Image: Matthew Jensen
Cranky Booking brings you a special line-up tonight at Antje with the original line-up of Ned Collette + Wirewalker playing an exclusive German show. Collette has a Berlin version of Wirewalker aswell so if you saw them support A Hawk And A Hacksaw recently well, it’ll be a different band playing the same stuff and also loads of new stuff which will appear on the follow up to last years Fire Records release, 2. Joining is Londoner-via-Western Australia Joe McKee and Berlin-based Canadian/US band Man Meets Bear who will play their last full-band show for a while…it’s a map in itself this line-up.
Ned Collette & Wirewalker come together for three rare full band shows in Berlin, London and Brighton this May. This is almost the entire Australian lineup of the band, taking advantage of the fact that Joe Talia (drums) and James Rushford (synths) will be touring their own duo project throughout Europe at this time. Joining them from Berlin will be Collette on electric guitar and vocals, and Sweden’s Fredrik Kinbom on bass.
Ned Collette & Wirewalker’s most recent album, ’2′, was released last year on Fire Records, garnering praise in such publications as Mojo, Time Out and The Wire. Collette & Talia are currently completing work on a new album and will follow these shows with a Wirewalker tour of Japan, where Talia has been living and performing club shows alongside Keiji Haino and Jim OE1/4Rourke. Since moving to Berlin from his native Melbourne three years ago, Ned Collette has made a name for himself in the German metropolis as a musician of rare directness, sitting well apart from any of the city’s particularly fragmented scenes. Neither one of the endless army of living-room folksters, nor solely working in rock-band or experimental formats, he presents constantly evolving versions of his songs in many different musical contexts.
A well known and respected singer-songwriter in his own country and in underground circles worldwide, he was first invited to tour Europe by Joanna Newsom, and has since played alongside such acts as Kurt Vile, Bill Callahan, Deerhoof and Mogwai. Recently he has successfully shared stages with such seemingly disparate Fire label-mates as Howe Gelb and Opossum.
Here’s Long You Lie:
Joe McKee is London born and based musician who spent a large part of his life growing up in Western Australia, one of the remotest places on this planet, let alone in Australia itself and it was this area which inspired his solo debut album Burning Boy:
The Darling Ranges lie about 35 km’s south of Perth. The drive is mostly highway, fairly droll until you start actually ascending the hills themselves, at which point great dips and troughs reveal themselves and the whole region takes on a strange arid quality. The area was on fire for about 4 days in early 2011. Joe Mckee grew up in these hills and, after 4 years under the spell of London, he returned to them. Burning Boy is his debut album.
Burning Boy itself is a bold shift for McKee. Gone is the pulsing rhythm section so often omnipresent in his work, replaced by a breathy and somewhat unexpected baritone. Cuts like Open Mine, a loose mediation on Western Australia’s recent gold rush, and the brooding title track show a vulnerability and lyrical dexterity seen for the first time here.
McKee relocated to London a few years ago but maintains strong links to Australia’s music scene so it’s no surprise that he arrives in Berlin to play alongside Ned Collette + Wirewalker. Having recently appeared at All Tomorrow’s Parties at Bush Hall in London alongside John Murry and the renowned Peter Bruntell, McKee is firmly establishing himself as an artist of some standing.
Here’s one off the album:
Man Meets Bear are no strangers to Antje klesund and Cranky Nights in particular but tonight promises to be just that little bit more special usual. They perform together for the last time tonight, for the foreseeable future anyway, so if you’ve yet to catch the full-band Man Meets Bear experience then do it now or regret it forever…or at least until the next time they play…which might be sooner than we all think…who knows…I don’t think they even know themselves.
What began as the solo project of Vancouver lake scientist Soren Brothers, Man Meets Bear has evolved into a three-piece over the past couple of years with Dave Dunnett on drums and Evelyn “Experimental Housewife” Malinowski on keyboards. Their only full band album to date, Dream BC, has been one of my favourite records of recent years and I’m sure it won’t be too long before we get some new stuff to keep us going, hopefully anyway.
Their live show is all things to all people, one moment driving drums and swirling guitars as on I Saw The End (below) to moments of pop genius like Waiting For The Night to the doe-eyed, star-gazing beauty of Rainbow Beach, which I doubt will leave a dry eye in the house, to the sprawling epic that is Far Below. They are all, as the band write of the Dream BC record:
Hazy memories of British Columbia, through the lens of a Vancouver indie rock band, ca. 2000
Here’s a few of those:
