Irish Times writers review Oasis at the Odyssey Arena, the Shanghai Quartet, Artis Quartet, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet and American Analog Set who play The Shelter in Dublin
Oasis
Odyssey Arena, Belfast
Kevin Courtney
been here too many times before. The band who put meat 'n' potatoes rock back on the menu have a new platter, Heathen Chemistry, and are embarking on another tour, which is sure to have its fair share of food fights, spilt pints and bland musical flavours.
They're headlining Witnness at Fairyhouse on Sunday 14th, but as the band strut onstage at the Odyssey Arena on Saturday night, we're already asking ourselves if we can stomach another summer of Oasis.
Then we think of the alternatives - Travis and Stereophonics - and suddenly the return of Oasis doesn't seem so unpalatable anymore.
It's been 10 years since Oasis played Belfast, announces Liam Gallagher from the stage of the Odyssey Arena, before booming into the lyrics of Hello.
"Hello", roars back the 9,500 strong crowd, leaping up and down to the riff of The Hindu Times. Just as we're about to suppress a yawn and start tucking into our meat 'n' two veg, however, the band launch into a new song, Hung In A Bad Place, written by guitarist, Gem Archer. Hmm, almost exciting, in a boring sort of way.
Liam's growl has grown stronger, while Noel's backing vocals deftly shadow his brother's rasp. Columbia, from the debut album, Definitely Maybe, is a promising progression, but Liam seems to be having problems with his monitors, and remonstrates with the soundman: "This is Liam G up here, not f***ing Ronan Keating," he roars.
(What's The Story?) Morning Glory keeps us suspended in that timewarp when Oasis were almost great, and new single, Stop Crying Your Heart Out, gives us hope that maybe the Gallaghers have found some reserves of genius within those tired rock 'n' roll muscles. Liam pushes his foghorn voice to the limit for this mighty anthem, then takes a break to let Noel handle the lead vocals on another - inferior - new one, Little By Little.
From here, however, it's a slow slide downhill, and not even Cigarettes & Alcohol, She's Electric and Live Forever seem able to rejuvenate this lumbering dinosaur.
Born On A Different Cloud lifts things with some thundering drums from Alan White, but Better Man is not one of the better new songs. Force Of Nature feels a bit blustery, while Don't Look Back In Anger just breezes along towards the final tune, a timely cover of The Who's My Generation.
Definitely one of their better shows, but I can't help feeling that it's just not their generation anymore.
Shanghai Quartet, Artis Quartet, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Michael Dervan
Quartet No 3 Bright Sheng
Quartet No 4 Zemlinsky
Quartet in F Op 59 No 1 Beethoven
The star of the Viennese composer Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) is once again in the ascendant, more than a century after he first emerged so brightly into the musical world. He won the approval and support of both Brahms and Mahler. Brahms found a publisher for his early chamber music. Mahler (whose wife Alma had earlier had a passionate affair with the younger composer) undertook the premières of two of his operas.
Zemlinsky was also associated with the members of the Second Viennese School, giving Schoenberg his only formal tuition in composition, and, later, inspiring the Lyric Suite of Berg, a gesture of homage to Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony.
But Zemlinsky shied away from the more radical developments espoused by Schoenberg, and, although he continued to compose, he made his career as a conductor and was especially valued for his handling of the most difficult new music.
His Fourth String Quartet was written in 1936, as a memorial to Berg, with whose Lyric Suite it shares formal characteristics - Zemlinsky was one of the composers who was offered and declined the opportunity to complete Berg's opera Lulu, after the composer's death in 1935. The opening is a wonderful achievement, both drained of feeling and brimming with expression, and the work as a whole is full of striking gestures, contained in six compact, potent movements, which had to wait a full quarter of a century after the composer's death for a first public performance.
It's a work which would certainly grace any programme were it played with the emotional resonance and insight that the Artis Quartet brought to it at the opening of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Saturday night.
The Artis's Zemlinsky was framed by greater and lesser music: the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet offering a narrow-visioned reading of the first of Beethoven's Razumovsky quartets, the Shanghai Quartet ardently presenting the Irish première of the Quartet No. 3, of 1993, by Bright Sheng (born 1995), a work that married a Chinese melodic sensibility and quotations and allusions to 20th-century Western music, blending the two with the all-inclusive enthusiasm of someone mixing paints for the first time.
American Analog Set
The Shelter, Dublin
Edward Power
The American Analog Set have patented a soporific pot-pourri of dreamy drone-rock and tentative sad-core. Trainspotters will detect wisps of My Bloody Valentine and Low beneath the bonnet. The Texas quintet's languid melodies and arch-compositional structures are entirely their own, however.
Ambient rock music often translates into an uncomfortable live experience. Those who stumbled upon the American Analog Set via their notoriously impenetrable contribution to Darla Records' Bliss Out series may repress a shudder at the prospect of an in-the-flesh rendition. Consisting of two otherworldly 20-minute instrumentals, the project gnawed at the boundaries of song-writing convention. Lazy audiences dismissed it as drab and dysfunctional. Devotees hailed a fragile masterpiece that rewarded diligent listeners.
It came as some surprise, then, when a chirpy and irreverent American Analog Set took to the stage. Drawn principally from last year's uncharacteristically accessible From The Heart album, their set mingled chiming fretwork, creeping slide guitars and shuffling drum beats with mesmerising aplomb.
A sanguine The Only One provided an early highlight, climaxing in an entrancing chorus and languorous steel pedal workout. On the vivacious Like Foxes Through Fences, taut lead guitars segued into an ebullient acoustic froth. The velvety smooth I'm the Post Man cossetted a sanguine hook line in a warm blanket of feedback. Belying its uncompromising moniker, the majestically insouciant Punk as Fuck proffered a delicate melange of powerchords and delicate riffs.
Aficionados of ethereal lo-fi will vouch that it is an oeuvre best appreciated alone and with the lights dimmed. In a perfect world, the American Analog Set would make house calls and lullaby you to dreamland as you wallowed in a hot tub, wreathed in votive candles and honeysuckle incense. Their Irish début was a beguiling compromise.
