Gig review: Every Time I Die, Newcastle Riverside, 19/12/16

The last time Buffalo’s favourite sons were in town it was the day after the Paris attacks, and the gig provided some much needed catharsis with a night of solidarity and overwhelming positivity. It was a truly special show.  Tonight, they returned, touring a much stronger album, and without the tragic backdrop.  The question being: would they have them same impact without the emotional circumstances.

Up first is Albany, New York’s Drug Church; a band about whom I knew nothing.  Melding the kind of melodic post-hardcore kind of stuff that made Poison The Well and Handsome so good, to some straight up punk aggression, they were bloody impressive.  Singer Patrick Kindlon’s stage banter was priceless and endearing, and his performance was by turns trance-like gesticulations, and looking like a man having an argument with somebody who wasn’t there.  Brilliant.  Drug Church offer melodies, textures, riffs and screaming; I knew nothing about them but I was suddenly very curious.

Next up are ’68.  Never heard of them either but I later found out that the lunatic on guitar and vocals was Josh Scogin, formerly of Norma Jean and The Chariot, both of whom are/were ace.  The two-piece are doing exactly what Royal Blood should be doing on their next album, assuming of course they want to alienate and frighten any indie fuckwit fans they've picked up.  Setting their stage with drummer and guitarist facing each other and not the crowd, they are strange from the off and get weirder as they go on.  They sound not unlike The Melvins’ fuzzier moments, and Scogin offers an impressive range of screams and one-handed guitar technique.  It’s mesmerising stuff and has the audience baffled and hooked in equal measure.  Special prize for best stage banter, too: “I’d like to thank each and every one of my friends… for being in my band.”

Every Time I Die seem incapable of half measures.  Incapable of dialling it in.  Incapable of anything less than full throttle.  A new album every couple of years, most of them ace, heavy touring and a frightening level of intensity at every show.  8 albums in, they now have a wealth of material to choose from and tonight’s set draws heavily from this year’s Low Teens.  Opening with savage new song ‘Glitches’, which gives way to ‘We’rewolf’, at which point singer Keith Buckley invites the audience up onstage.  They oblige and from that point on, the show is barely controlled bedlam.

While we get a lot from Low Teens, including brilliant single ‘The Coin Has A Say’ and the slower-paced Southern Rock of ‘It Remembers’ (Buckley doing an admirable job of Brendon Urie’s melodic chorus), the band know that the older songs still get the moshpit going.  ‘Floater’ causes some serious chaos and ‘Bored Stiff’ kicks off a circle pit which stops only for the audience to join in with the refrain “Hey there! Girls! I’m a cunt!”  The sleazy gutter-punk riffs of ‘The New Black’ are as fun as ever and slot in nicely alongside new songs like the off-kilter ‘Fear & Trembling’ and riff driven ‘Religion Of Speed’.

ETID are tight as you would expect, having kept the same lineup for a while now, with guitarists Jordan Buckley and Andy Williams (also a wrestler, scarily huge) totally in sync with one another.  Keith Buckley spends much of his time being mobbed by enthusiastic fans trying to sing along into his mic.  He welcomes this and encourages them, and creates a community atmosphere where fans routinely hug each other between songs, and always stop to pick up fallen moshers (of which, there were many…), and the stage is simply an extension of the moshpit.

I’m up on stage with them for the last few songs, including the multi-tempo groove of ‘No Son Of Mine’ and closing number ‘Map Change’.  It’s an exhausting and exhilarating night on which I discovered two new bands, whose names I will look out for in future, and a band who never lets me down stayed true to form and didn’t let me down.  It’s a year in which I’ve seen Pearl Jam and Therapy? live but this band would give anyone a run for their money.  I often wish more people would take notice of them, but you have to wonder whether a larger venue would have the same magic, because that’s exactly what tonight was.  Even thought I was kicked in the head by a crowd surfer.

