Did we, by any chance, happen to give the impression that the Solidays festival is happening in early July this year? It seems that we did: sorry. The annual Paris summer event is actually on a week earlier than last year – the weekend of 26-28 June. We know this because it says so on the CLUAS Foreign Correspondent (Paris) weekend pass. Yahoo!!

We’re yahooing because the line-up has some cracking names on it. Sunday night headliner: Manu Chao! Saturday night: Amadou and Mariam! Imagine how cool they’ll sound on a summer evening – and even if it pours rain those two alone are worth the trip.

And if that wasn’t enough, the rest of the bill is studded with little gems. Friday night features Yuksek, Digitalism, Hockey, The Dø and Tony Allen. (That evening’s headliners are local rappers NTM, of little interest to us.) Warming up Saturday night for A&M are The Virgins, Alela Diane, Friendly Fires, Girl Talk, The Ting Tings (a hit at last year's festival too), Late Of The Pier and a host of other domestic acts. (Again, local headliners Keziah Jones and Benabar doesn’t excite us.)

Then, along with the boy Chao on Sunday you’ve got a trio of French Letter favourites: Cocoon, John & Jehn and Syd Matters. Plus, there’s Metronomy and the good-time Balkan folk of Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra.

There are still weekend tickets available at the ridiculously decent price of €48. The festival takes place at the Longchamps racecourse, conveniently located at the end of two metro lines and (more importantly) within an hour’s summer stroll of Chateau French Letter.

As we explained before, Solidays began as an AIDS awareness event (‘solidarity’ + ‘holidays’) before growing into a large and respected summer music festival. It still honours its origins: proceeds will go to AIDS charities and on the weekend the site will host information and advice tents. Full details are available on the Solidays website.

Manu Chao! From the 2005 compilation of his old band Mano Negra, here’s the fairly deadly uptempo version of ‘Out Of Time Man’: 

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Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert - WARP 20 (live in Cité de la Musique, Paris)

Review Snapshot: To honour one of electronic music's best-loved labels, a birthday bash featuring two cult figures from different points on the spectrum of that genre. Vibert's DJ set is cool and seductive; Aphex Twin sets your head and entrails to spin-cycle. Two different live experiences but each great in their own way.

The Cluas Verdict? 8 out of 10

Full Review:
Gouging the mind’s ear for two decades now, Warp Records are currently celebrating their twentieth birthday by putting on shows in major cities around the world. The Paris leg at the Cité de la Musique comprises two nights: last night Pivot, !!! and Jarvis Cocker were among those getting the party started (Nightmares On Wax apparently pulled out at the last minute) and tonight Aphex Twin (right), Luke Vibert, Hudson Mohawke, Leila and Plaid are blowing out the candles.

Luke Vibert is here doing a DJ set in what’s normally an installation space at this venue, a combination of museum, exhibition centre and concert hall for all genres of music. Apparently there’s some international turntable code decreeing that artists can’t play their own music during DJ sets, so we don’t hear Vibert’s gorgeous ‘Sharp AZ’.

But no matter: his DJ set is fantastic. He starts out soulfully with the eclecticism, sensitivity and funkiness of Mo’Wax and the boy Shadow in particular. At just the right moments he knows when to up the beats and build excitement before pulling it down into cooler, more cerebral sounds again. Thus he plays with the crowd all during his set, and it’s impossible not to get swept up in it.

Only once does Vibert drop the ball, by working in the vocals from ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The effect is to make the crowd self-consciously aware that they’re dancing to some ‘80s naffness, like when a film actor gives a corny line straight to camera with a wink. But that’s just a minor blip. Luke Vibert is probably the best DJ we’ve ever danced to, though in fairness we only have as a comparison DJ Wreck-The-Buzz at our local hop.

Dashing into the main concert hall so as to grab a space for Aphex Twin, we caught the end of Plaid’s set. Earlier we had seen some of Leila’s turn. Both seemed impressive enough from the brief glimpse we got of each, so we must check them out in detail sometime. (We didn’t get to see Hudson Mohawke. Sorry.)

As for tonight’s marquee name, Aphex Twin live is an impressive experience. Richard D. James (born in Limerick!) looks less diabolic in person than the distorted face from his videos: in fact, he exudes a kind of Jamie Oliver mate-iness. His alter-ego, though, is gleefully malevolent – those squelchy, distorted sounds trouble your mind and shudder your entrails.

On which point, his visuals feature a gruesomely clinical mortuary sequence that’s not for the squeamish; some punters briefly stepped outside to recall their lunch. In a shout out to the home crowd, we also got a slide show of the sicker images from controversial ‘60s French satirical magazine Hara Kiri.

