A drum machine is still bobbing. Laura-Mary Carter, swinging her electric guitar, rocks to the beat. Steven Ansell sits behind the drums. Wait. Wait. Wait. And then they start shooting. The drum machine is hammered down, Carter fires powerful power chords into the crowd, it’s an ear-fluttering energy that they suddenly release here. Carter and Ansell are them Blood Red Shoesand with them the ROLLING STONE Night begins at the Reeperbahn Festival.
It’s Saturday evening and the verdigris is completely busy. People are queuing up at Große Freiheit to get into the club and see the two Brits. They obviously didn’t expect so many fans to be here and are playing a kind of greatest hits festival set. “It’s Getting Boring By The Sea,” this torpedo of a song that slams forward with relentless energy, comes very early in the set. “Is there anyone here who saw us back in the old Molotov?” calls Ansell. Approval cheers from all corners of the club.
The band thrives on the interaction between the two; they wrestle with each other, seem to have some kind of competition going on to see who can make the bigger noise, and, well, it’s probably a draw. Although Ansell might win because he can also sing and scream impressively while playing the drums. Carter’s singing is more melodic, more soulful, more atmospheric. Here and there synthesizers come off the assembly line; The new records have some electronic elements. But Blood Red Shoes are at their best when they simply concentrate on each other, when their sound is the jagged sum of their two parts.
Sad songs about sex
Then a change of pace. The BPM number is halved, at least: Come now Arab strap, the Scottish slowcore veterans. Another duo, but the contrast could hardly be greater. Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton enter the stage inconspicuously and start playing quietly. The lyrics, however, are less subtle: “It was the biggest cock you’ve ever seen,” sings Aidan Moffat. “But you’ve no idea where that cock has been.” There are worse lines to open a concert with.
People aren’t quite as close together as they were at Blood Red Shoes. It’s almost as if depressive songs about drinking, sex and regretting sex aren’t crowd pleasers! The two Scots play their 1998 album “Philophobia” in full. Moffat’s aged baritone sounds richer and warmer than on the recordings. He gives the songs more melancholy and feeling, they sound more melancholy and sad, no longer so confrontational. Moffat is now a portly man with a bushy, gray beard; There’s something grandfatherly about the way he stands there and gently touches the cymbal next to him with his baton. Meanwhile, Malcolm Middleton stares at his feet, is the quietest of all shoegazers and plays his beautiful Gretsch guitar over the beats from the tape.
Music for raving monks
The finale of the ROLLING STONE Night is a premiere, the meeting of two musical worlds. The electronic musician stimming has with the singers of NDR vocal ensembles Under the direction of chief conductor Klaas Stok, classical works of choral music are rehearsed. He complements the vocals with basses, beats, synths and field recordings that he has in front of him on his Ableton Push 3 controller. His equipment is state of the art and includes pieces that were composed four hundred years ago. The sacred chants float ominously in the room, swelling with eerie dynamics, while stimming lets his beats run against them. Music for monks who rave in the dark. An evening that began with Blood Red Shoes and continued with Arab Strap can actually only end with Johann Sebastian Bach.