Ulrich Schnauss / Manual / Rumskib

Lx_Nen · #1 11-07-2007, 04:33 PM

A quick writeup for any interested Dirts...

I Spent an interesting evening last night in Hoxton (insipidly trendy part of London) sipping horribly overpriced drinks and listening to a triple headed neo-shoegaze gig organised by club AC30.

Having found my way into the venue (a black-painted shoebox in the back of a trendy winebar) and staked a bit of floorspace a few feet from the tiny stage, I was first treated to an large slab of Rumskib, a five-piece outfit when playing live - aparrently only two of them are actually 'the band', but I found that out later. I was very impressed, they delivered a lively set, living up to the promise of their debut album and not being as dour as their reputation as 'the Danish Cocteau Twins' might suggest. Hop over to their myspace at http://www.myspace.com/rumskib and play 'hearts on fire' and 'springtime' if you've not heard of the band before.

Next up were Manual. I'd not heard of them before, unfortunately they managed to perfectly fit the requirements for being second billing to Ulrich Schnauss by sounding just like Ulrich Schnauss but nowhere near as good. And hour of tolerable but unremarkable extended noodling left me with very little to say about them apart from the guitarist looks a bit like Dr. Macartney from Green Wing, and they seem to be the only band in the world to use non-apple laptops, each one of the 3 people on stage having a generic PC laptop to hide behind. http://www.myspace.com/jonasmunk if you want to hear more

Onto the main course, Mr Schnauss very helpfully helped roadie for Manual and then set up his own rig on stage. The first part of his set was almost underworldy, in that the tracks were fairly seamlessly mixed, with slowdown improv-tpe bits to cover tempo changes. Ulrich seemed to alter between playing 1 song on keyboards then knob-twiddling while the next was run from a sequencer. My favourite track 'Stars' appeared early on, with a long tease of the first 2 notes repeating drawing whoops from the crowd of 2-300 people, but without vocals and a lot of the detail present in the album version, it wasn't the triumph it ought to have been, suffering heavily for being mostly reverbed to death. The stage looked oddly blank as a lone mic stand stood unoccupied for the first half hour while Mr Schnauss (who isn't anywhere near as much of a Stephen Wright lookalike as his myspace photo suggests) sat sideways-on to the audience at a tabletop to one side of the stage. Eventually someone was becconed on to the stage to strum an acoustig guitar and sing through a rather plain take on ther album track 'Shine'... then he's off again, and it's back to the trademark wall of reverb with bits of song poking out here and there. As the show went on either my ears started to fail me (I now have a much nastier case of tinnitus than I usually get at gigs), or the sound got more distorted. I only recognised the start of 'Medusa' from the occasional 'blip-blop' in the overwhelming wall of noises. This track saw the guitarist return, with an electric guitar this time. It was quite hard to tell which bits of the wall of sound were down to him, but by the middle of the track he was getting a biy pyrotechnic, and by the end he was doing a frankly laughable Hendrix impersonation, playing the guitar behind his head, bouncing it off Ulrich's rack, and all but smashing it on the floor. After this comedy interlude, and some slightly concerned knob-twiddling and apologising for delay from Mr S, who got quite into things himself during the comedy-hendrixing and was obviously enjoying himself a lot, a second vocalist replace the departed axe-wielder. This time it was a tiny woman who appeared to have a nasty case of stage-fright, but saved the night by producing a perfect rendition of 'on my own' accompanied by some great keyboard pyrotechnics from Mr S, who was flailing around (as was his floppy shoegaze hair to an even greater extent). Between the two of them, they took this track to the next level (as a live performance ought to) and provided an amazing high-point to a gig that otherwise was in the ok-but-not-great category. If only she'd been there to do 'Stars' too... Back to the wall of sound for a last track or two and we all dispersed off into the night.

Overall, well worth £10, but I could have happily skipped an hour of Manual who were blown off stage by Rumskib, and the headliner could have been so much better with a few more vocals and a lot less mushy reverb.

mkb · #2 11-08-2007, 04:46 AM

What? I think the Manual album I have is way better than Ulrich Schnauss. Maybe it just doesn't work live.

mkb · #3 11-08-2007, 04:46 AM

What? I think the Manual album I have is way better than Ulrich Schnauss. Maybe it just doesn't work live.

Lx_Nen · #4 11-08-2007, 05:49 AM

Hmm, that's hard for me to tell as I've not heard any Manual albums, my guess is that I just don't really like what they do, as the set was technically very profficient. Seems I'm in the majority though, as Ulrich was the headliner, for what that's worth... have you heard his latest album, his sound is a lot bigger than it was on his first album?