As for the music, there are times when James coasts along by letting the bare beats drag on for a minute or two, as if he’s filling time while rooting in his bag for another trick. Anyone who came just to hear ‘Windowlicker’ or ‘Come To Daddy’ will have been disappointed; the pretty piano melody of 'Flim' is the only one of Aphex Twin’s more familiar, accessible or ambient tracks to get a (brief) run-out tonight.

But overall it’s a great show. For pop kids like your reviewer, not a regular at live electronica or techno, the sensory blitzkrieg of Aphex Twin was an overwhelming thrill. This is one new customer who’ll be shopping here again, then.

Aidan Curran

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A review of the album 'Posthumous Success' by Tom Brosseau

Review Snapshot: The sound of a singer-songer in creative transition and perhaps finding his true voice. This album’s folk foundations are weak when exposed to attentive listening, but Brosseau’s other aspect is an alt-rock swagger that infuses this record with wit and personality.

The Cluas Verdict? 6.5 out of 10

Full Review:
The self-deprecating title of Tom Brosseau’s third album suggests that this North Dakota native may be of that rare species: a male acoustic singer-songer with a sense of humour.

And for the most part this is true. ‘Posthumous Success’ is a likeable sort of record that brings a refreshingly alternative range of influences to bear on the familiar old folk-pop format. ‘Big Time’, with its wry declaration of wannabe ambition, shudders with a treated electric riff that would sound at home on stage at the Enormodome. There’s a triumphant lo-fi sneer to ‘You Don’t Know My Friends’ which is picked up again in a veritable Lou Reed tribute called ‘Drumroll’. That VU sound suits Brosseau and he wears it like he owns it.

Strangely enough, though, he’s less convincing whenever he chooses to emphasise the folk style that probably inspired these songs at the writing stage. Brosseau’s thin, vibrato-drenched voice just isn’t robust enough to carry the weight of sincere balladry. On something self-consciously rootsy like ‘Wishbone Medallion’ he sounds like a college boy pretending to be a gnarled old-time bluesman by putting on a fake moustache and his granddad’s hat. ‘Favourite Colour Blue’ (in two versions that top and tail this album) and ‘Been True’ sound whiny. And ‘Axe & Stump’ is the sort of Ritter-esque laboured lovelorn sincerity best left in the bedsit.

So, to recap: sometimes Brosseau plays and sings with the indie swagger and dry cynicism of a young man, which is where this record fairly buzzes with attitude and personality. Other times he tugs the forelock to traditional folk and blues, and then it all sounds flat and faintly contrived.

Given these two aspects of this album, it’s no surprise to learn that half the songs were recorded in upstate New York and the other half in Portland, Oregon. Whichever of those two locations got Brosseau into his Velvets frame of mind, there he should stay for 100% of his next record.

Aidan Curran

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Morrissey (live in Leisureland, Galway)

Review Snapshot: Great set, shame about the venue . . .

The Cluas Verdict? 8 out of 10 

Full Review:

I am in ‘the coastal town that they forgot to shut down,’ trudging along a drizzly Salthill Promenade.  Welcoming lights beckon a few feet ahead.  They belong to Leisureland: swimming pool, fitness centre, off-season funfair park, and the venue for tonight’s Morrissey concert.  As I enter the grounds, I pass a heap of dismantled funfair ride equipment being rained on; perfect material for Morrissey.  Perhaps he’ll see it and write a song about it.  Heaven Knows These Waltzers Are RustyNow, or some such.  The entrance has an A4 sheet of paper tacked to it that reads, ‘Morrissy’.  Someone - a disgruntled fan perhaps - has used a biro to helpfully add the ‘e’. 

Inside, I am greeted by the welcoming aroma of chlorine.  I make my way past the ‘bar’, which is roughly the size of a hotel mini bar (a badly stocked one).  I find a good spot; close enough to the front to get a good view, but far enough away to avoid being trampled by Morrissey’s more hysterical fan boys.  The gig is yet to start, so I survey the empty stage.  The backdrop is a huge black and white image of a sailor, proudly brandishing his muscles, as he smokes a cigar that dangles from the corner of his mouth.  Great.  There is a giant gong on stage.  Brilliant.  I can see a shelf offstage, lined with a row of those enormous silver exercise balls.  Erm?  It begins to feel like the audience is part of some leisure centre Morrissey flash mob.  I look down, expecting to see a disgruntled pilates class squashed under our feet.  

