My 20 best gigs of 2019

The high, the lows, the ... in-between bits? Er, no, just the highs! This, of course, is the famed Niluccio on noise 20 best gigs of the year list. All those gigs you wished you'd gone to but were too lazy/watching some idiotic Netflix series to actually do so. Old favourites (The Rebel, Hamer) cuddling up to new pretenders (Leather.head, Cherry Pickles). Noise, rhythm, drone, more noise, shrieking, murky murmurings, and ... more noise (possibly even a bit of melody). Anyway, here they are. Meanwhile, as these Niluccio on noise 20 best gigs of the year lists started in 2010, it means that this is the tenth one, encompassing all of the 2010s. Which can only mean one thing - yep, there'll be a best of the decade list coming soon. The 20 best Niluccio gigs from the second decade of the century. Bet you can't wait. Anyway, calm down, because before that we have 2019. What was it like? Like this ...

Career: Blondies, London, 24 January

They shouldn’t give up their day jobs! Just kidding - Career were an enjoyably pulled-tight outfit: nervy, highly-strung and generally er, wired. Excellent choppy, high-in-the-mix guitar, some nice chord changes and an all-round feel of something like a pumped-up XTC. Yep, they’re just making plans for … their career in pop music. Also caught them at JT Soar in April: good then, too.

Low Resident: Flashback, London, 19 February

Er, low-key to a fault, Low Resident regaled this small instore audience with quiet/fragile vocals against attractive guitar chords (some looped) and bits and pieces of glitchy electronic business. The doubled vocals could have been a lost Tim Buckley tape or something and, to my mind, parts of their set were achingly beautiful. All refracted through drone and static noise. Excellent.

Low Resident: achingly beautiful

The Shakamoto Investigation/Ohmns/Hamer: Chunk, Leeds, 24 February

Mosh-tastic! Though no fan of moshpit madness, I can still appreciate the thrill of a mosh-y gig and this was one such. During an unrelentingly intense, noise-heavy evening, TSI were the pick of the bunch: mutant funk-noise rhythms and blaring, droning vocals. The usually-excellent Hamer (see 8 November below), were rather too wasted at this end-of-tour gig and didn’t bring out their best Damned-do-Hawkwind sonics, while - somewhere in the middle ground - Ohmns provided a pretty formidable noise-rock blitzkrieg.

Ghost Town Collective/Roman Candle: Inspire, Coventry, 23 March 

A DJ bash, with Ghost Town Collective pumping out a nicely bubbling set of fairly minimal/abstract electro, some of it featuring processed violins with a distinctly 70s disco vibe. Only heard a couple from Roman Candle, but I reckon a more celebratory tone was about to kick in. Also good: the fact that the DJ desk was festooned with potted plants, while incense wafted through the dance. Chill!

This town's coming like a Ghost Town Collective

The Rebel: Windmill, London, 2, 9, 16 and 23 April

More rebellious absurdity, following on from excellent Rebel residencies at this venue in 2017 and 2018. It’s all kind of been said (mostly by me) but, well, there was more strangulated maudlin balladery, more sick-to-the-stomach-with-it-all misanthropy, and more berserker beats from Mr R’s ramshackle collection of wired-up pedals and ancient-looking electronic gadgets. And also, for good measure, there was a pleasingly deconstructed version of The Cure’s Killing An Arab. Meanwhile, also good at these gigs: Leather.head (see below, 5 July) and Naima Bock.

The Rebel: he lives at The Windmill pub

Cannibal Animal: Blondies, London, 19 April

Chaos! Well, a certain amount of liveliness for sure. About 40 people squashed into this narrow bar found themselves ricocheting around the place, either joining in with or (like me) trying to avoid the bursts of moshing. Bodies hurled against the rough exposed-brick walls, people getting ... flattened. The music? Er, doomy noise rock with uptempo bits (cue more moshing), prominent bass and a general sense (especially via the surly singer) of We.Don’t.Fucking.Care. As I left, battered but unbruised, a fight between two members of the audience appeared to be underway. Kinda summed it up.

