Upset The Rhythm presents…
NO AGE
SHAKE CHAIN
Saturday 4 March
100 Club, 100 Oxford St, Oxford Street, W1D 1LL
7.30pm | £14 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Zf02f4acddc4
NO AGE have a guiding principle: first thought, best thought. Constantly responding to their own streams of consciousness with reductive flexibility, they’ve taken the basic duo of guitar and drums with vocals WAY farther than anyone listening in halcyon Weirdo Rippers days could have guessed. Expounding on those larval possibilities, they’ve zig-zagged in serpentine precision, in and out of the teeth of the wringer - ranging outside and back in again, as befits the present thought. And now, 16 years deep and six albums into it, these motives have led them to make People Helping People (Drag City).
‘People Helping People’ sees No Age deep in the lab, scraping available nuclii together to see what new compound they find next. Erasing the starting points, reordering the pieces and beginning anew. Side one ricochets expertly back and forth between magisterial instrumentals and sing-song forms cut up on the mixing desk, as with the undeniable hitness of “Plastic (You Want It)”, winningly rewired to MIDI-mangled beat squelches. Straight up punk-style riffs get busy on side B, their aesthetic choices continuously reframe the norms, enhancing their inherent power. ‘People Helping People’ finds their disparate desires operating in perfect sync; prolegomenic weirdness fused immaculately to classic rock propulsion, transforming the energy pouring out from their hands and feet with electronics. This is ‘People Helping People’: unpretentious, suspicious, inviting, and left-field. The most accurate display of the No Age ethos put to record. Yet!
https://noage.bandcamp.com/
SHAKE CHAIN have been busy demolishing audiences and expectations for the best part of the last three years. Vocalist Kate Mahony sets that standard by anything from crawling through the audience’s legs in a bright yellow raincoat to crying and washing her hands in a nearby toilet, as the rest of the band start the set. A feeling of anxiety and unease conjures relevant questioning, ‘what an earth is going on?’, ‘am I hallucinating?’ and ‘is this part of the show?’, all hallmarks of Shake Chain’s unruly and lyric-bespattered rock show. The four-piece from London are completed by Robert Eyres (Synth/Guitar), Chris Hopkins (Bass/Synth/Samples) and Joe Fergey (Drums). Born from the ashes of their former bands, the group met with a desire to create something that would feel new for each of them and audibly take its own course. The result is a nervous propulsion of bass lines, twitchy guitars that jolt and jerk and tack sharp drums, overridden by screeching vocal slurs and sampled television. Kate’s singing is a unique embrace of flights of atonal fancy, head-first repetition and ecstatic frenzy. Opinion-dividing arguably, but singular in making Shake Chain dauntingly brilliant. The band’s debut album ’Snake Chain’ is out now on Upset The Rhythm.
https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/snake-chain