Thankfully, when Morrissey appears on stage, he more than distracts us from our shoddy surroundings.  Nobody brandishes a tambourine quite like Morrissey and the way he manipulates a microphone flex is an art form in and of itself.  He trails it casually, intermittently whipping it behind him like a charismatic ring master.  He performs with a youthful vigour that convinces me there must be an ageing picture of Steven Patrick Morrissey hidden in some dusty attic.

Smiths fans are in their element as they are treated to several classics, including Ask, Some Girls AreBigger Than Others, and This Charming Man.  ‘For a Wednesday night, I suppose it’s not bad,’ drolls Morrissey, as the crowd cheers in a slightly manic fashion.  As he launches into How Soon Is Now? I begin to wonder if Morrissey gets bored, singing his hit songs from the 80’s night after night.  After a while, wouldn’t it start to feel like karaoke?  How does he keep it interesting for himself?  My question is answered by an incredible red strobe light sequence at the end of the song, which accompanies some frantic gong playing by one of Morrissey’s band members.  It is these details that add a whole new dimension to these familiar songs, elevating the show into a brave new audio-visual world.

The lights are worth singling out in particular.  (I haven’t seen such effective use of stage lighting since I saw MC Supernatural supporting Jurassic 5 back in 2001.)  The aforementioned sailor backdrop is intermittently drenched in yellow, green, red and blue light; or silhouettes of the band are cast onto it.  The lighting cues are timed perfectly to the music; many songs ending in a pleasingly dramatic fashion with an abrupt black out.  The one incidence of overkill occurs during Ask, when piercing yellow searchlights scan the crowd, as though trying to unearth the ‘buck-toothed girl’ from Luxemburg.  I have to cover my eyes with my hand until the song is over.  Shyness may be nice, but blindness is not. 

Songs from ‘You Are The Quarry’ are well received, among them, Irish Blood, English Heart, How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel?, and First Of The Gang To Die.  The highlight is a particularly emotive rendition of Let Me Kiss You, with Morrissey ripping off his sweaty shirt and throwing it into the crowd during the line:

But then you look in my eyes

And you see someone

That you physically despise. 

But my heart is open,

My heart is open to you . . .

Before playing his new single, he addresses us politely: ‘May I lodge a complaint?  HMV in Galway refused to stock my new single.’  This is greeted with a chorus of pantomime boos and shouts of ‘Wankers!’ from the audience.  I can only presume the decision by HMV isn’t due to any particular anti-Morrissey sentiment – it’s certainly the catchiest song about anti-depressants I’ve ever heard - but rather a general decline in sales of singles. 

It is still raining as the crowd exits Leisureland, but nobody seems to care.  The sound of excited chatter fills the air; a sound generally reserved for contented concert-goers.  Not bad for a Wednesday night.  Not bad at all.              

Máire T. Robinson

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A review of the album 'Royal Family - Divorce' by Storsveit Nix Noltes

Review Snapshot: Balkan folk instrumentals tarted up with punk riffing and a brief spell of shoegazing squall. The genre sound is done well but the lack of variety in the tracks means your interest will wear off very soon, though it's probably good fun live.

The Cluas Verdict? 6 out of 10

Full Review:
The band’s name is sufficiently Scandinavian and melodic to suggest that they deal in catchy tunes – and with that allusion to Hollywood hellraiser Nick Nolte, arse-kickingly catchy tunes at that. Plus, that album title can only be said in a Lydon-esque sneer. This seemed promising.

Imagine our disappointment, then, to hear a full album of instrumental Balkan folk. For that, dear friends, is what ‘Royal Family Divorce’ by Icelandic post-rock supergroup Storsveit Nix Noltes gives you.

If you’ve ever seen a film by Emir Kusturica, then you’ve heard this kind of music in a typical scene of his: the scrawny, scruffy middle-aged peasant somehow manages to pull the sultry young gypsy babe and at the wedding the entire campsite is dancing around to it. (Your reviewer hasn’t seen Kusturica’s film on Diego Maradona yet, so we’re curious as to how he’ll work a Balkan gypsy wedding scene into that one. Perhaps Napoli take a pre-season tour of rural pre-war Yugoslavia.)

Oh, but there’s a bit of modernising and indie-ing up done to the genre: some fairly basic electric guitar chugging through all the numbers. Second-last track ‘Winding Horo’ (most of the track titles have ‘Horo’ in them: we believe it’s Serbo-Croat for “condescending, middle-class Lonely-Planet ethno-tourism”) has a bit of MBV-style screeching, the only point where this record briefly considers taking a creative risk.

Look, it’s not a bad album and were you to hear this music live you’d probably have a good night. But on record the whole thing is samey to the point of boredom: same rhythms, same arrangements, no vocals or variety to break things up. It’s background music for when you’re dancing with a sultry young gypsy, and it doesn’t bear attentive listening.

