Review: Taupe/The Brackish/Michelson Morley

The Cube, Thursday 9 March

It’s been roughly half a century since rock music emerged as a musical form and, while it’s still vital that untutored young people hurl themselves into it in a frenzy of self-expression, there’s a real body of serious musicianship and musical knowledge to be learned from that story. This triple-bill of instrumental outfits showed just how evocative and thrilling it can be when ‘proper’ musicians take rock music seriously.

With their impeccable collective jazz pedigree opening trio Michelson Morley wove an electro-acoustic path, Jake McMurchie’s tenor sax emerging from a bank of pedals to rival any guitarist. He spent much of the set crouching over them, harvesting an orchestra of captured and effected samples into a wall of counterpoint on There Are No Different Waves and delivering a funeral pulse for End of Age. Screen-lit drummer Mark Whitlam deployed both electronics and drum kit (and even Tibetan bowls) and duetted cleverly with his own laptop under Riaan Vosloo’s bass solo on Primitive One, the tune fading out through polyrhythmic sax sounds. There was an interesting and creative tension between melody and riff running through, with sudden clean breaks from unmoored ambience into tightly locked slams and back again. It’s effective but there was no denying the pleasure of the Krautrock inspired 4-beat drive through Rice Rage, their final number.

If Michelson Morley had brought some rock discipline to an essentially jazz approach, The Brackish were much more tightly tied down. With a dual/duel guitar front-line of seasoned rock players Luke Cawthra and Neil Smith the emphasis was on smartly written music delivered to display the exactness of the writing, albeit with the wig-out option never too far from the surface. The epic Loggins Breakdown was a case in point, opening with Smith’s plinking guitar and Cawthra’s jabbing response before harshly dissonant chords shook the rafters en route to a glowering rumble-riff. That flowered into a raucous cosmic psychedelic conflagration that subsided before a major thrash ending upturned the apple cart again. It was symphonic stuff, referencing The Magic Band, Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd and The Pixies, and the invigorating performance was indicative of how the band’s music has tightened still further since last year’s Liquid of Choice album.

And so to Taupe, the Newcastle-based threesome whose tour had inspired the evening. This being their final date they could have been forgiven for being either jaded or recklessly demob happy and though they claimed the former the general mood was more the latter, thanks to the energetic optimism of the music. More jazzy than Brackish and more rocky than Michelson Morley their performance brought things together perfectly, somehow conveying spontaneity throughout their elaborately constructed sequences. Like the Roller Trio the line-up is sax/guitar/drums, a bass-less arrangement that puts a fair strain on guitarist Mike Parr-Burman’s thumb, but after three weeks on the road it was impressive how rigorous his digit remained, even when challenged by the time-stretching subtleties of Take One, an erratically hiccupping number requiring him to conjure a fairground organ sound and finally to dance two-footed on his bank of pedals. Saxophonist Jamie Stockbridge was no less agile, roaring harmonised growls into the mix while dapper drummer Adam Stapleford drew it together and took it down to a surprisingly restrained conclusion.

The largely unannounced numbers came from new album Fill Up Your Lungs and Bellow, an eclectic scrapbook of musical collage that both jarred surrealistically and yet formed a perfectly balanced whole. If the tune title More Is More was meant to be a statement of their philosophy it didn’t really represent the judicious control of their resources at all times, especially Stapleford’s drumming which surged and stretched throughout. Similarly Stockbridge’s alto sax used exactly the right dose of frenzy when required, yet cruised alongside the guitar at other times with an almost lounging restraint. These dynamic shifts and the precision of their delivery (plus the odd bit of shameless proggery) all combined to create attention-seeking music with both hearts and minds behind it.Hopefully Bristol will see more of them in the not-too-distant future.