have the place moving, although nothing from their earlier more jagged-edged albums.

Menzingers – Hello Exile and From Exile

If Hello Exile was a more mature sounding Menzingers, From Exile, produced once their tour came to a premature end in New Zealand, was the stuff of brilliance. New and unexpected, almost folksy in parts, acoustic twists on Hello Exile’s songs make these two albums two of the very best, with the storytelling really coming to the fore on the latter. Last to Know into Strangers Forever on both albums is THE perfect Menzingers double-tap.

Menzingers live stream from Studio 24

Even in a year of few actual live gigs, a 2am live stream in September from Philadelphia has got to be special to stay up for. The full band rigged up in their studio doing a full-set might be risky – but the sound quality showed what a brilliant-sounding band The Menzingers have become. You know it’s good when it’s still buzzing around your ears 48 hours on.

Biffy Clyro – Celebration of Endings + Barrowland live stream

Launched in August, a huge breath-taking sonic boom of an album, Biffy took over pretty much everywhere in support. Impressive given everyone was pretty much locked down. They also performed live in their spiritual home, the Barrowlands, on an album play-through streamed to fans. Spectacular listening and viewing. The sweeping orchestral grace of Space coupled with raucous noise of Cop Syrup sum this whole album up nicely.

Hause – Patty and Paddy + Kick

For punk legend and constant tourer Dave Hause, 2020 might have been an understandably frustrating year, but it was one in which he produced some stunning noise. Kick, his full band album with The Mermaid, firmly positioned him as one of the most important performers out there. With Patty and Paddy, he paid tribute to two of his favourite lyricists – Patty Griffin and Patrick Costello, from opposite ends of the musical spectrum. Two beautifully-produced EPs, beautifully highlighted the winning combination of Hause’s voice and the guitar work of his brother Tim. Songs brought to life brilliantly during Hause’s live stream with buddy Chuck Ragan at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall.

The Lawrence Arms – Skeleton Coast

A riot of an album. All the punk moves from stalwarts TLA you would expect but delivering more with every listen. A really impressive sounding piece of work from a band who need to get back to Scotland to give this a blast live.

Bush – The Kingdom

This one passed me by until very recently when an acoustic version of The Kingdom surfaced. Listening to the full album, I don’t know why it did. It’s massive-sounding, heavy on huge guitar riffs and the vocals of Gavin Rossdale tie it all together. Don’t miss out on this one.

Brian Fallon – Local Honey

Another solo gem from Fallon. Eight songs which are more rooted in alt-Americana than The Gaslight Anthem punk anthems (evidenced by its frequent selection in end of year C&W best of lists), but which still carry strong hooks and lyrics ensuring fans of the latter hang on every word this man writes. Stripped back, emotional and raw. Again, without the benefit of touring, Fallon has turned to live stream performances to bring these songs to fans and when you see them performed on just an acoustic or piano in his home studio it really underlines how impressive he is as a song-writer.

Postscript. Early Humans album #2 A Wave is start to finish blast. Full of hooks, it caught me on first listen to Tentacles & it's been a go-to since. 

Brave Faces Everyone: 2020 hindsight and the album of the year

With perfect 2020 hindsight - one album stands above all others released this year.

February feels like it was a different time altogether. There were gigs, tours, good times - with a whole year of gigs, tours and good times to come.

Since then, there’ve been online show live-streams, stripped back albums that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day if not for lockdown and it feels relentlessly like there’s no end in sight.

In between, there’s been a lot of stunning music – much of it matching the mood.

Spanish Love Songs’ Brave Faces, Everyone was fired out into the world a little more than a month into the year and immediately provided a searing punk rock companion for our times.

  

The Pure Noise Records album felt like a clarion call. As a commentary on the state of it all up to that point in time, it was damn near perfect. We’re in this shitty world together, so brave faces everyone.

As we chaotically stumble towards 2020’s finishing line on our last legs, Spanish Love Songs’ third album has proved it couldn’t have been more prescient if it tried. Listening to it now with the benefit of a full year - this year - behind it is quite the experience.

It would be hard not to quote line after line from the album’s 10 songs as proof.

Every track hits hard, lyrics anchored in pain, angst, a loss of hope. It’s bleak stuff and even if there’s almost always a glint of hope amidst it all, it sounds tired, sceptical, jaded. The addition of a comma and a pause in the album’s title track makes the notion of putting a brave face on sound less like a call to arms and more resigned to this all just being overwhelmingly difficult: “We don’t have to fix everything at once, we were never broken, life’s just very long, brave faces, everyone.”

