Venue: Scala, London.
Support: Anna Calvi.
Words: Phil W.
Standing alone between metal barriers at the entrance of the Scala in Kings Cross I began to suspect I may be Kaki King’s biggest fan. I had a whole twenty minutes to ponder this before anyone else joined me in the queue.
First one inside, I eagerly ascended the stairs and being a seasoned veteran of the front row, my first port of call was the bathroom. Last stop before I spend the night pressed up against the front of the stage with no room for escape! As I leave the bathroom, Kaki walks past me down the corridor and we share a momentary glance. I wonder if she recognises me from the Jazz Café. No, it’s unlikely; there must have been hundreds of gigs and hundreds of fans since then. I watch her glide away like a spectra into the bowls of the building.
There’s still no one in the main hall, everyone’s still at the bar and I take my place at the front centre of the stage. There’s no barrier tonight between the audience and the stage and I’m able to perch on the stage to chat with the people that join the audience behind me. We talk music and musicians - we’re music geeks, that’s the kind of gig this is, the kind of fans Kaki’s stuck with. We talk guitars, effects pedals, session musicians and obscure albums.
Once again Kaki is supported by the superb Anna Calvi. She opens with a massive five-minute guitar solo and it’s all up from there. Deep reverb guitar solos and passionate Latin infused vocals. As Anna’s packing away her effects pedals after the set I lean over the stage to her and ask her about CDs; there’s an album out in August apparently. It’s long overdue.
Kaki open’s with ukulele driven Spit It Back In My Mouth from the new album Junior before ploughing through a two hour set of material from all five albums. There’s a beautiful full band version of Jessica. Part way through the gig Dan and the new drummer leave the stage and Kaki dazzles us with her solo instrumental work including the epic All The Landslides Birds Have Seen Since The Beginning Of The World and the fantastic Carmine Street from her first album. “Its been a long time since I played that one!” she tells us. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched footage of her playing that song on YouTube but to see her play it live now is mesmerising. Other highlights include a full band version of Pull Me Out Alive and an epic version of You Don’t Have To Be Afraid. For an encore she performs Gay Sons Of Lesbian Mothers on the lap steel and then closes with the heartbroken Sunnyside from the new album.
After the show I said hi again (I’d meet Kaki King again in July). It was another superb gig from the guitar wondergirl but what can I say, I’m a fan! Can she really be the artist I’ve been waiting for all these years? Just when I thought I was done with being a fan, an artist comes along that truly is everything I’ve been looking for. The answer may well be yes.
Showing posts with label Anna Calvi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anna Calvi. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Thursday, 2 April 2009
KAKI KING
Venue: Jazz Café
Supports: Anna Calvi
Reviewer: Phil
Female guitar virtuoso Anna Calvi and her duo of co-conspirators (a drummer and a percussionist) utterly nailed the intimate crowd that had squeezed into Camden’s famous Jazz Café to see fellow female guitar virtuoso Kaki King do her thing. With Telecaster around her neck and in Russian tuning (she may be Russian, she spoke with an accent, I’m not really sure) Anna Calvi opened up the set with a huge reverb guitar solo. Her songs, about love and loss, capture images of sweaty nights in bars and shacks somewhere south of the Mexican border, of open roads across the desert and starry nights on Caribbean beaches, the smell of woodsmoke in the air. Her voice is powerful, her songs structured around blues chords and huge guitar solos drenched in deep south reverb and Latin flourishes. Think the rock and solid vocal delivery of PJ Harvey, the aching intimacy of Chris Isaak circa Wicked Game and yes, the guitar licks of Hendrix. High praise, but this is one unsigned act that really needs to be seen.
Kaki King; if you need to know more then look no further than here for the Dudebox review of her performance at the ULSU last year. The major difference this time round was that for much of the set she was joined on stage by drummer Matt Hankle and long term collaborator Dan Brantigan on synth, both of whom recently collaborated with her on her Mexican Teenagers EP. The entirely instrumental EP sees yet another stylistic shift for her with a much harder edge as she picks up the electric baritone guitar to explore the depths of hard rock and blues.
Kaki opened, kneeling over her pedal steel, gently plucking the delicate opening of ….Until We Felt Red. The synth whispered and the cymbals shimmered while the song built into an emotional frenzy of distorted chords before withdrawing back into itself. The opening three songs from third album Dreaming Of Revenge sounded much fuller with drums and synth, Kaki almost growling her vocals on Life Being What It Is, lost in her emotional break-up song while she plucked the guitar lines on her Ovation - but when she picked up her yellow baritone guitar it became clear the backing musicians were there to add muscle. Material from the Mexican Teenagers EP was played at near metal frenzy with power chords and crashing drums as Kaki moved into full on rock star mode, striking poses and throwing her guitar to the floor when she’d finished with it. “My mother must be so proud” she laughed, “having a rock star for a daughter!”
There were quieter moments of course; for a heartbreaking band performance of You Don’t Have To Be Afraid; and midway through the set when Matt and Dan cleared off stage for Kaki to run through some solo material including Magazine and Happy As A Dead Pig In Sunshine. And Kaki finished with a solo encore of Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers performed on pedal steel with loops. Throughout Kaki’s guitar playing remained spellbinding, ingenious, creative and utterly defying expectations.
