HIGH PLANE DRIFTERS /
HAND OF FATIMA /
ROB HOLDEN /
GOLDMUNDO

Yorkshire House, Lancaster
Thursday 12 April 2007

Review by Alex Brookhouse

A mere seven musicians on stage all night. A paltry three quid entry fee. And tonight the Yorkshire House is not exactly a tin of sardines. But if ever a gig proved that less is more, this is the one.

On his Myspace page, Goldmundo (aka Richard James Turner, he of Puma Sutras/ Wisemen/ Gokarnas fame) describes himself as "a vegetarian, peace-nik CND member, pro-green, Free-Tibet hippy bastard" who wants to call his child Gandhi. Imagine therefore the audience's collective trauma as Mr Turner struts egotistically through dry ice onto the stage in a Viking helmet and suspenders, cranks the Marshall stack up to eleven and dismembers Wagner's 'Ride Of The Valkyries' with a low-slung Gibson Flying V before pledging Borat-style support for George Bush's war of terror.

Oh, alright.

So: looking as gentle as ever, Mr Turner sidles peacefully onto the stage and subtly massages his high-slung acoustic guitar for twenty minutes of trademark laid-back chicanery, soothing us with that languid vocal meandering and those rich fingerpickings. While some of Goldmundo's songs take more than one listen to reveal themselves, 'Captain', a cautionary tale about not letting anyone put you in charge of a sinking ship, collars you instantly, deploying selective repetition and audaciously upping the tempo, then downing it, to draw you in. The trump card in what was a pretty decent hand anyway.

Delving into a more unhinged stratum of the musical coalface, Rob Holden is, artistically speaking, a rough diamond. More specifically, a rough diamond you would not wish to polish. A radio-friendly, industry-friendly, sanitised Rob Holden would only be half as interesting as the woolly-hatted, unshaven, jagged-edged entity that spits into the mic tonight. He does not sing every single note bang on pitch, his vocal nuances echo everything from Kurt'n'Courtney drawl to booze-addled Shane McGowan splutter via Lee Marvin's gravel-tinged basso profundo, and his fingers stalk the fretboard like vipers on crack, at times turning his acoustic into a guerilla orchestra. And it's utterly absorbing. The words "bow", "strings" and "many" spring to mind as the Threads guitar maestro fires off a love song, a murder ballad ('Lily Of The West'), a slow country cover, a Napoleonic leave-taking dirge, a sinister galloping ditty about the Devil allegedly once having lived in Cockerham, and a blues number "because that's what it said on the poster".

And at the heart of Rob's set is a striking anecdotal yarn (possibly titled 'North Of The Bay'), driven by a choppy mid-pace rhythm, based on weird events and conversations he got caught up in hours before the recent Rose Kemp gig, and cloaked in enough mystery to pique your curiosity. In fact, this man makes you want to visit the scenes of the songs he sings to find out more. Me, I'm off to Cockerham to scout for that blue plaque on the wall...

Is it a bird? Is it a spaceship? No, it's Hand Of Fatima. Bad news: they only play one song tonight. Good news: it's thirty minutes long. And yes, this is good news.

If three-minute pop songs are about the shortest distance from A to B, guitarist/singer Dean McPhee and his throb-tastic rhythm section whisk us from A to Z and back via the outer reaches of the cosmos, and it's a detour that renders more earthbound guitar/bass/drums trios mere specks of dust on the celestial horizon. The six or seven sections that comprise this half-hour are seamlessly telescoped into a groove-heavy succession of plateaus and basins, warm jangly chords and goosebump-inducing dissonances, sustained vocal declamations and sinewy instrumental workouts that burrow so deep into your psyche they nearly come out the other side. The piece may be called 'Journey To The Centre Of The Earth' but, personally speaking, it takes me off this planet rather than into it. In any case, it evokes a close contest between infinite blackness and blinding incandescence. By its midway point, Dean is firing shooting stars and meteorites (or are they glow-worms?) off his Telecaster with an e-bow as Robin and George steer bass and drums on an understated course through several dark, satanic nebulae (or is that the earth's core?). By the time they finally plunge our brains back down to earth (or back up to ground level?) for the home straight, the earth has mutated. Or have we?

Hand Of Fatima have only been together a few months. Live, they are as yet only 75 per cent full throttle, and still settling scores with some technical gremlins. But they are already several stratospheres above the competition - assuming such a rarefied species can be said to have any.

Now: imagine the nascent Led Zeppelin rising from the primordial swamp minus Plant and Jones. Imagine Chuck Berry choreographed by Balanchine and Jimmy Page. Imagine a two-piece rock'n'blues band contest in which the White Stripes are thrashed into second place by a howling neanderthal brickie and a drummer with genuine versatility (and a haircut last spotted on ex-England goalie Ian Walker circa 1994). Congratulations, you have just imagined the High Plane Drifters. Sort of.

This pair, however, sound like a three-, even four-piece band at times, and they achieve this more subtly than by just blasting the room with wall-to-wall racket. Drummer Wesley John Stephenson's fulsome and varied percussive palette is crucial to this illusion - as is frontman Timothy James Oxnard's use of his guitar alternately as rhythm engine, lead instrument, surrogate bass, even as a kind of modernist cello when he grinds a bow futuristically across six strings on a song written for Can's Damo Suzuki and propelled by appropriately Krautrock express-train drums.

It's one of several intriguing reference points for a "Psychedelic Garage Blues" band (as they label themselves) that lovingly patrol half a century and more of blues'n'roll heritage, select only the twangiest riffs, throw in some loopy loops of their own, and distil the whole glorious stinking mess into a heady, muddy brew, to be served up on their forthcoming album this summer. 'Despair', the fifth of only seven songs played tonight, is everything the blues should be: the well of unhappiness as fuel for a careering, sexy bassline to bring you out of that trough, with tomtoms-as-pneumatic-drill coda topping it all off.

In a nutshell: four acts that prove that when the songs are strong enough, you don't need the world and his wife to bring them to life on stage.

www.myspace.com/highplanedrifters
www.myspace.com/handoffatima
www.myspace.com/robholdenmusic
www.myspace.com/goldmundo