And maybe it’s just us but there’s something vaguely dispiriting about a bunch of Reykjavik indie kids turning out a Balkan folk record. Perhaps it’s the same culturally-right-on self-satisfaction that makes many fans of Beirut so insufferable. (Your reviewer has a hip local bookstore whose staff we’re thinking of here; we’re sure they’ll love this album.)

But if you’re engaged to marry a Serbian gypsy or a bourgeois-bohemian ethno-tourist, this’ll be a hit at the wedding reception.

Aidan Curran

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A couple of months ago I was in Guangzhou, that sprawling capital of concrete and spaghetti junctions and home to the Canton Fair. Like Shenzhen, the other big city in Guangdong province, home to the largest concentration of factories in the world, Guangdong is about commerce and being as successful as Hong Kong, which is technically part of Guangdong (once Canton). More suprised was I to find a flowering of musical talent and record labels (like Starsing). My favourite guangdong sound is dombra (a stringed central Asian guitar-like instrument) playing singer Yerboli, an ethnic Kazakh from China's far west, who's moved about the country's richer cities playing in bars and at Han Chinese banquets. Thanks to That's PRD magazine for drawing my attention with their complimentary article timed with the release of Yerboli's article on Old Heaven Records in Shenzhen. Listen to him on myspace.

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Since their incorporation in 2005, Casio Kids have become reknowned for their epic live performances combining old analogue and trashy keyboards, pop melodies and shadow puppet theatre.  Musicially, the band claim to draw inspiration from artists as diverse as Paul Simon and New Order.

Having spent the first part of the year supporting Of Montreal on their European tour (on top of Eurosonic and SXSW apperances), Tuesday May 26 sees the Norwegian electro-troupe outfit make their Irish debut in Academy 2.  Tickets are on sale now from the usual outlets for €15 but, thanks to MCD, Key Notes has a double pass to give away.  

To win, all you have to do is email keynotes[at]cluas[dot]com (removing the [at] and [dot] and replacing them with @ and .) with 'Casio Kids' in the subject line.  The competition is open until Friday May 15 when a winner will be drawn at random.  As always, Key Notes decision is final.

Casio Kids: Grønt Lys i Alle Ledd

 

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This Friday, 8 May, is a public holiday in France to commemorate VE Day. Last Friday, 1 May, was a public holiday too, the French being a socialist people at heart despite the efforts of their bling-bling centre-right president.

And Ascension Thursday, 21 May, is also a day off - the French may be socialists in a secular republic but that’s no reason to let a holiday opportunity pass by. Basically, during May no one’s doing a tap of work over here.

It’s fitting, then, that the last weekend of this holiday-strewn month serves up the first important music festival of the French summer. Europavox takes place on 27-31 May in the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand.

We’ve featured Clermont-Ferrand here before: bands like Cocoon and Quidam are at the vanguard of a thriving local scene that inspired Le Monde to call the city the French capital of rock. With the breadth and depth of its line-up, Europavox should put Clermont on the radar of the international pop community.

The first two nights are curtain-raisers featuring French stars Olivia Ruiz and Sliimy, the latter looking and sounding like a cross between Prince and Mika. Serious business begins on Friday 29 May – between three venues (Cooperative de Mai, Magic Mirrors and Le Cabaret) there are appearances by Maximo Park, I’m From Barcelona, Thecocknbullkid and Danish poppers The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, auteurs of the radio-friendly cracker ‘Around The Bend’.

Bloc Party are the main draw on the Saturday night in the Cooperative de Mai. But that same night in Magic Mirrors there’s a tasty show featuring French Letter favourite Emily Loizeau (even if we’re not crazy about her new album) and fellow piano-singer-songer Soap & Skin, one of many fine acts to emerge from Austria recently.

The final night features an impressive folk-pop bill: Herman Dune, Loney Dear, Lonely Drifter Karen… and our own Declan de Barra. G’wan Oirland! For something with a bit more BPM that night, the alternative is Vitalic.

While Declan de Barra is the only Irish act appearing in Clermont, throughout the five nights of Europavox there’s an impressive cast of acts from across the continent. The Scandinavian region is well represented, as you’d expect at any multinational popfest worth its salt – but there are also acts from Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic, countries not normally associated with Champions League-level music. (For instance, we’ve only ever heard of one decent Spanish band: punk-poppers Dover.)

Full details about Europavox are available on the festival’s website and MySpace page. Any Irish people visiting Clermont-Ferrand wouldn’t want to be too smug about winning the Grand Slam this year: rugby can be a painful subject for the locals during late May/early June, the time of the local team’s annual defeat in the league final.

