Cardboard Soup For Tea.

It's not often I tend to blog (in general this working out to be something of a 'Quarterly'. And still less) about gigs I have attended. Maybe it's partly due to various of my own performances being given short shrift by the occasional wannabe music journo with a broadband connection. Partly, no doubt to Zappa's 'dancing about architecture' maxim. But anyhow, I have returned, this Easter night, from a gig of revelatory proportions. Support bands Resurrection Men (aptly named for such a gig) and Tenebrous Liar did an able job, the former's three guitar riffing being particularly pleasing at times. But it was the Carrot which stole the show with their... well, frankly indescribable mix of. Stuff which I shall now attempt vainly to describe.

Songs about all the fat skinny people and tall short people seem apt played by this group of Harborough lads. They are a loose tight hotchpotch of consistent contradictions. Stewart Brackley's inimitable yawling croaky vocal is so off kilter, one can forget he's also providing half of a thunderous rhythm section. His banter with Ollie Betts (sax, bass recorder, keys) is a stream of vaudevillian privates jokes into which a rapt audience is effortlessly inducted . This translates musically into some wonderfully supple call and response work between keys and vocals (most notable in the 'one about Thatcher': NOT ACTUAL TITLE.) Beneath, or maybe alongside, the prog outs and free noise lie songs strong enough to be taken apart, dusted off and rewelded with a jazz sensibility and ounces of rock balls. The result: a sound which is earnestly experimental but never inaccessible. With beats that stomp (even without percussion lothario Euan Rodger: swanning AWOL in Paree.) fuzzy guitar riffing and warbling warped woodwind. A band which gels so remarkably onstage that the comprehensive reinvention they appear to have have undergone in shy of a month since I last saw them seems just like a natural progression .

Perhaps the greatest contradiction being that despite all the madness it all seems to make perfect sense. Maybe it's the dream logic of the schizophrenic mind. Or the fact that an unpretentious band of variously bearded, decent, drinking chaps can get away with creating such lunacy. But I went away feeling that if, somehow, in an absurd comedy mixup, these guys could headline Wembley in lieu of, say, Coldplay, on, say, September 18th / 19th, an ailing music industry might be just be saved. Or at least entertainingly euthanised.