Food Corps: The Hart, New York City, 2 May

Growls, yelps and prolonged anguished screams: yes, Food Corps is in the house! Or rather, the basement of a surprisingly “regular” bar in a residential area of Brooklyn. Prodding away at his laptop and bashing madly on the oversized keys of a weird shoulder-worn guitar-cum-keyboard device - this one-man noise machine blasted out bursts of breakcore, assailing an audience of about 15 people with Death Grips-type stuff. Lots of harsh noise nourishment.

Food Corps socking it to the basement dwellers

Holiday Ghosts: Shacklewell Arms, London, 7 June

Second time I’ve seen these and here they worked for me like the Black Tambourines (singer-guitarist Sam Stacpoole’s earlier outfit) used to. It sounded to me like punked-up skiffle played with a fair bit of energy - especially Stacpoole’s hi-octane guitar. On top of the mostly “summery” (but not-at-all-as-boring-as-that-suggests) songs, Staccers threw in a decent hip-shimmy worthy of the great Jake Lovatt from Uncle John & Whitelock, albeit about ten times less Presley-esque or manic.

Trappist Afterland: Old Hairdressers, Glasgow, 15 June

It was back to the 17th century for this gig, with a multi-instrumentalist guy doing a reedy-voiced folk thing, accompanied by a guitarist who, dear reader, is an old acquaintance of mine (I didn’t know about his presence in this outfit beforehand and I firmly forswear any bias in this review). There was a strong drone tinge to a lot of the songs, giving them a pleasantly gloomy feel. I particularly liked the kick-drum sound - like a call to bring out your plague dead. Speaking of the dead - there were, according to my count, eight fee-paying audience members at this gig. Glasgow! Come! On!

Leather.head: Windmill, London, 5 July

First encountered at one of The Rebel’s April gigs (above, pic from that as well), the ominously-named Leather.head are in danger of becoming firm Niluccio on noise favourites. A groovy mix of skronk-jazz and art-rock rhythms, their sax wails were a pleasing counterpoint to the singer’s through-clenched-teeth vocal delivery, itself a highlight. Here, they were in a reconfigured line-up with Great Dad members: just as good, with maybe the best intro I heard this year - the singer intoning threateningly “I did one of those DNA tests online / Turns out it’s not your home, it’s mine”. Gulp.

The house belongs to Leather.head, not you

Burden Limbs: Flashback Records, London, 6 September

Another good-quality Flashback instore, Burden Limbs did droning noise rock with exaggeratedly flat vocals (impressively so), and a sort of all-round relentlessness. It was essentially edging into noise-drone territory, with wall-of-noise guitars and sludgy songs lasting longer than eternity. Lyrics to emerge from the murk included repeated incantations of “And I will make the same mistake again” and “He’s not the guy he believes himself to be”. Uplifting stuff.

Bad Idea/Leggy: Chunk, Leeds, 8 September 

Infectious punk-pop from Bad Idea, who had a strong sense of pop drama (a song called Boy Racer a particular highlight) and a lot of well-arranged songs involving intricate lead guitar one moment followed by instant fuzz-out, ramped-up drums and lift-off. Meanwhile, Leggy, as with numerous US bands, pulled off metal-edged noise rock with keening lyrics (Nirvana-ish, I guess) in a way few UK outfits ever seem to manage. Super-tight, yet loose and relaxed. Amongst other things, the singer-guitarist had a nice way of playing her guitar and leaning back and bouncing the guitar off herself. Meanwhile, a tall, very-long-haired bassist played the entire gig in fingerless gloves. It’s cold in Leeds.

The Vouchers: Blondies, London, 26 September 

Saw them in January as well, but this was the better gig (small venues, you know it makes sense). They’re garage rock geezers with songs about desolate lives and the meaningless of work. We can all identify. Some complex drumming, rather lovely guitar parts and lots of excellent bass from a guy in a beret. South-east London-based, but with a singer whose Geordie accent adds considerably to their stroppy/heartfelt vocals - the Vouchers were cut-out-and-keep, fully redeemable.

