Scottish Gig Highlights – January 2015
Right, enough’s enough. If you insist on validating the passing of yet another twelve months by making a resolution to be less of a shithead this year, at least do it properly. Close the paleo-diet and yoga pants tabs you’ve got open (seriously, who’re you fooling), and start flexing your eardrums instead. Here’s the January roll call:
First up, Bad Luck at King Tut’s – appearing as part of the venue's annual New Year's Revolution, for which you can find full listings at the back of the mag – on 15 Jan. All loose-lipped vocal overlaps and sullen guitar solos, they’re a glowering guilty pleasure who’ll catapult you back to the days of scribbling love hearts on physics folders and being unjustly detained for wearing converse to school. Supporting are fellow gorgeous noise-makers ShnarffShnarff, Pinact and Twin Mirrors, so you’ll get a cross-section of stompy alt-rock, psych-punk and resplendently shouty stuff. Y’welcome!
A few days later, Glasgow Art School welcomes J Mascis, a man of mythically flaxen hair and divine tuneful musings to match. Tied to a Star, released last summer, is a sparkling, rotating bundle of smoky vocals, flurrying acoustic guitar and lonely but lovely lyricism. Have a deek for yourself on 19 Jan.
Those comfiest with country can also look forward to First Aid Kit – AKA Johanna and Klara Söderberg – this month. Folkier than ceilidh in a cornfield, the sisters will be breezing into Edinburgh Usher Hall on 19 Jan and bringing with them the dusty delights of their 2014 release Stay Gold. Catch them before they steal away for the Swedish chapter of their tour in February.
Mark Lanegan’s earthquake-inducing rasp will be filling O2 ABC on 20 Jan, when he’s joined by a full band to perform tracks from a discography which spirals down to his stripped back 1990 Sub Pop solo debut, The Winding Sheet. A Krautrock-inspired rusty-electro influence resurfaced this year when the band dropped Phantom Radio in October. Sampling most of the drums for the record on a mobile app, Lanegan is intent on exploiting the evolution of music technology in his prolific creation of soul-searching treasures – and we’re quite happy to sit tight and watch that unfold.
Another jackpot-hitting LP from autumn 2014, just two years after her stratospherically popular debut Devotion, Jessie Ware’s rested and ready to explore the globe's stages once more. Her latest album Tough Love was the product of post-tour exhaustion, unravelling from a single track written in New York about heartpains of the past. With strikingly arranged new material which succeeds in shrugging off the SBTRKT sidekick visage, Ware is not one to be overlooked. Edinburgh Queen’s Hall is the place to witness her evolution live on 23 Jan.
DO NOT MISS: Neneh Cherry with RocketNumberNine, SWG3, 30 Jan
Neneh Cherry, the soul-simmering sass merchant who’s held rule of the funk-rap throne with the likes of Salt-N-Pepa and successors like Missy Elliot pays us a rare visit, and good grief is it a welcome return.
Featuring viciously fresh production from Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), last April's comeback LP Blank Project is a chromium alchemy of genres; trickling between trappy and funky, tribal and ambient. Cherry’s definitely back, and still so cool there’s a chill-blains hazard attached. Get re-initiated as she makes her first onstage appearance in these parts since 2005.