Film Review: Victoria

A few months back, I was stood in the Tyneside Cinema foyer accompanied by two things: a pair of idiots (who, for the purposes of this introduction, count as one thing), and a large promotional stand for Sebasian Schipper’s Victoria.  One idiot asked the other “have they made a film about Victoria Beckham?” to which the other simply shrugged, acknowledging the possibility, and therefore suggesting that they didn’t think this was a ridiculous idea.

That largely irrelevant paragraph highlights the only major problem with Victoria and that’s the largely innocuous title, which suggests a period drama rather than an experimental German thriller.  Schipper’s remarkable film is constructed as one uninterrupted shot, lasting 2 hours and 18 minutes.  Long takes are nothing new; Spectre, Children Of Men, Snake Eyes and Touch Of Evil feature some of the best examples.  Films constructed as ‘one shot’ are really nothing new either: Hitchcock’s Rope is effectively one shot, despite the technical limitations of the time (reels of film lasting about 10 minutes necessitated hidden edits), with the macabre touch of the camera showing the point of view of a corpse.  More recently Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark provides a 96-minute one-take history lesson contained within St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum, and Inarritu’s brilliant Oscar winner Birdman was constructed from several long takes, although hidden edits were required for time lapses and the essential weirdness of some scenes.

While those films are impressive, they are either contained within one location, or broken up by edits, which would allow those pesky actors to review their lines or take a breather.  No such luck with Victoria.  Stylistically, this is probably closer to Gaspar Noe’s real-time-in-reverse Irreversible, which uses a shaky, hand-held, God’s POV approach.  While Victoria is less likely to give you nightmares, the long take is both its biggest selling point, and a potential albatross around Schipper’s neck, and the necks of his cast.

Filming in an uninterrupted shot surely presents several challenges, but the biggest of these, dramatically speaking, is the absence of time lapse edits. These would normally allow the audience to absorb details of character relationships, make assumptions about what’s gone on in the meantime (i.e. they have a date, cut to a month later and they’re living together).  Victoria takes its time to build relationships between Laia Costa’s eponymous heroine, a Spanish girl new to Berlin, and the group of four local guys she meets, particularly between her and Sonne (Frederick Lau).  This takes approximately 40 minutes of screen time and while the film never feels particularly long, I did at times wonder where it was all going.  However with hindsight, this slow build is essential for what happens later: if the relationship and attraction between Victoria and Sonne & co is not fully established for the audience, it would be much harder to accept her willingness to go along with them to commit a crime.

The technical ambition of Victoria is simply staggering.  While it is relatively simple in scope; a few Berlin streets, rooftops, cars, and a hotel room, the planning, rehearsal, and sheer concentration required to pull it off is nothing short of amazing.  This would count for nothing if the film didn’t work, though, so it’s pleasing that Schipper has pulled off both a technical marvel and an engaging story to boot.  Victoria herself is down to earth, a little naïve, and eminently likeable.  We buy into her relationship with Sonne and just buy into her willingness to help his group with some seriously shady dealings.

The film at times wears its influences on its sleeve, despite the originality of the concept.  While probably influenced by Gaspar Noe’s hand held style, there are nods to American indies like Richard Linklater or Larry Clark, whose willingness to let the characters breathe often pays dividends.  European breakouts such as La Haine and Run Lola Run (understandable since it starred schipper) also come to mind, particularly the former, with Vincent Cassel’s manic energy recalled by Franz Rogowski’s ne’er do well character, Boxer.

If I have to complain, and I don’t but I will anyway, it’s that the near-constant switching between English and German is a little distracting, but it made sense that a Spanish girl in Germany would try to use a widely spoken language to get by.  So even if you’re not a fan of subtitled films (get over it, will you!), Victoria is well worth a look: at times exhilarating, emotional, exhausting and deeply suspenseful.  Hardcore film fans will marvel at the achievement, and for everyone else it’s a couple of hours well spent in the company of a cool character and a great plot.  Definitely not Victoria Beckham, then.