Buffalo Bill And The Indie'Uns

Midori Hirano/Gnu And The Shrew/Muarena Helena, Buffalo Bar, Windsor Terrace, Cardiff, Thursday April 2 2009, 8.30pm.

Your chaotic correspondent has been threatening to make a Loose night in Cardiff for some time, and finally got his act together to make this eclectic and engaging bill, albeit one artiste short with the disappointing absence of Lily Green with throat problems. When in Cardiff, use your Brains, so your ruddy-cheeked rogue sampled some of the brewery's ales in a few local taverns beforehand, the pick being the Reverend James as available in the best of the bars, The Cottage, on St. Mary's Street.

All this exhaustive research already had your stewedshrewd scribe in a jolly mood by the time he made it upstairs at the popular Buffalo Bar, further enhanced by seeing the lovely Liz Hunt from The School on the door, dispensing some Parma Violets and a free compilation CD as she ushered your timeous tinker into the venue to catch the opening moments of East London's Muarena Helena. They're a good introduction to the evening's entertainment, as they combine folk, classical and rock instrumentation but with enough added edge and strangeness to offer a frisson of curious menace to proceedings. Sample song title: Gangland Hand Gesture, so listen to your creaking consigliore when he says watch out for this lot.

Duo Gnu And The Shrew hail from Manchester, and come to Cardiff fresh from Marc Riley's seal of approval on his 6Music show. 'Look at the scary puppets!' points out Liz, as the pair not only deal with found sounds but also a fascinating, mottley collection of vintage/retro bric-a-brac including the afore-mentioned finger furniture. Singer Jennifer Kay has a rasping delivery which may prove an acquired taste, but for your intrigued interloper added to the sense of theatrical oddness that give their predominantly acoustic ditties a distinctive appeal. CD 'Time For Tea', on sale at the gig for a mere six quid, is definitely worth rummaging for, with 'Gasboard Fraud' and 'Bingo' standing out on first few listens.

Headliner Midori Harano is a petite Japanese solo musician whose made her home amidst the electronic scene in Berlin. She offers predominantly keyboard music which produces pretty, pastoral, hazy soundscapes but with enough beats and glitches to add some swooning movement to the ambient electronica. Midori had also arrived in Cardiff entirely free of entourage, which made me rather fancifully think of her like a William Gibson character, a tough cookie in vulnerable guise, trotting the globe with her particular brand of techno-alchemistry. The result was even more intoxicating than the Brains' beers.

In conclusion, a roaring success for Loose, with three apparently very different acts making some logical connections with each other, a friendly, civilised vibe permeating throughout and all the artists concerned proving approachable, even to your Brains-dead blogger's blether!

Next day, had another wander around Cardiff before heading home, getting an 'above-par' cappuccino in Starbucks, taking a walk up and down the impressively reconstructed Roman castle that is slap-bang in the city centre (the audioguide is voiced by the BBC's Huw Edwards) and sampling the Wheat Ale at the nearby Zero Degrees microbrewery that is located opposite from the Millenium Stadium. Don't think it'll be too long before your restless rascal will be gig-going in this neck of the woods again.

Grace Bothers

Savage Grace, Electric Cinema, Birmingham, Saturday July 26 2008, 4.30pm.

CAUTION: CONTAINS MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS.

This is your intrepid inquisitor's first visit to the Electric Cinema since it was re-opened to much blogging hullabuloo a few years back. It's now touted as the oldest operating cinema in the UK, and it is a grand building, although your long-in-the-tooth loafer remembers it rather differently in its' Tivoli guise in the 80s, when it was considered something of a sleazepit where we made furtive forays to see B-movies like James B Harris' Cop and Craig R Baxley's criminally-under-rated Action Jackson. Visiting the cinema now feels a much more welcoming, middle-brow experience, with plush sofas; pretty, friendly box-office staff and a silver spoon to go with your white chocolate and raspberry ice-cream.

Tom Kalin's Savage Grace is the cinematic fare this afternoon, a film that is apparently attempting to re-construct the events leading up to the savage murder of a socialite by her troubled young son in 1972 London. The film is pretty to look at and mostly watchable, contains some strong performances (notably Moore as the doomed diva) but has too many serious flaws to be considered a success. Any film of such relatively short length is going to suffer from the episodic structure imposed on it here, leaving the viewer to struggle to get their teeth into the filletted fare on offer, and as a psychological study it's a non-starter as we're left none the wiser at the end of the film why the son takes the knife to his mother then calmly orders a Chinese.

Wikipedia's references to the real-life case would suggest that the film has played fast-and-loose with many of the facts of the case, something that would have made more sense if it had made the story more interesting not less. As it is, Kalin has made a film that brings to mind past movies like Mommie Dearest; Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?; The Sheltering Sky and Ma Mere, but only serves to highlight their relative superiority to the shallow showboating on offer here. Although any film that reacquaints us with elfin curveball Elena Anaya from Sex and Lucia ain't all bad so gracias for that.

