Bones At The Bottom Of The Barrel / Rita Lynch
The Junction, Bristol
Saturday 4 July 2009
She may be forever doomed to have her name prefixed with the tag ‘Veteran Bristol Rocker’, but there’s something heroic about Rita Lynch. Clad in her usual gig attire – spray-on jeans, peroxide birds’ nest hair, lipstick, Fender guitar, no shoes - she is joined tonight by John Langley, the Blue Aeroplanes/Strangelove drummer who is quite possibly her musical soulmate. As they blast their way through tracks from Rita’s self-released new album Good Advice, it becomes apparent that she is an artist – outsider or otherwise – at the top of her game. If Iggy Pop was all about Raw Power, then Rita’s territory is Raw Pain, and the desperate catharsis of her performance is something to behold. For well over six months now we’ve been hearing that 2009 is the year of women in music. An admirable thing, sure, but neither Florence (gap-year Kate Bush), Little Boots (shiny, disposable Topshop pop) nor Bat For Lashes (the Natasha Bedingfield of pseudo-goth tosh) possess one smidgeon of the ravaged innocence and torturously earned experience that Rita distils into her music.
Headlining tonight are the amusingly eccentric Bones at the Bottom of the Barrel. On graveyard guitar and throat-disease vocals, John is a lanky, eyelinered, string-breaking, attention-demanding frontman. On keyboard, melodica and backing vocals, Anna is a natural comedienne and a perfect female foil to John’s boyish exuberance. Migrating to Bristol from Sheffield last year, the duo quickly made an impression as an acoustic act, but their ‘we-like-dressing-up-and-every-song-is-about-pirates’ schtick got tired quicker than your parrot could say ‘Long John Silver’. Well, the good news is they’ve changed. Going electric, and adding bassist Joe Clark and drummer Alice Hyde, the Bones now shake and roll where before they merely rattled. Their new songs are like a trolley-dash through the murkiest aisles of some Trash Rock supermarket, while Anna’s uber-cheesy synth lines suggest their own imaginary version of the early ’80s. The Bones offer little in the way of intellectual endeavour or emotional sustenance, but if it’s a borderline-demented party band you’re after, they’re just about the best in town.
Photography by David Hammonds
Hi, Thanks for the review. funny how people can assume so much and know so little. you obviously havn't realised that a lot of the song we played were the songs we played when we were acoustic they're just very transferable. We strive not to write about your standard matters like personal emotions prefering to write about characters within situations that reflect human conditions. Is this void of intellegence and emotional content? Sometimes if you look a little deeper you can get past the surface of things and find a whole new world for you're crative pleaseure. You know I'd rather be breaking the strings on my guitar than the strings of my heart all over the place. Either way thanks for the add. Oh, yeah and don't expect that we're done with dressing up in the least.
ReplyDeleteLove and peas
JB