I’d love to review Kaki King objectively, I really would - but fact is she falls into a limited number of musicians I’m just utterly in awe of. I’m a fan, I’m right there. I’d like to say I could be objective but something in her music speaks so personally to me that it’s just impossible for me to do so. And I may not be the only one. After the guitar ferocity of Mexican Teenagers, the audience still fell utterly silent, hanging on her every word. She still didn’t need a microphone to speak to the audience and Kaki frequently looked slightly awed and surprised at her adoring audiences. At one such quiet moment, a man close to the stage cried out to her “marry me!”
Umm, no, it wasn’t me.
Kaki laughed and said “but you don’t even know me!” But Kaki’s is the kind of music that makes you feel like you do. In an interview when asked why more of her songs don’t have lyrics, Kaki replied that many of the songs express emotions she can’t put into words. This is the power of her music; she speaks poetry through her guitar, leaving you hanging on every note. Little surprise that when she stops playing it just doesn’t make sense to start talking, the audience expects to hang on every sound she makes.
After the encore she jumped off the stage and headed straight for the bar. Thinking about it now, that’s pretty logical really even if a thousand other performers would have headed for some backstage location. I patiently waited as half the room decided to say Hi. I wanted to be cool, I did my best. I told her I really dug the show, we hugged. Her music just means a lot to me, I feel like I already know her. You ask a rock star for their autograph - but you hug a friend, and that’s just the way it went down.
Supports: Anna Calvi
Reviewer: Phil
Female guitar virtuoso Anna Calvi and her duo of co-conspirators (a drummer and a percussionist) utterly nailed the intimate crowd that had squeezed into Camden’s famous Jazz Café to see fellow female guitar virtuoso Kaki King do her thing. With Telecaster around her neck and in Russian tuning (she may be Russian, she spoke with an accent, I’m not really sure) Anna Calvi opened up the set with a huge reverb guitar solo. Her songs, about love and loss, capture images of sweaty nights in bars and shacks somewhere south of the Mexican border, of open roads across the desert and starry nights on Caribbean beaches, the smell of woodsmoke in the air. Her voice is powerful, her songs structured around blues chords and huge guitar solos drenched in deep south reverb and Latin flourishes. Think the rock and solid vocal delivery of PJ Harvey, the aching intimacy of Chris Isaak circa Wicked Game and yes, the guitar licks of Hendrix. High praise, but this is one unsigned act that really needs to be seen.
Kaki King; if you need to know more then look no further than here for the Dudebox review of her performance at the ULSU last year. The major difference this time round was that for much of the set she was joined on stage by drummer Matt Hankle and long term collaborator Dan Brantigan on synth, both of whom recently collaborated with her on her Mexican Teenagers EP. The entirely instrumental EP sees yet another stylistic shift for her with a much harder edge as she picks up the electric baritone guitar to explore the depths of hard rock and blues.
Kaki opened, kneeling over her pedal steel, gently plucking the delicate opening of ….Until We Felt Red. The synth whispered and the cymbals shimmered while the song built into an emotional frenzy of distorted chords before withdrawing back into itself. The opening three songs from third album Dreaming Of Revenge sounded much fuller with drums and synth, Kaki almost growling her vocals on Life Being What It Is, lost in her emotional break-up song while she plucked the guitar lines on her Ovation - but when she picked up her yellow baritone guitar it became clear the backing musicians were there to add muscle. Material from the Mexican Teenagers EP was played at near metal frenzy with power chords and crashing drums as Kaki moved into full on rock star mode, striking poses and throwing her guitar to the floor when she’d finished with it. “My mother must be so proud” she laughed, “having a rock star for a daughter!”
There were quieter moments of course; for a heartbreaking band performance of You Don’t Have To Be Afraid; and midway through the set when Matt and Dan cleared off stage for Kaki to run through some solo material including Magazine and Happy As A Dead Pig In Sunshine. And Kaki finished with a solo encore of Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers performed on pedal steel with loops. Throughout Kaki’s guitar playing remained spellbinding, ingenious, creative and utterly defying expectations.
I’d love to review Kaki King objectively, I really would - but fact is she falls into a limited number of musicians I’m just utterly in awe of. I’m a fan, I’m right there. I’d like to say I could be objective but something in her music speaks so personally to me that it’s just impossible for me to do so. And I may not be the only one. After the guitar ferocity of Mexican Teenagers, the audience still fell utterly silent, hanging on her every word. She still didn’t need a microphone to speak to the audience and Kaki frequently looked slightly awed and surprised at her adoring audiences. At one such quiet moment, a man close to the stage cried out to her “marry me!”
Umm, no, it wasn’t me.
Kaki laughed and said “but you don’t even know me!” But Kaki’s is the kind of music that makes you feel like you do. In an interview when asked why more of her songs don’t have lyrics, Kaki replied that many of the songs express emotions she can’t put into words. This is the power of her music; she speaks poetry through her guitar, leaving you hanging on every note. Little surprise that when she stops playing it just doesn’t make sense to start talking, the audience expects to hang on every sound she makes.
After the encore she jumped off the stage and headed straight for the bar. Thinking about it now, that’s pretty logical really even if a thousand other performers would have headed for some backstage location. I patiently waited as half the room decided to say Hi. I wanted to be cool, I did my best. I told her I really dug the show, we hugged. Her music just means a lot to me, I feel like I already know her. You ask a rock star for their autograph - but you hug a friend, and that’s just the way it went down.
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