The Vouchers (beret not shown)

The Cherry Pickles: Hare and Hounds, Birmingham, 28 September

Excellent, slinky R&B-type stuff from The Cherry Pickles, whose primitive two-drum slow-rockabilly beat was worth a hundred regular rock outfits with their boring rolls and cymbal splashes. Short songs sung in Portuguese (and English), a nice line in rock ‘n’ roll shrieks, a song about Elvis being alive and crawling over the ceiling (Elvis Exorcist): basically, lots to like. It was also that rare thing in live music these days, a performance which could have gone on a lot longer and not been boring. Elvis is alive!

Coppé: Just Dropped In Records, Coventry, 12 October

Yeah, I just dropped in to this gig ... but, interesting stuff. An electronic-gizmo three-piece - apparently playing together for the first time - bathed a modest little audience with breathy, reverb’d vocals, pastoral murmurings and whirrings, zither electro whooshes and … all manner of other oddities. Not always cohering into anything very tangible, I nevertheless liked the hints of Stereolab-like coolness and two nicely-spooked versions of Ave Maria and Lover Man.

Sebastiano Pilosu, Massimo Somaglino & others: Teatro Massimo, Cagliari, 27 October

Not exactly a gig, but close enough - this was a semi-dramatised spoken-word piece with theatrical readings given in two Italian minority languages (from Sardinia and Friuli). For 75 minutes we had two basso-voiced speakers intoning portentously while shards of treated violin and mysterious tremors and scrapings echoed in and out of the mix. Best of all: a shattering sequence of cacophonous subterranean reverb’d voices off, shaking the theatre and sounding something like a portal into hell.

Cross Wires: Flashback Records, London, 1 November

It was back to ‘78 for this one, or at least echoes of The Jam or similar mod-punk business. Songs of lost girlfriends and thwarted hopes - also one nice lyric about all the things the singer loved “slowly dying” (oh dear). It was kind of “traditional” pop (XTC, Kinks, whatever), but also quite mixed up - I caught Mark E Smith vocalisations, as well as plenty of Estuary/Medway-ish blare-blokiness (shades of Billy Childish or The Masonics). Fun for all the family (there did, indeed, seem to be mums and dads there as well as little kids).

Hamer: Muthers Studio, Birmingham, 8 November

More Hamer! Having enjoyed this powerhouse psych-noise whirlwind of a band on numerous previous occasions, they … did it again. Warp-speed playing, a hailstorm of delayed-to-the-hilt vocals, and a bassist prone to weird moonstep moves: just some of the attractions of Hamer at this rather-further-south-than-normal-for-this-Leeds-band gig. Better still, they managed to make even the sterile Muthers concert room seem like a half-decent venue (more on the gig here).

Comet Gain: Flashback Records, London, 15 November

These have been around for so long (since 1992), that I was almost sure I’d seen them before - but no, maybe not. What we uninitiated got, then, was lovelorn uber-indie guitar-pop (here a six-piece crowded into this not-overly-large shop), with echoes of everybody: Pastels, Sportique, Television Personalities, Swell Maps (who they name-checked), etc etc. Their longish set changed gear several times - from choppy, 60s beat stuff, to slow, driving emotional songs (nice Farsifa-type keyboards on some of these). Despite rather too much between-song patter, their best songs had real emotional/romantic heft. It’s true - the (indie) kids are solid gold.

Lumer: Victoria, London, 4 December 

Another band from Hull (cf Cannibal Animal), Lumer were impressively intense, focused and ... not mucking about. They opened with heavyweight rockabilly drumming and frantic delay-vocals (shades of the Birthday Party/Bad Seeds), later switched to more restrained (but still good) crooning over keyboard-infused neo-pop stuff, before cranking it back up again. Here and there, there were even glimpses of country-ish tones. Lumer - looming into view at a venue near you.

Lumer: one of two bands from Hull to make it onto the list

And that's yer lot. I've had my say and it's time to be off. No, hang on a minute - I know! Let's bundle it all up, all these gigs, stick them onto a limited-edition marble-swirl vinyl album (approximate length 14.5 hours) and get it out in time for Christmas. It's gonna be a hit.