tanaou
hear tanaou on purevolume

My first trip to Birmingham, to play a gig with Now It's Overhead and Tanaou, and what a good gig it was. I shan't talk about NIO since I'll post a review of their album that should pretty much cover it - suffice it say that they were excellent, and very nice people to boot.

i only saw about half of Calire Horton's set but I liked what I heard. First of all she and her guitarist soundchecked with Sebadoh's "Soul and Fire", a song that's been going round and round my head quite a bit lately. I'd forgotten how good it is until it popped up on Domino's "Worlds of Possibility" compilation. Anyway, so big brownie points there for taste alone. But the delivery made it even better, sttripping it down to the basic tune, slowing the tempo, and slathering Hope Sandovall style vocals on top. And this pretty much characterises what I saw of her set - fragile vocals and chrystalline guitars. And I'm a sucker for that kind of thing.

Tanaou were excellent too - imagine Delgados if they were into emo and you may have a reasonable idea of what they sound like. Sort of lazy, but they do have male/female vocals and a violin, so there you go! The songs were good, not going for the obvious changes, plenty of loud/quiet dynamics without simply rocking out for the sake of it. Their guitarist was excellent, doing lots of complex finger tapping and picking that a brought a really melodically sophisticated texture to the whole thing. This was backed up one of those hard-hitting post rock drummers that I love, and a bass player that clearly liked to play a lot, doing lots of complex lines that were sadly lost partly because they had a lot to compete with and also simply because NIO's bass amp settings were a little on the boomy side for that kind of thing. And for once the live violin thing worked - so often it ends up being an out of tune mess, but it worked well to bring an extra dimension to the melodies, just as it should. I liked Jaime's vocals, very Conor Oberst in the emotive stakes. I have to admit I would have liked them a lot more if he was singing in a American accent, but then I guess some people just can't help it.

Hopefully there should be a Tanaou CD on its way to me right now, so you'll be hearing more about them soon.