They say appearances can be deceptive, but sometimes they’re wrong about that. The man Napoleon IIIrd himself does a fair job of keeping things under wraps – he’s Lego character neat from top to toe, and there might be a beard, but unusually it’s one that gives little away. He’s so styled-yet-nondescript in fact you might suspect him to be a spy if you were particularly paranoid. But his sometime drummer Alex on the other hand, very much here tonight, gives the game right away. Clad in bright yellow Mr Bump t-shirt, clutching (and dropping) drumsticks with a giddy tick, ginger hair and beard sprouting maddeningly from all over his head, decisively mouthing vocals from the backing track though he’s nowhere near a microphone and possessing a glazed look akin to an episode of the Magic Roundabout on fast forward. You can make assumptions about the type of music he might find himself involved in and throw a haphazard guess at the nature of his contribution to that music. And you’d be right. Napoleon IIIrd usually crafts his music alone, in a bold fantasy land of awry pop tales anchored in real life, playing live with the uber-DIY backing of a reel-to-reel tape, neatly singing and dropping guitar and keyboard flourishes over the dynamic electronic bed, an amalgam of Beck and glum London folkie Chris TT. This is all very satisfying, his tunes siphon down 70s rock and 80s electro-pop efficiently and bolt on beats to hijack your toes, but it’s the addition of day-release ginger skin-thumping nut Alex that stretches our smiles to cracking-point tonight, booting the tunes through the roof and hurling torrents of firing-range explosive, excitable, water tight beatage at every song he plays on. His mischievousness brings out the fun side of these tunes too, whilst seeking to playfully rile the main man, who – as revenge possibly, hoping to have the last laugh – dismantles his kit drum by drum as he attempts to play the final song to its close, only to be pushed backwards into the debris when he has nothing left to occupy himself with other than a hi-hat. It’s a fitting close. Fog are one of those acts that make complete sense languishing in relative obscurity on one hand, but don’t deserve that at all on the other. Read any words on them and you’ll quickly discover that they (or he – he being musical prodigy Andrew Broder) confound most listeners at most turns, they’re not often palatable, they’re true to their name – thick, disorientating, biting, abstract. And we, like those listeners we reference, are dumb(con)founded tonight. We know them mostly from the ‘Ether Teeth’ album, an Andrew Broder solo project, an intoxicating and unusual mesh of Anticon style hip-hop abstracts, ambience, folk, electronica and dark melancholy. Folktronica it is not. He’s signed to hip hop labels (Ninja Tune in the first instance, then Lex), but certainly can’t be characterised like that. And yet, for all this unpredictability and electric-eel-like genre escapology, nothing prepares us for the venerable, thrilling sonic strangulation we’re immediately subjected to tonight. It is as though Thurston Moore has been rubbed in gunpowder and projected from a canon towards our midriff, winding our sensibility and summoning drastic hyperventilation as feedback and violent distortion peels around our peripheral vision and walls crumble. Our attention, in the bank. Out of that chaotic bed rises characteristics that are more familiar; the fragmented bass rhythms, choppy, unorthodox structures, demonstration of the depth we presumed we’d see. Only exaggerated, multi-fold, drowned in decibels. His staggeringly intuitive, able, intense musicianship is laid bone bare before you, which the 2 other members are more than adept at harnessing and spinning furiously – and sometimes delicately – to emotional ends. Together they give legs to the term eclectic, reminding us at various points of artists as far and wide as Jimi Hendrix, Murder By Death, The Mountain Goats, Mars Volta, Sonic Youth, Wilco, Onelinedrawing and Springsteen. The variety begs your forgiveness for the occasions things veer especially emo-wards, and you’re happy to grant it. In this form they are perhaps at their most pin-down-able. Quite. Something very special, appearing in human form. Relevant sites:
www.fogtimewaster.com/
James Berry for Crud Magazine 2007© |
