Bellows @ Komedia
Bellows
Troop EP Launch and Twenty One Crows
at the Komedia
Wednesday 28 October 2009
A few days before Halloween, four piece folk ensemble
Twenty One Crows played at the Komedia and beguiled the audience with funereal
songs full of longing and foreboding. Before they began they asked if it was
still foggy outside, reminding us of a bloodthirsty James Herbert novel. In
between songs the singer frightened the bejesus out of us with stories: one
about a path to the sea on the Isle of White called Haemorrhage Hill that was
so steep people would keel over and die while climbing it: another about a
sanatorium that could not be demolished because the ghosts of the insane dead
scared the workers away.
The band played sitting down. The
guitarist coaxed cries of feedback from his Fender. The bassist kept his back
to us and accordion player Becca added to the sea shanty atmosphere with
swathes of warm harmony. Like American prog folk exponents The Decembrists,
their songs have unsettling nautical themes, with tales of light houses and
beaches, but theirs are even spookier. In A
Night in the Life they sing about "bodies
piled higher" and in Blow Wind Blow they
beg the wind to "bust this wretched place
apart with all your might."
Some of the songs were so quiet that a
member of the audience inadvertently added percussion when the bells on her
bangle tinkled as she reached for her drink. During the final song I heard the
lines, "if the
walls close in and the days grow dim, I am not afraid." They
might not have been, but we were! If you like Tom Waits, The Decembrists or
Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, you will love Twenty One Crows.
Almost every young band I have spoken to about their music
has said that their songs are 'impossible to describe.' This is a disingenuous
comment to make in the MySpace age and often highlights the gulf between their
creative vision and how their music sounds. Sometimes though, a band does deliver
on their promise to be indescribable, and Bellows are such a band. They say
their instrumental music is, "cinematic" and
I have to agree. I stopped writing in my notebook after three songs. I closed
my eyes during the fourth but then had to look at the stage to see how they
made the sounds I heard. I saw the bassist using a bow, the drummer playing
with bare hands, the guitarist petting his fretboard. There were arpeggios and
histrionics, pauses and pulsing bass lines. The music was like the soundtrack
to a dystopian David Lynch film based in Europe instead of the American south.
It made you think and it inspired confusion. Where were the usual song
structures, the simple time signatures? The music was both old and new. There
were rhythmic passages that were be-bop and vocal samples that were hip hop.
This was music that was... indescribable.
Troop EP by Bellows is available now on Cake Records.