Cattle Decapitation vs. Beverley Knight: my week in weird gig combos

Think Tank, Newcastle, 21/06/16

The Sage, Gateshead, 22/06/16

Well this was a strange week and one that, musically, could only be described as 'eclectic'. I had never been to a show at Newcastle's impressive Sage venue and seeing that one of my wife's favourite singers was playing there, I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone: seeing the venue for the first time and chalking up some serious brownie points. Alas, Beverley Knight cancelled her show (some flimsy excuse about a sore throat. Pfft...) so the wife and I ended up drinking cocktails all afternoon instead.

Knight's rescheduled date, only a couple of weeks later, turned out to be the day after a show that I definitely wasn't going to persuade my wife to attend. San Diego's finest death/grind exports Cattle Decapitation were playing one of Newcastle's better small venues, Think Tank. I'm not the world's biggest death metal fan and probably couldn't describe where the genre lines lie, but I do enjoy the heavier side of things. Cattle Decap being a band that rarely makes it to these shores, I just couldn't miss it.

Cattle Decapitation are not as nasty as the name suggests. Whereas death metal bands have a tendency to write meaninglessly about unpleasant subjects (early Carcass, any Cannibal Corpse song), and Cattle Decap play up to that at times, they also carry a strong ecological message in some of their work. Originally an all-vegetarian band, their songs tell stories about nature (often in bovine form) reclaiming the Earth from humanity. There was a guy next to us smoking a vapour cigarette, apparently dry ice flavour, and I'm voting for nature to start with him.

Playing as a five-piece tonight, they make some pretty exacting requests for monitor settings and plunge headlong into some pretty fierce DM/grind, played at a speed that would enable them to travel through time. The musicianship on display is impressive as they go through breakneck tempo changes and some of the finest riffs the genre has to offer. What sets them apart from many of their rarefied scene is that their songs are memorable, brought alive by Travis Ryan's vocals. More than just a DM screamer, his voice easily alternates from low-end growl to pitched scream, giving the songs actual choruses. Alas, tonight the sound wasn't great (the make-everything-as-loud-as-possible mix doesn't help) and some of the more technical elements of their songs are lost in the mud, but it's still easy to tell that these guys have some serious talent, and it's great to seem them put it to use writing songs about the end of humanity.

Suffering through the next day with ringing ears and, being at the age where you're genuinely not sure if your hearing will fully recover, I spent the day worrying that my hearing would ever fully recover. With a curious mind and a very excited wife, I headed to the Sage. Having only walked through the vast, pristine foyer before, I was suitably impressed by the wood-lined hall known as Sage 1. Deigned for perfect acoustics, it looks unlike any venue I'd been in before and we took our seats high up in the top gallery with a bird's eye view of the stage. Having arrived early, we were 'treated' to a DJ set from a DJ whose name I can't remember. His modus operandi appeared to be to badly mix songs that you might hear at a wedding, adding ill-fitting beats at seemingly random intervals. So jarring were the rhythms at times, it made the previous night's entertainment sound like Coldplay.

The stage, adorned with a staircase separating drum riser and keyboard banks, lit up and Knight emerged at the top. Opening with 'Soul Survivor', she sounds impeccable and puts on a hell of a show. Please bear in mind that I have no real affection for soul music, and that the previous night I willingly went to see a band called Cattle Decapitation, but I was seriously impressed. The only song of hers that I really knew was 90s hit 'Shoulda Woulda Coulda', and it's not a song I would immediately associate with a powerful singer, more a well written pop song. As Knight started going through tunes from her new record Soulsville, it was clear that I was in the presence of a serious talent and there were times when the voice went straight through you to give a little shiver down the spine. The Sage's sound quality was impeccable and suited her voice to a tee.

Ably supported by an 8-piece band (a soul Slipknot, anyone? Didn't think so) we get hits like 'Gold', 'Greatest Day', 'Get Up' and 'Flavour Of The Old School' (yes, I had to look this up). She's grateful to the (admittedly somewhat diminished, given the rescheduled date) crowd throughout and the main theme from the stage throughout is fun: the band join in with synchronised dancing and use the stage to it full effect, and Knight herself is a consummate performer, giving her all both vocally and physically. The crowd lapped it up.