It was already going to be a big album for LA-based SLS, following on from 2018’s landmark Schmaltz. Still punky, still melodic, still laden with anguish and emotion, the distinctive vibrato vocals of Dylan Slocum rip through every song, even – maybe especially - during quieter moments. The lyrics and their delivery are downright inspiringly-clever.

The production is bigger than on Schmaltz. Polish has been applied. Everything is louder, deeper. The bass lines thunder through these tracks and the drums couldn’t be tighter. The guitar work is heavier but at the same time more intricate. The whole thing is laced with threads of subtle synths. A standout track, Beachfront Property – driven by a beautiful bass hook - does the job as well as any other: “Said, it’s the end of days, and we’re still hoping for the beachfront property….”

The way everything comes together makes this album special. Even with the polished edges, the lyrics, vocal and music retain their sharpness.

Optimism (As a Radical Life Choice) is a perfect articulation of how it works. Starting acoustically, a low-key lyric is bursts into one of the heaviest moves SLS have made so far. Lyrics – whether voiced at top volume or in the song’s quiet ending – are searing: “Don’t take me out back and shoot me, I know my circuits are faulty, now I’ve only ever been a kid, pointing out dead dogs on the road / Take me down in a landslide, help me weather this high tide, I’ll wear you out waiting for me to implode”.

It was an eagerly-awaited album by many who had Schmaltz on a loop (and still do) – the anthemic Losers was on my most listened to tracks of 2019 list despite being a late-in-the-year release – and it has only improved as the year lurched on.

The chance to see these songs live came in February, just a week after the album came out and shortly before gigs stopped. Billed with The Menzingers, SLS took the roof off Glasgow’s QMU with a set featuring a handful of new material. Having first caught them at Bannerman’s in Edinburgh just 18 months before that on their first UK visit, then in Birmingham and Manchester since, it’s been a buzz getting on the first wave of a band making it out there and going with it.

With 2021 just round the corner, who knows what SLS will have made of it all by the time album number 4 emerges. It’s bound to be darker, heavier and even more bleak and it’ll be worth the wait.

Hause and Ragan: Trusty chords in the Great American Music Hall

The echoes of American music reverberate around the ornate setting of the Great American Music Hall in San Franciso.

The colourfully-historic 113-year-old venue, in the city's Tenderloin district, is reputed also to have more than a few ghosts which haunt its oakwood floor and decorative balconies.

So when punk stalwart Chuck Ragan dedicated Congratulations Joe - penned originally as a tribute - to his recently departed father in law who worked the nearby Oakland docks all his years during Saturday night's live stream with Dave Hause from the near-empty GAMH, you know this is personal. And that Joe is up there in the gods with audiences past enjoying this special one-off performance.

 (Pic: Chuck Ragan, Manchester, UK; November 2019)

Over the years thousands of fans have crowded into the GAMH to enjoy live music, adding to those echoes and ghosts.

On Saturday night, punk legends Hause and Ragan took to its stage to perform a one hour and 45 minute set for devotees of the frontmen from two of the best-known bands on the scene - The Loved Ones and Hot Water Music.

Both are successful performers in their own right now, The Loved Ones having come to an early end, while Hot Water Music toured the UK last year with album anniversary shows. Either singer can command an audience in any venue.

This was a show with a difference. With just six other people in the venue due to the current covid19 restrictions in place, you could be forgiven for thinking two guys and their acoustic guitars in an albeit atmospheric venue, might not catch fire.

Lockdown has seen a series of live-from-home-via-various-streaming-platform shows. Dave Hause himself announced this show with Ragan at the end of one such performance a month or so back. Highlights so far have been Brian Fallon's one-man acoustic & piano streams and The Menzingers live from Studio Four full-band crash through their now stellar back catalogue of anthems.

The Great American Music Hall performance from two great American musicians will stand out as damn near perfection.

Streamed via Veep, of course it's not a direct replacement for standing in a crowded space with hundreds or thousands of other people, drink in hand, reacting to the music coming at you. It's a different dynamic watching a live stream - very obviously - and one this good still gives you that gut reaction that only live music can.

Everything is stripped back. Punk shows are not known for their elaborate stage set ups anyway. This is Chuck and Dave and their acoustic guitars, a couple of mics and the obligatory rug on the stage (why do performers go for stage rugs???). It's intimate - it's not standing at the barrier with the weight of the crowd at your back, but you get to be on stage, front row and in the wings all at once.

What's not stripped back, in any sense, is the power of the performance.

This is a 23-song epic set covering not just their own solo material, but songs by The Loved Ones (Pretty Good Year) and Hot Water Music (State of Grace and the anthemic Trusty Chords).

