jump to navigation


A surprise of an evening February 27, 2010

Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, Music, Review , add a comment

The stars finally aligned to allow me and one of my bestest buds to go into town on Tuesday in order to peruse some live music. Our intention was to go to an open mic night, but when we got there we found no such open mic, or indeed even an open venue. So we instead we headed the independent (and secretly Christian) Bar and Coffee house the Malt Cross, which we’ve been scoping out with timid curiosity for a while. The place is alarmingly hip and feels so oozing with indie cred that it’s a little scary for those of us new to that amount of music cool. It’s also a very interesting building and I’d urge anyone living around Nottingham to go inside and take a look for that reason alone.

Anyhow, as it happened Tuesdays are a night for free music (or at least this one was) and for young people with old, broken cars and pay cheques not coming till the end of the week this was rather perfect. We were there rather early for the music so we got to see the band sound checking. Not the best time to see a band but without this my curiosity would not have been piqued. It was a band not only with quite a large number of musicians but a quite ludicrously large number of instruments to go with it. Ukeleles, mandolins and trumpets combined with more traditional bass, guitar and drums. Plus they had a dedicated chellist. This was something I had to see.

It took us all the way till the very end of the evening to find out what the band were called, but I’m just gonna name them now for ease of writing and to allow me to speak about the EP that we bought (yeah, I have a 60% share in it). As it turns out they are called Hhymn, a name with all the indications of being appropriately indie without being too pretentious. They hail from Nottingham, which is nice purely because I like to find local bands that aren’t playing the derivative drivel of most of the ones I’ve seen.

I didn’t exactly fall in love with them from the live show, but I definitely enjoyed it. And it interested me enough to want some of their music. All live music is improved by knowing the songs though, repetition is such a core concept in music, there is only so much that I can enjoy something when hearing it for the first time. I have to be able to go and listen to it in my own space, in my own world. Luckily the EP captures the best elements of the band that I saw from the live setting as well as bringing in some minimalist production that just enhanced things that little bit. As such it has become a CD (figuratively speaking, all my listening is from my PC) that is really growing on me.

The songs are well put together, full of neat rhythms and piercing melody with a pleasant but yearning backing put out by soft clean and acoustic instrumentation. The structures and concepts aren’t ground breaking, they’re just very well done, and the sheer variety of instruments gives the necessary variety to make each track unique but still cohesive to the sound of the EP and the songs themselves. These guys have got a sound that I think has potential to appeal to a great number of people and I’m really looking forward to seeing more of them, I hope that they continue to write and play, as long as they do I’ll be followingand listening.

Repetition

ChrisH6 Woo! June 5, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Internets, Misc , add a comment

My chum Chris has decided to revive his blog which, despite its small number of posts, certainly beat this one in terms of outside comments. Of course, this was because he posted pictures of a “UFO” he saw on holiday and we added it to stumble upon. It’s quite entertaining reading the comments, I hadn’t actually realised that anyone had looked at it at all until recently. Surprisingly convincing.

As a side effect of his blog revival I will most likely mention him by name now when talking about general events, I tend to shy away from naming people on here but actually it doesn’t make much sense. This is definitely my blog (as in, me the British citizen with a passport and a bank account) and I don’t really hide that so keeping these names hidden is a bit silly.

Of course, now it’s on to see who can gets the most readers!

No, that’s silly. No one should read either of these blogs. Just go home. Unless of course you are our friends, in which case you are allowed to stay but you don’t count anyways.