Mojo - The Music Magazine

IN AN EVENING AT Brighton's winningly central Komedia venue that could easily have been subtitled Folk Roots, New Routes, MOJO's final fling at the South Coast's South-By-Southwest sees four very different acts take traditional music in four dizzyingly disparate directions. Reflecting their MOJO-simpatico commitment to quality and diversity, UK-based indie label Full Time Hobby has found berths for them all.

First on, Aussie warbler Sarah Blasko's smock-dress and witchy handjive (pictured above) immediately hint at trad values and uncanny undertows, but there is strikingly more to her than meets the eye. Vocally, there's more of the soaring Tim Buckley than stentorian Florence, and as her songs unfold we are whisked into a world of powerful pop melodies muscling through dramatic arrangements, while a gathering of guitar, drums, keys and upright bass have something of the shabby-chic loungepunk mien of The Triffids... or is it just the accents?

Highlights include the ghostly keening of dreamy Sleeper Awake - not the only song to draw threads from Blasko's weird childhood amid apocalyptic Christian sects - and the slowbuilding All I Want. A female fan cries out in admiration. "You sound like my auntie," remarks Blasko, unethereally.

Similarly muscular in essence are Erland And The Carnival, and we're not just alluding to burly Orcadian frontman Erland Cooper's First XV physique. This is heavy folk-rock with moiling beat group dynamics, directed with his customary sang-froid by Verve and Damon Albarn collaborator, Simon Tong, whose serrated guitar interjections are lethal at this range. It's an all-action style, best heard on their rumbling, tumbling versh of Jackson C Frank's My Name Is Carnival, that has drawn admiring murmurs from the Paul Weller camp, and as Cooper tortures a hand-held mini-theremin, you can envisage all kinds of surprises on their second album, already underway.

MOJO buttonholes Tong backstage - it is the first time we have ever been able to say, "The last time I saw you was in New Orleans" - before the band rush on and elsewhere to their second set of the night. Such is the feverish, show-must-go-on ambience of The Great Escape.

The Leisure Society's reputation for songcraft goes before them, and they are the only one of tonight's bands who can say, "Now we're going do an Ivor Novello-nominated song" without fibbing like bastards. They line up with a picaresque collection of Rhodes, ukulele, flute, string trio, bass and drums, but If that seems to suggest the tasteful restraint of their The Sleeper Album, then we are misled, because there is a fervour and intensity to their live delivery that sometimes makes you think of the Waterboys or Dexy's.

The glorious chamber pop of Save It For Someone Who Cares achieves new depth and heft tonight, but most of this material is new and bodes well for something akin to a commercial breakthrough. And in singer/songwriter Nick Hemming and keysman Christian Hardy we have a dashing British pop equivalent of the Wilson brothers - that's Luke and Owen rather than Brian and Carl. Thorstein Veblen would be proud.

Topping the bill, Tunng (above, right) are a known quantity, and if any current British group are more instructive of how you can be grounded in folk without being tethered by it, we'd like to meet them. Neither folk nor rock nor electronica, but informed by all, they remain an open-ended invitation to get tribally acquainted with your inner yarragh. They make acoustic guitars sound like giant clashing pieces of metal - some trick - while an hallucinatory, Liquid Len-type light show (not to mention demon strummer Mike Lindsay's scrubby beard and hippy hat) stirs traumatic flashbacks to Megadog. Ravey grooves build a full-on love-vibe among the boozy revellers, peaking on the sample-driven folk'n'hip-hop breakdown of Bullets.

As they depart, Lindsay actually skipping, like some kind of folktronic Ian Anderson, it feels like we've been on a journey, from music's boggy past into an unformed future. See you next year - whatever the hell that looks like.

Danny Eccleston

Photos courtesy of Andrew Ford

MORE FROM FULL TIME HOBBY

Click here for an exclusive four-track taste of Full Time Hobby's Hobbyism label compilation. That means free tracks by Tunng (It Breaks), Erland & The Carnival (My Name Is Carnival), The Leisure Society (We Were Wasted) and School Of Seven Bells (Babelonia).

Hobbyism is released June 28, 2010 on Full Time Hobby. Featured acts include Micah P. Hinson, White Denim, Malcolm Middleton and Fujiya & Miyagi. Full Time Hobby goes out and about, with Micah P. Hinson, The Leisure Society & Tunng (DJ set) appearing at the Fleche D'Or, Paris on May 26, and Tunng, Micah P. Hinson, The Leisure Society rocking the Windsor Festival on October 1, at the Theatre Royal.