Bravely, Knight gives us a note-perfect Whitney Houston cover as well as her rendition of 'Hound Dog', showing the versatility in that wonderful voice, before ending with an uptempo 'Come As You Are'. People leave the venue smiling from ear to ear, myself included. While I've probably not had my narrow musical horizons widened too much, I've been treated to a reminder of a time just 15-20 years ago when pop stars were actually singers, and the good thing is that lots and lots of other people here remember it too. My overriding feeling is one of bemused pride that my little city can attract such diverse musical quality as the last two nights have shown, and has the venues to do it justice.

Cinema Ruined My Life: or, How I learned to keep worrying about the ending

Cinema has ruined my life. Ok, maybe a shade of hyperbole there, but if you'll hear me out I'll try to explain. Cinema has not entirely ruined my life, but it has certainly affected my enjoyment of it and helped shape my somewhat warped perception reality. I love films, and I've spent much of my life watching them instead of doing something remotely useful. It's got to the point where I base entire conversations around stuff I've noticed in films that references stuff I've noticed in other films, and for this I apologise to anyone I regularly talk to. Watching a film is one of the most enjoyable things I ever do; I enjoy it more than I do most conversations, most interactions, and normally feel more enriched by the experience. And herein lies the problem and my arrested development.

Endings. Movies have them, life is ongoing. This has created a schism in me between expectation and reality and it's all come down to endings; after the ending, a character doesn't have to do anything else and whatever was a problem is now no longer so. In life, you still have to get the bus home and pay the gas bill. Imagine for a second that you've resolved an issue in your life that meant you could start a new relationship, or save an existing one. You celebrate by going out on a date. A final compromise is made, tensions are resolved, epiphanies had by all, and to finish you kiss in the rain or look longingly at each other across a table. It might also help to imagine that you're Emma Stone or Ryan Gosling. In a film, the camera pulls away and leaves you to it, credits roll. In reality, you're soaking wet in the rain and end up with a cold, your starter ends up stuck in your teeth, and when you inevitably jump into bed later on, you inevitably don't look like Emma Stone or Ryan Gosling. Endings are bullshit and life pales by comparison because the evening burns out rather than fades away.

Take the ending of Die Hard as an example. John McClaine, reunited with his wife, drives away in a beaten up limo. It's a perfect, if a little tongue-in-cheek, Hollywood ending. In reality, he's been beaten up, shot and his feet have been cut to shreds. There's no way that evening isn't ending in a long queue at A&E, and he's definitely not getting laid. If you extrapolate that narrative, as you would in real life, endings are bullshit.

The happiest endings often leave the biggest black holes if you look beyond them. Elliot from E.T. is surely to be subjected to a barrage of tests and interrogations from the same government agents who were apparently willing to shoot him just ten minutes from the end. It's A Wonderful Life's ending, while not condemning to George Bailey to “prison and scandal” still leaves him condemned to a life in Bedford Falls, never daring to leave lest everything falls apart in his absence.

Even films without particularly happy endings are prone to leaving frustrating voids if you care to look beyond the credits. In Apocalypse Now, does Capt. Willard stand any chance at all of making it back down the river in that fucked up boat alive? And while the unknown advice from Bill Murray is rather the point of Lost In Translation's ending, the natural assumption is that they both go back to their miserable lives. One happy ending that I do like is that of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia; a cat's cradle of a film about interconnected lives which ends with a slow zoom culminating in a very well earned smile from Melora Walters' downtrodden character. It leaves you believing the next episode of her life will be good.

I like films where the ending either forces you to think about what happens afterwards, be this directly (despite it kind of cheating, I'm a fan of Inception's ending as it forces you to choose between optimism and pessimism), or indirectly.

