It's fair to say that such “weird” or potentially esoteric sounds belong in such white-walled/wooden-floored gallery spaces, but the scuffed-up DIY aesthetics of all the bands at these two Seripop performance nights means they'd fit moreso into divey warehouse spaces or basements. Either way, these were two of the most vibrant, fun nights of music and experimentalism I've seen in Newcastle, so much so that really this sensitively converted ex-flour mill scarcely felt like a regular night out; it could've been London or, heck, even Berlin. That's a good thing; the grungier feelings that Seripop (two Canadian visual artists and members of AIDS Wolf and Hamborghinni) brought to this Northern English city went down like a treat.
Still, I was a little slack in making the first bands on both nights (and also got pretty distracted by the amazing silkscreens, cassettes, and zines exploding with color and the merch desk), so after missing juneau brothers and A Middle Sex, it was the texturally and volume-dynamic noise of Blood Oracle that I heard first. Using old walkmans, vocals and a variety of pedals, they built some scratchy fields of distortion that focused on the sporadic, lovely, and unpredictable, funnelling burnt-out soap opera memories into a new context.
If Les Cox (sportifs) formed out of a shared tiredness of Newcastle's often “po-faced music scene” (so true!), then bravo; their jangly pop slides out with an artfully skewed sense of '90s lackadaisics, chucking those jaunty chords and wonky vocal affectations, an oblique and joyfully art-damaged approach to a vaguely twee aesthetic.
Spin Spin The Dogs take the cake as far as the British bung-pop goes (Ã la Country Teasers, xx) because of their positively silly Mark E. Smitheries and awkward leers of their khaki-green/park ranger outfitted lead singer. It's super fun and embraces the amateur element of DIY in the most heartily ironical way.
London's Roseanne Barr's DIY punk got all clamorous and endearing on the slightly better-attended Saturday night before local favs/Blackest Rainbow-released Jazzfinger with their tectonic free-noise rumbles. It was Leeds-based Beards who really stole the show with their way-over-the-top (amazing) matching black-&-white-striped outfits that looked like some acid combination of Roman soldier and high fashion. Their pop is particularly colorful and tight, if chuggy and math'd-out at times.
London's Cleckhuddersfax brought a similar eccentricity. I got kind of obsessed with the contrast of the long-haired synth nerds playing keys (real Freaks and Geeks garage-style aesthetics) to the fluoro leotard of the lead singer, but their slightly jocked-out DIY transcended both. Way more than Devo revisionism, their muted pop worked best at the start, when the beats were more energetic, but the combination of severe musicianship (on said synth players and drummers behalf) with showmanship worked great. Seripop's noise project Hamborghinni was scheduled to play last but couldn't due to illness, so the night ended here, fitting for two nights of enthusiastic DIY performances.