But in the Europavox spirit of pan-continental pop fraternity, here’s Herman Dune, Frenchmen with Swedish roots, and their lovely ‘Try To Think About Me’ from a live radio session in Los Angeles:

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MSTRKRFT (live in The Academy, Dublin)

Review Snapshot: Toronto’s electro remixers blast out the tunes to an adoring, dancing, day-glo crowd. Subtext? Not for the over-25s. 

The Cluas Verdict? 6 out of 10

Full Review:
‘Isn’t that just Mr. Scruff spelt wrong?’ I was asked when heading to see Toronto duo MSTRKRFT at the Academy. No, it’s Mastercraft (also spelt wrong). The moustachioed men have remixed all your favourites: Buck 65, Death From Above 1979, Bloc Party, Metric, Justice. Due to arrive on at 12.30, the masters were supported during the wait by LA Riots, a DJ who decidedly kept quite serious but popped out some tech-house tunes for the filling crowd to bop to.

Somehow we garnered a spot in the VIP lounge, which was ironically equipped with opposites in excess - a large wooden Buddha and several bottles of Cristal. Looking down onto the crowd I noticed many neon T-shirts and indoor sunglasses and began to feel a bit removed from it all.

Resembling a pair of cowboys (with a bottle of JD on the decks to back up that point), ALP and JFK aka MSTRKRFT bounced onto stage eventually at 1.15am. With alien sounding beats on their build-ups and inspiring a blonde guy to stage dive, they moved the crowd to a level of insanity not far off the emotional outbursts of hysteria at festivals. Strobe lights, purple lights, flashing lights; the venue did its best to raise the level of the show far above simply two guys on decks. It worked.

Men posed at the barriers while MSTRKRFT knocked out heavy remixes of Spiller, Justice’s DVNO, Simian Mobile Disco, and more Daft Punk era floor-fillers. It was about this time that the crowd began to jump and the DJs did too. This inspired a vast number of crowd-surfs, another stage dive (see above) and people trying to get across the barriers while the bouncers quickly made little of them in their massive arms.

Two years ago I would have been right there, until the very last tune, dancing without purpose or care. But I’ve started to believe that maybe nights like this are not designed for the over-25s.

This one left me with a brain melt, as well as the vision of a hairy white bum that was exposed as one man tripped down the Academy staircase.

Pint of Guinness in Doyle’s anyone?

Niamh Madden

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Note to CLUAS regulars:
The following blog post has nothing to do with music. And it may appear at first glance to be completely irrelevant. But it relates to the technology we use to run the site (DotNetNuke) which - it is sad to say - your humble webmaster is quite keen on. Read on at your peril and if you get to the end and go 'Er, so what?' you cannot say you weren't warned.

Recent email exchanges with other DNN Blog Module team members got me thinking about how popular the DNN Blog module is relative to the other 22 free DNN Modules (or "Projects" as they now seem to be called) available via the DotNetNuke mothership. Measuring "popularity" of a piece of software is an imprecise - if not impossible - science. All the same, I made a stab at it by assuming that number of downloads of a module is an indicator of popularity.

Each of the core DNN modules has a stats page on Codeplex (from where the modules are downloaded) and it shows you the number of downloads for each module over different stretches of time (for example here's the stats page for the blog module). I pulled the number of downloads over the last 3 months for each of the 23 modules and the table below brings all the data together, with the modules listed in order of average downloads per day over the last 3 months.

The most downloaded (or popular) module? That'll be the "Form and List (formerly User Defined Table)" module (with an average of 51.9 downloads per day over the last three months). Biting at its heels in 2nd place is the Blog module with 42.9 downloads per day in the same period. I am not surprised to see the Blog module with such a relatively high number of downloads. But I never thought it would be the Form and List module that would top the table (even if I for one have been very keen to deploy its latest version on CLUAS.com in order to replace the - dare I admit it? - FrontPage forms that are still used on the site).

Ranking	Module	Downloads per day
1	Form and List (formerly User Defined Table)	51.9
2	Blog	42.9
3	Survey	42.2
4	Gallery	38.5
5	Announcements	33.0
6	Events	32.2
7	News Feeds	31.0
8	Documents	28.7
9	Store	28.6
10	Forum	28.5
11	Links	24.9
12	Repository	21.7
13	Map	20.9
14 (joint)	Feedback	20.3
14 (joint)	Media	20.3
16	Wiki	20.2
17	IFrame	17.5
18	FAQ	17.0
19	Reports	17.0
20	Contacts	17.0
21	Help	13.4
22	Users Online	12.6
23	XML	10.6

 

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