It sounds daft, but these days it’s getting harder to find a real, old-fashioned pub in London, so tonight a mob-handed W&H are delighted to arrive and discover that The Lord Hood – a stone’s throw from the Cutty Sark in Greenwich’s Creek Road – is still furnished with a proper all-round bar, dart board and a refreshing lack of anything that could be equated with ‘regeneration’ or ‘theme’ pubs. Hearty thumbs-up all round, basically.
It’s the perfect place to catch a band as resolutely out of step as ONE MORE GRAIN, too. The brainchild of one Daniel Patrick Quinn (whose singular solo albums on his now-defunct Suilven label have been wholeheartedly embraced by W&H before now), he put OMG together during the summer of 2006 and since then they have been making sizeable waves on the small venue circuit around the capital.
Let’s get one thing straight from the start, though. Just because OMG are based in the Poplar area of East London, they are the very antithesis of the guerrilla-gigging/ urchin pop clones that the media are liable to tell us lurk east of Liverpool Street and are thrown into even sharper relief when compared with the bunch of haircuts (the name escapes me and I don’t care) who follow them, dutifully doling out every indie cliché in the book tonight. Pshaw!
But the fact One More Grain are so willing to wander out onto the limb of their choice is one of the things that makes them so special. And they revel wondrously in this ability tonight, even if the miserable thirty minutes the venue have deemed suitable for them is actually ridiculously short-changing for both band and audience.
Still, quality over quantity and all that, eh? From the off, OMG are intent on playing a blinder tonight. They open with the sinewy, motorik pulsing of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, with Dan and trumpeter Andrew Blick trading the melody lines and the music rising in gradually-increasing waves as the tune progresses. Despite the title, it oughtn’t to be confused with The Who’s anti-establishment song of the same name, though the spectre of Keith Moon surely hovers over drummer Gal Moore’s amazing, propulsive rolls around the kit that drive the track to a stunning conclusion.
The tracks intended for the band’s soon-come debut mini-LP, ‘Pigeon English’ make up the bulk of the set. The tremendous ‘Tropical Mother-in-Law’ not only boast’s the year’s best song title, but also the first of Quinn’s, pointed Mark.E.Smith-meets-Alan-Patridge rants and Blick’s trumpet making noises closer to Pere Ubu’s Allen Ravenstine jamming with a herd of elephants than anything equated with a regular trumpet. It’s fantastic and utterly unmissable.
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The slower, obliquer ‘Figure Of Eight’ follows and the whole band dig in. Quinn sets up a synth-based drone, adds tentative, trebly guitar melodies, while Moore and stand-up bassist Dudu prove they are a consummate, intuitive rhythm section with leanings towards both jazz and Krautrock and Blick cements his reputation as the band’s secret weapon, again triggering noises that sound closer to what this reviewer would call ‘industrial bebop’ than anything remotely connected with modern-day indie. Lack of familiarity prevents your reviewer filling in some of the finer points of the next two tunes, although they finish with a sterling, seething take of new, pro-cynicism, anti-complacency track ‘Against King Moron’, which – if the version on their MySpace page is anything to go on – is already limbering up as a classic-in-waiting.
They’re gone way too soon, but they’ve already done more than enough to make us realise that we’re hearing an important new band. Hearteningly, there’s already a decent-sized string of gigs awaiting them over the next few weeks and with gigs beginning to roll in for the new year and the mini-album ready to go, it seems that when Dan sings of “rolling the dice for next year” on ‘Tropical Mother-in-Law’ he already knows full well that One More Grain are taking bets on 2007 being their year.
http://www.myspace.com/onemoregrain
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