Live Owlls this Saturday at the troll market of Stranger than ParadiseHosted By: Owlls
When: Saturday Oct 25, 2008
at 12:00 PM
Where The Miller Bar, 96 Snowsfields London SE1 3SS
SE13SS
United Kingdom
Description:
Owlls

Click Here To View Event

http://www. myspace. com/owlls - self described as tropical goth - and nope we don't know what that is either so don't bother asking though whatever it is we love it. The Owlls are a six piece (3 girls / 3 boys) combo hailing from London who if 'little smoke' is anything to go by have a passing fetish for Adam and the Ants 'kings of the wild frontier' - well at least that's what the initial reaction was until our ears picked up the marauding Morricone meets Mancini dustbowl mirages and haunting Hammer horror styled harmonies, this beauty soon unwraps itself into a parched death rattling turbulently arid western sound-scape that if we didn't know any better we'd said was the result of blood smeared pact between the Gun Club and Wall of Voodoo. Beer swilling ominous noire dashed shanty like musings bleed through the grooves of the Tom Waits like 'raindrops' while 'evil bob' described as a rough demo is by the sounds of things a whip cracking wild country vibed psycho-billy beauty that had us reaching for our Meteors and Inca Babies discs of yesteryear. All said and done it's the smoking 'black lodge' that caught our undying affection - sounding like a crooned out Flaming Stars shimmying up to the Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet with those Gallon Drunk dudes twiddling the mixing desk controls weaving their becoming dark romance over the unfurling festivities.

After many night of coaxing and cooing the ghosts of two new songs have finally been persuaded to lay down in our lodge, in exchange for a small amount of fresh blood and a bucket of scorpion wine..please enjoy.

OWLLS

Looking like refugees from several different bands who all met up in a jail cell after a drunken night gone horribly wrong, it's north London's finest pirate bar band, and they really SHOULD be playing in Tortuga in the 17th Century rather than Elephant & Castle. But no matter; by the time they're a couple of songs in you feel like they may as well be. Bring me the horizon, and why's all the rum gone?
Every inch the rock'n'roll preacher of doom, frontman Luc growls, howls and yowls his way through a set of rock-solid whiskey-sodden numbers, taking in sea shanties, gypsy dances, gothic terror and all points in between. One moment a mass of flailing limbs,the next, constrained by the stage, throwing himself to the floor, where he kneels and screams at the sky, as if calling on God for salvation, damnation or possibly another double. And you bet God can hear him
This is BIG music. The fact that Owlls have mastered that trick, like the Birthday Party and Gallon Drunk before them, of being absolutely watertight yet sounding like at any moment things could descend into total chaos, shouldn't distract you from just how fucking BIG this music is. Listening to the violin-led near-instrumental Little Smoke you could close your eyes and wonder just how those pirates managed to fit an entire orchestra into some dodgy bar in Tortuga. Or alternatively you could wonder just how someone managed to provoke Tindersticks into a chain fight. And while a lot of bands claim their music is soundtracks for non-existent films, listening to Owlls makes me want to MAKE films just so they can do the music. The cowboy-friendly guitar on DogHead serves only to convince me further that if anyone ever manages to film the seemingly-unfilmable Blood Meridian, it would be a crime against humanity were they not to have this playing in the background.
But that's not to say it's background music, not at all. This is in your face, spitting tobacco in your eyes and killing your dudes. That crazed preacher man in his desert chapel, howling in the face of the storm about a coming judgment? This is what it sounds like inside his head. Only, y'know, a lot more fun.
And the crowd are lapping it up, reactions raging from closed eyed dreaming to rabbit-in-the-headlights WHAT THE FUCK?, but in a good way. If they didn't come across as being such nice people in between songs, Owlls would be one hell of a scary band. None more so than on crowd favourite Raindrops, an epic stomp that sounds like the results of a pretty messy lock-in during which Tom Waits manages to convince a really fucked William Burroughs to get up and dance on the table, and several people leave in bodybags. You know. A Saturday night thing. Ending in a near-polka of which Gogol Bordello would surely approve, and containing the wonderful couplet "He said there's no light at the end of the tunnel / I said fucking go down and light it yourself", being inspirational, funny, and FUCK YEAH all at the same time, Raindrops is an instant classic, and it's surrounded by similar rough musical diamonds.
Right now you can go and see Owlls for a couple of quid. Do so, because if there's any justice in the world, very soon they'll be playing somewhere you have to have the resources of the Spanish navy to buy a drink.
Seriously, they are MADE OF AWESOME. It's like drinking grog with gypsy pirates in that town that gets painted red in High Plains Drifter. It's that good.



Deuteronemu 90210 and a bottle of rum.