The ending of John Carpenter's peerless The Thing is brilliant because it has primed you with the knowledge that for there to be any sort of victory, both remaining characters have to die. A victory for humanity, but not so much for Kurt Russell and Keith David, either of whom could be an alien interloper.

The Coen Brothers' brilliant Cormac McCarthy adaptation, No Country For Old Men ends with Tommy Lee Jones' sole moral character reminiscing, having withdrawn from a world which is too brutal and immoral for him to cope with. While it's sad to think that a good man couldn't defeat the evil in his world, at least we know that he's safely away from it. I'm also a fan of Burn After Reading's ending, which basically tells you that nothing you've just seen really mattered and the joke's on you for trying to work it out.

David Fincher is great at leaving you to deal with with weight of the climaxes of his films. Seven, like No Country leaves the moral veteran character, and therefore us, to ponder and cope with John Doe's complete act. We aren't supposed to think that the good guys have won and everything is ok, we are supposed to still feel the gut punch as we leave the cinema. Fight Club, a modern equivalent of The Graduate IMHO (more on this later), leaves the distinctly unromantic pairing of 'Jack'/Tyler Durden and Marla Singer watching the world burn, pondering what the hell to do next. Wouldn't you do the same? The ending to Gone Girl leaves more planted in the viewer's mind than it shows on screen: Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike's reunited couple are held together by the web of lies spun throughout the entire film, the only thing that keeps them as man and wife is their fear of each other, and as it ends you're meant to wonder about your own relationship and what lies beneath its surface. The ending plants that seed.

Stanley Kubrick's pitch black comedy Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb (the film after which this article is named) features what I consider to be one of the best, and darkest, endings ever to feature in a comedy (originally to feature a custard pie fight). Imagine if you will, the events that would follow the end of that film: America nukes Russia because of an unhinged General, Russia's 'Doomsday Machine' retaliation destroys the rest of the world. We are invited to laugh at the man riding the bomb like rodeo bull, and the President and his advisers bickering about how to survive the holocaust and repopulate the world. Very dark satire of the highest order and one of my favourite endings, although I do wonder that that says about me...

My favourite ending, however, and one which silently addresses the notion of 'what do we do after the ending?', comes from my favourite film. The Graduate addressed contemporary countercultural issues but also expressed the kind of detachment and ennui experienced by many people in the age bracket of Dustin Hoffman's titular ex-student, Ben. You've spent years building your life towards something and not knowing what that something is can drive you in the opposite direction. The youthful impulse is to rebel against the expectation and do something destructive. In Ben's case, this means to screw the legendary Mrs. Robinson, alcoholic wife of his father's business partner. Much like Fight Club expressed the anxiety felt by many purposeless 30-something men and the impulse against a life of inertia, the impulse to destroy overtakes the one to create. After Ben 'rescues' Mrs Robinson's daughter from her ill-conceived wedding, they escape at the back of a bus full of nuns. As the smiles fade from their faces, their laughter gives way to the realisation of what they've just done. The look on their faces says more than dialogue ever could. The camera pulls back, leaving them to ponder the question that's written all over them: what the hell do we do now?

I think I've had that look on my face for most of my life.

Funeral For A Band: my fanboy tribute to Funeral For A Friend

I hated these guys when I first heard them. I was something of an elitist douchebag (still am) and the whole 'screamo' scene just got on my nerves: seemingly more about haircuts than songs; every band seemed to have a singer who screamed and another member who did all the singing. It wasn't quite metal, it wasn't anywhere near hardcore, and it seemed to be what all the cool kids were listening to, so naturally I hated it (please refer to my douchebag comment above). Funeral For A Friend were, for me, the worst offenders.

I think it was the vocals. I don't have a problem with rough or screamed vocals, but these guys just sounded contrived, like it didn't come naturally, like they were doing it because it was expected of them. Some record company exec had spent a fortune making sure they had cool music videos and a bunch of paid-for attention in the music press. Arrogant and contrived, no tunes: not interested.

Well, it turns out I was wrong.