Related link: Moore happy to embarrass kids.

Dead Kenny's Behrami Army

To celebrate our beloved West Ham finally making their first major signing of the summer in Valon Behrami, a Kosovan-born Swiss international right back, whose crazy hair and tats should see him fit in well with our long history of 'eccentric' full-backs, Parallax View sees fit to empty our favourites folder for you to pick 'n' mix -

More reasons to be cheerful as Joe Lean And The Jing Jang Jong shelve their debut album. Seems like an 8/10 rating from the NME doesn't amount to a hill o'beans these days!

We've cut back our gig/festival-going in the last month or so, but some good folk have put the hours in during our absence -

Drowned In Sound review Supersonic 2008.

Ben SWSL's Glasto 2008 Diary.

Sweeping The Nation reviews Truck festival.

Last Bus Home reviews the Lovebox Weekender at Victoria Park.

Troubled Diva reviews White Denim at Nottingham Bodega.

In other news -

Rock drummers are top athletes.

Attachments' Amanda Ryan is to play Cathy in Birmingham Rep's upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation.

Twenty Major's cure for another boring summer.

Scary Duck on passive-aggressive notes.

Lydongate? Johnny's Behaviour Rotten? Swells on the 'racist' rickus (via RussL)

Careless Genes shows us how to make home-made peanut butter.

Birmingham's Flapper and Firkin faces demolition. (via Pete Ashton)

NOT SAFE FOR WORK eye candy if you like the idea of a Japanese Cheryl Cole lookalike with F-cup depth to her personality - Suzuka Ishikawa (20): REMINDER: NOT WORK SAFE.

M.I.A. and Santogold Get It Up together.

Cat With A Theremin (via just about everybody, it seems).

And finally, we did get to a gig last night, review to follow shortly, but here as a taster is one of the bands, Red Pony Clock, and their silly promo for My New Best Friends. If you like what you see/hear, they'll be playing the Indietracks festival in Ripley, Derbyshire this weekend -

Summer Night City

Richard Prince: Continuations @Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London, Sunday June 29 2008, 11am.
Female Agents, Odeon Covent Garden, Sunday June 29 2008, 6.25pm.

Spent the first weekend in a while down in London, the first couple of days mainly taken with meeting up with and getting to know a certain voluptuous Brazilian online friend of mine, who, amongst other things, introduced me to the delights of pacoquinha, an intensely sweet hit of peanut taste textured somewhere between biscuit and fudge, good with tea or coffee as long as long as you have a sweet tooth!

Sunday represented an opportunity to soak up some culture, and went along to see the Richard Prince exhibition Continuations at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. Prince may be best known to alt.music fans for providing the striking sleeve art to Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse, but, although there were a few of his nurse paintings included, as well as a drumhead autographed by Thurston, Kim and Lee from SY, the exhibition presented a broader overview of his work that spans over four decades.

Just as the nurse pictures are appropriated images from pulp novel covers subverted and fetishised by Prince, much of the rest of his work involves customising found objects such as car hoods, and in one stunning case, an entire Buick adorned with objectified images of naked women. Elsewhere, there are a series of photographs of cowboys and biker chicks, and Prince isn't even beyond appropriating other peoples' jokes, with stylised paintings featuring looped one-liner gags. The result is an impressive, arresting collection worth a half-hour's browse for anyone in London with an interest in modern art.

Then headed off on the District Line to Brick Lane, where visited Rough Trade East for the first time, renewed my taste for octopus, wine and chocolate dessert at a tapas festival and wandered into 93 Feet East where there was supposed to be an all-dayer happening, but found no punters to be seen or music to be heard!

A quick change at the hotel later and then into the West End to see Female Agents, which follows in the sly, saucy footsteps of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book by looking at the derring-do of undercover female resistance agents in World War Two. In this case, Sophie Marceau's crackshot recruits/conscripts some dodgy distaff divas into the SOE's female operative branch (known as, we shit ye not, FANY) to distract the Nazis in France long enough for them to help the escape of an Allied geologist doing important groundwork paving the way for D-Day.

It's fairly derivate stuff, suffering from some erratic levels of characterisation that means you don't always care as much during episodes of jeopardy as perhaps you ought, but it says much for the zip of the production and the committed performances from the game, gallic cast that, despite some obvious flaws, the resulting film manages to be thrilling and poignant for the most part, particularly recommended for filmgoers with equal levels of passion for wartime heroics and the female form.

Turned out to be a bad time of it for Germans all round, as got back to the pub beneath the hotel in time to watch the second half of the Euro2008 final in which Spain vanquished the 1996 champions 1-0 to become worthy winners of a surprisingly entertaining competition, a particularly welcome result given that many of the bar's patrons seemed to be Spanish or Portugese speakers.