There are covers in there too, aptly spanning a wide range of influences throughout the years and genres - Brian Fallon's No Weather, Brandi Carlile's Hold Out Your Hands, Northcote's Worry, Moon Song by Patty Griffin and The Dillinger Four's fearsome and snarling The Great American Going Out of Business Sale - done by Hause on an acoustic with a nod to the fact the song was written in '98 but the themes are just as valid in 2020; the crescendo here is every bit as spat-out snarly as the breakneck speed original.

 

(Pic: Dave Hause, Glasgow Barrowlands; July 2018)

Some songs are duetted; their own material is picked up by each solo while the other sits on a stool watching on. Ragan says they're going to volley back and forth all night. At one point they chat about how many songs they're going to play - at mention of 40 both laugh and say they've got the kids to get back home to.

The friendship these two share is clear - even down a live stream cam. Years of tours, sharing stages and songs, performing each other's material. Both dedicated songs to their kids and Chuck's especially poignant Congratulations Joe, in memory of his father in law, adds another ghost to the venue's roll call of residents.

The vast array of material on display is specatcular. It's blue collar. It's Springsteen-esque in parts. It's punk, but it's also Americana.  It speaks of toil, working hard, love lost and love found. It's political and it's personal. There are more than a few references to the Revival Tours featuring various punk, alt-country and bluegrass band, which were Ragan's brainchild around a decade ago.

What stands out is the voices. Ragan and Hause are perfect singing alone - when the sing together it's truly something else. Ragan has a roar that's like velvet coated gravel. At one point singing harmony to Hause's lead, he's standing about 5ft back from the mic and you can still hear the guy. When he let's rip, stand back. Seeing him with Hot Water Music a year ago in Manchester, he commands the stage and it's effortless. He does the same here.

When he passes singing duties to his companion, Hause just takes it and runs. Having seen him over the years on his own, with The Mermaid, headlining and supporting The Gaslight Anthem in Glasgow, he's truly become a class act. Lyrics that hit hard combined with musicianship and vocals that deliver right then left hooks consistently.

I've no idea how many people watched this show. The chatter running alongside showed people from Canada, USA, Germany and the UK. Performed at 1pm San Fran time, it was 9pm in the UK - recognising the huge fanbase that exists for both in Europe. No matter when you saw it - nobody who logged in could have failed to have been blown away by it. As the lights went down and we all logged out (the lockdown gig equivalent of lights-up and the venue team clearing away the debris as the PA plays to our deafened ears) there's no doubt this was another memorable addition to the story of the Great American Music Hall.

 

 

 

 

 

Intimate with The Menzingers - Teviot House, Edinburgh: October 14 2016

The Menzingers paid their latest visit to Scotland with a gig in the intimate surroundings of Teviot House, part of the Edinburgh University student union complex.
Intimate because the venue is a tight, low-ceiling, low-stage, narrow room with a balcony over-looking the left side of the space. Intimate because whether you're standing at the bar, at the back or down in the pit, The Menzingers and their music make this an in your face experience.
The band of low-key, hi-energy, guitar-driven Philadelphia punks meandered on-stage in front of a packed floor and a heaving balcony and took off with their newest tune Lookers, from their forthcoming album. 
As if often the case, the live setting brings to life tunes which can sound very different upon first stream. That was the case with Lookers, which sounded edgier and more aggresive than the recorded version and it served to whet the appetite for what was to come.
What followed was an astonishing, sweaty, crowd-surfing romp through a now impressive catalogue of tunes, each of which saw devotees, new and old, become even more whipped up.
The setlist ( http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-menzingers/2016/teviot-underground-edinburgh-scotland-3fd612f.html ) was a perfect blend of old and new - Lookers tipped straight into Obituaries with the crowd roaring back at Greg, Eric, Tom and Joe "I will fuck this up, I fucking know it...".
I Was Born provided a huge nod to the album Chamberlain Waits which again the crowd responded to with real vigour. Chamberlains Waits also gave up Rivalries and Who's Your Partner - this is an album of such brilliant guitar hooks and soaring, snapping vocals it was a real pleasure to here these tunes live.
There's very little by way of between-song chat - other than Greg's references to the band's love of playing to a Scottish crowd. But that doesn't diminish the connection between band and audience, which was electric and tangible. This is a band that can do no wrong and their next outing to tour the new album will surely only add to their cult following.
The mighty double salvo of Gates and In Remission had the crowd singing, bouncing and surfing as one - the encore made complete with support act and fellow Philly singer Roger Harvey joining the Menzingers for the last hurrah which included an epic cover of The Bouncing Souls Manthem.
This was a punk gig which left the Teviot crowd gasping for air, hoarse and sweathing buckets as well as hoping for a quick return from the hottest punk ticket going.