They opened for Iron Maiden at Newcastle Arena. With some degree of predetermined apathy I stood cross-armed and watched them walking onstage, preparing to suck... And, in-keeping with the universe's ongoing plan to prove me wrong, Funeral For A Friend were fucking amazing that night and a new fan was born. Playing to a hostile crowd they were fierce, passionate and full of reverence for the headliners. The perfect set should leave you wanting more and that's exactly what they did.

I started listening: debut album Casually Dressed And Deep In Conversation was and still is an absolute stunner. From start to finish there is not a second of filler and it shows the confidence of a band that knows its own talent. It's emotional without being twee or trite, it's heavy but memorable and tuneful; what the hell had I not been hearing before? Tunes like 'Juneau', 'She Drove Me To Daytime Television' and 'Bullet Theory' are all incredible but the stunning 'Escape Artists Never Die' is a dynamic, catchy modern rock song. I couldn't get enough.

'Difficult' second albums affect bands differently, but for FFAF they took the pressure in their stride with 2005's Hours. Bigger, more complex, sometimes darker, sometimes more hopeful, they had released an album that admittedly took a while to appreciate. First single, 'Streetcar' is an anthem and 'History', like Pearl Jam's 'Daughter', is a bittersweet uptempo ballad that will mean something different to every listener. Best of all is album opener 'All The Rage': with a twisting riff and melody holding it all together it's a brilliantly arranged song and one of my favourites of any band.

And then something awful happened. Now a fully fledged fan, I was listening intently when the first single from third album Tales Don't Tell Themselves made its debut. My heart sank on hearing 'Oblivion'. So simple, so over-wrought, so middle-of-the-road. My reaction at the time: “Fuck me, they've turned into Bon Jovi.” Indeed it sounded like they had either pandered to studio pressure to become more accessible, suffered some serious writers block and churned out filler, or got old before their time. 'Oblivion', however, kept nagging away at me and I found myself humming it at work. I gave in and bought the album and found myself quite taken by how brave it was for them to all but abandon their early style, releasing what was essentially a melodic concept album about a tragedy at sea and its effect on a community. It's a beautiful and moving album, but one that takes time to adjust to.

Their 'next big thing' status now abandoned by record label and impatient music press alike, they self-released Memory and Humanity in 2008 and for me reaffirmed their status as one of my favourite bands. It's a more immediate album, full of big riffs and dynamic choruses. Such a shame that it was so under-promoted because this, and 2011's Welcome Home Armageddon contain some of their best work. Some of the riffs on display on these albums are worthy of Metallica, but they never lost the melodic flourishes that guitarist Kris Coombs-Roberts brought to the mix. And while their gig attendances seemed to dwindle over this period, they were still a fine live act. Singer Matthew Davies, never less than an energetic performer, had an uncanny knack of never missing a note and the band were tight and always fun.

Their final two albums saw them return to a more aggressive style, probably not evident since their first few EP releases before Casually Dressed. For me, the Conduit and Chapter and Verse albums are good but not great, Davies' vocals less powerful and perhaps no longer suited to the rawer scream he often adopts here. While pleasingly heavy and angry, the subtlety and flourishes that made their earlier songs so successful are missing from a lot of tracks. They could still knock out a killer chorus, but something had faded.

I was disappointed to read that they were calling it a day, but ultimately it made sense. I think the band themselves knew that it was over and decided to call it a day with heads held high. Ending with a series of concerts in which they played Casually Dressed and Hours from start to finish, it's good for a band to acknowledge what the fans wanted to hear and leave the stage with some dignity. As an interesting post-script, I missed their last show in Newcastle because I was given tickets to see Slipknot play (ironically) Newcastle Arena the same night. Funeral were consigned to a much smaller venue, which they failed to fill. I know where I would rather have been.

I really loved this band and it's sad to see them go, but probably the right time for them to do so. Some lyrical clunkers and a terrible cover of 'The Boys Are Back In Town' aside, they rarely put a foot wrong and have me hours of entertainment along the way. 

Thanks guys.