Sipping On The Sweet Nectar

Neil Jones on a week of live music with Jens Lekman, Shrag, Josh Rouse and King Alexander

The shrouded clouds represent the dark, menacing and downright boring anti-fascination of the modern bourgeois sponsored music scene (adjective spot), the happy white sunlit clouds are the poetry of the inspired Pop outsider, and somewhere between both in the pulsating winter sky is the glamour-punk spirit, ebullient and regal. Oh yes, to borrow a sentence from a travel book, a week in the culturally teeming South West virtually has it all.

It’s 8pm on Wednesday when I trickle into the Bristol Academy. The venue is filling with a mix of familiar Pop kids here to see Jens Lekman and an older element in dogged anticipation of Josh Rouse. The Academy is a multi-tiered affair that reaches into the sky rather than sprawling itself out morosely into the background, as venues of this size usually do, but this redeeming factor is cancelled out by a negligible selection of drinks at the bar. However, as I stand sorrowfully sipping on a sweet cola a ray of light appears to take me away to better places.

Jens Lekman is the essence of modern Swedish Pop (don’t coin that term!), mining all the best musical annuls and making new shapes with modern poetry. He appears in a shocking English rose shirt that only the Outsider Prince himself could get away with, tells the crowd it’s ok to talk through his set, and kind of floats into the opening track, a glittering, slowed down version of ‘You In My Arms’ that’d make me cry if that kind of thing was allowed in here.

“Hello everyone, I’m Jens Lekman, I come from Gothenburg in Sweden, you are Bristol I presume, it’s very nice to meet you…” is his announcement to romantic guitar mood setting, and it's a quaintly beautiful thing. Tonight Lekman is sans the band he had as accompaniment at the End of the Road festival in September, so in place of the pulsing instrumental orchestration we had then there’s a more downplayed grace. ‘Sipping on the Sweet Nectar’ is a different kind of sumptuously romantic revolution than it is on record, slowed down as it has to be on these intricate occasions and living a life of poetic grandeur that’s so uplifting.

Jens is a fragile yet mischievous figure, like Woody Allen if he was a little more bashful and a little less neurotic. In short, if he was Swedish. He’s joined by a bongoist in a pretty dress for ‘A Postcard to Nina’, an affectionately rendered piece about posing as a girlfriend’s boyfriend so that her father won’t find out her true ways, and it has a great sense of awkward stand-up poetry set to music, Jens a heroically awkward figure as he dramatises his way through it.

Lekman comments on the fencing that strangely pens in some people in at the back, keeping them close to the bar, offering them the chance to molest him later when he walks among them, and the melancholy magic continues. The voice is a wonderful thing, deep, unadorned and so soulfully expressive, and when the twinkling piano emerges in ‘I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You’ I jump out of my skin in mild euphoria. Never has an automated piano sounded so good, joining our acoustic hero in pursuit of the stars.

Jens also uses vocal loops so that he can accompany himself on vocals, and as such it’s inevitable that there comes a point when the whole thing crashes around him like so much of a disaster. It’s a shame because it happens during the beautiful ‘Opposite of Hallelujah’, yet ok, because he can now show his disdain of the whole environment, whistling for a while, before forgetting the whole PA system, dismissing his bongoist and standing stagefront for the final song, quite unconcerned that not many people can hear. This is Pop dissidence in the best spirit, and Jens tonight is both a poetic poignancy and a running parody of industry domestication. The guy and his songs are rare treasures.

After Jens Josh Rouse can’t logically win, his smart and well-formed country emerging out into the venue in a manner that leaves me cold. In a smoky New York bar it’d be fine, but here with a ｣1.60 cola for company it gets tiresome, sitting a little too easily with the oh so passive mass appreciation, so I slink out into the night.

From Jens and his encounter with the industry bourgeois to Peppermint Patti and her ongoing pursuit of feminist dreams, and Chapter Arts on Saturday has a little of that spark about it, a touch of glamour and a sense of occasion. I saw King Alexander for the first time in support of Manic Cough last year, and then they were generally exciting and full of possibilities, but now something seems to have happened, and the general impression is burnt to shreds, replaced by high octane thrills of the moment. King Alexander are quite something, a fiery concoction of sheer riot grrrl balls that has such a fantastic musicality. At times during their set tonight I’m completely enthralled. Pop is all about moments, and when the vocals of lead singer Laura Byron start to fly with her magic guitar, Simon Alexander's propulsive bass and the thudding drums exploding in playful complicity alongside, the blend of pure noise and melody is blinding, and so aesthetically pleasing. King Alexander dream riot grrrl dreams soaked in Pop fantasies. It’s a sultry mix that’ll lead me back for more, and soon.

The scene has been set for Shrag, and what a bunch of well-decorated people they are. Keyboardist Stephanie stage right is kitted in a dress of jazzy white allure, drummer Leigh Anne in elegant night-ware, singer Helen in a fetching green number that knocks spots of anything on Fashion TV, or so says my friend Paul, while the boys, as is only right, go for the downplayed look, just right for their night's activity of anchoring the sound with terrific bass and guitar rhythms. King Alexander were really something, and so are Shrag, shimmering and shaking away with a similar Pop grace and bubbling musicality. Helen is a fantastic centre point to the chaos, organising affairs with a cool drama, her silky voice weaving golden lines through the band’s bouncing sound. ‘New Favourite’ sounds like The Slits take on anything cool and new wave, by which I mean absolutely ace shredded staccato Pop to fly one in the air. The band in motion are a fantastic thing. ‘Pregnancy Scene’ is an informed modern punk anthem of finely honed, totally ace racuous melodicism, and it just gets better as the Peppermint Patti trademark Panther Girl dancers (think Pan’s People, only indie – no, Pop, and obviously much better – there are even shy ones) join them for a beaming ballad that sends us away raving.

Jens Lekman, King Alexander, Shrag and the Panther Girls, the industry will drone on, but this is where it’s at.

© 2007 Neil Jones

© Miwsig