For
what is really quite a bijou venue, Snafu has amassed a decent following among
the people of Aberdeen. It mostly organises clubnights, and usually is host to
only a few DJs despite possessing a full-featured stage and PA system. So it
was perhaps no surprise when Oxjam, the musical fundraising project of famine
charity Oxfam, decided to use it as a site for one of the many gigs that took
place around Aberdeen on Friday night. Although fairly slow to fill, eventually
the bar-cum-gig venue is bustling with conversation.
As
the lights go down, the first musician to step up to the plate is Alan Davidson
of Kitchen Cynics, who carries on with him a guitar, a bow and a loop pedal. He
takes his seat, clearly unabashed by the bright pink spotlight glaring harshly
at him, and begins to sing his folk-inspired lyrics sotto voce, as though
nervous. He even apologises before Lichen, a song about a mother driven
insane by the grief of losing her child; despite himself, he plays the song
without a word or a finger out of place. He closes his set using the widest
array of noises one could imagine - a battery-powered portable fan slaps the
high-E; a hair twirler growls angrily at the upper pickup; a shearing razor
rattles its way down a string - followed by his playing with a squealing synth
box.
Next
to take the stage are Peterhead-based indie-pop group IndianRedLopez. Two
projectors balanced perilously on the side of the stage shine a collage of
bright lights and explosions onto the back of the stage as a backdrop for the
spectacle. After the briefest of introductions, the group begin their set in
earnest: a combination of the Korg layout dominating front of stage, the three
guitars (one of which is a bass, of course), the rather-subdued-by-comparison
percussion line from the drummer at back of stage, and the gruffer than usual
vocal contributions from frontman Mike Chang - he explained afterwards that
this was the tail end a recent autumn cold.
Headlining
on the dark and, by now, quite cramped Snafu soapbox are Stanley, a
genre-defying quintet, whose recent album Animals
With Amazing Disguises has gathered acclaim from the widest of sources.
From the off they show us exactly how they aim to avoid all pigeonholes - lead
guitarist Ramsay Clark brings on with him a güiro, an instrument of percussion
one generally only uses in Standard Grade Music class. It doesn’t stop there;
vocalist Stephen Podlesny thumps a tambourine as he croons on their first track
of the night, but the most obvious member of the group is Scott Coutts. He
clutches a navy-blue stick-thin double bass that only barely misses poking a
hole in the roof while a soft trilby rests precariously upon his head.
Their
set involves a boatload of instrument-swapping - while Geoff Jones spends most
of his time on an electric vibraphone, itself a sight not often witnessed in
venues this small, he switches around to operate a large keyboard near the
close-knit crowd. Thanks to a tiny stage and some fairly huge equipment, he is
forced to exit through a side door and climb haphazardly over the monitors to
get to the keys.
Stanley
swerve from humorous to foreboding like a car with a loose steering wheel -
with lyrics like “the shit you write” repeated over and over one minute, and
the staggered delay of jagged, dirty guitar on Obstacles the next. The quirkiness sets the night off perfectly;
three acts, each as different as the next, the perfect dollymix of musicians to
show off the diversity of talent in the northeast of Scotland. The fact that
all this is to benefit a highly deserving charity is the icing on the most
delicious cake.
JS
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