Liam Frost & The Slowdown Family at Scala (22/05/06)

There's a pretty poor turnout at the Scala tonight - it never gets more than half full and despite the doors opening half an hour after the tickets claim there are still fewer than 10 people there. Even fewer manage our feat of somehow wandering past security and into Jeremy Warmsley's soundcheck (ps how hard is Jeremy to type correctly? Eep!) - fascinating.
Anyways, he plays mostly on his own with a bit of support from Tom Rogerson on keyboards tonight although full band sets are promised elsewhere soon, and it would be interesting to see the difference - his twisty constructions are full of interesting ideas and even a couple of great tunes but only rarely seem to fully take off for now.

We're here to see Bat For Lashes, and are slightly lucky it turns out, as they have cancelled shows in the last few days thanks to singer Natasha Khan's throat illness. Aside from a couple of coughs in between songs it doesn't show at all though - her voice sounds as rich and extraordinary as ever (somewhere between Cat Power and Bjork... ish) and she's visibly more confident than supporting My Latest Novel in March too, still speaking timidly but a little less terrified looking.
There is a certain potential for tweeness in their setup, not helped by the gold headbands and glittery facepaint sported by Khan and her two bandmates on violin, backing vocals, handclaps, bells and various unidentifiable weird things, but it evaporates with the yearning power of her voice and the way that they use silence so chillingly well, not so much leaving gaps in their songs as creating an inky blackness against which to set them. And in "What's A Girl?" they've now even written a twisted but definitely pop song to go alongside the mystery and magic elsewhere.
[listen to Bat For Lashes for yourself]

With Liam Frost & The Slowdown Family, the story is largely the same as in January - great choice of support, charming guy, technically excellent band, but all rather hamstrung by the fact that almost every single song sounds just like someone else. There's a couple of I Am Kloot numbers (not helped by his voice being a dead ringer for Johnny Bramwell's), the one which is practically Bright Eyes' "At The Bottom Of Everything", followed by the one which is practically Bright Eyes' "Lua", and an unamplified encore which sounds just like David Ford, all of them never exactly living up to the standard of those they resemble. Fortunately they do at least have one really great song in "The Mourners Of St. Pauls" which doesn't sound like anyone else... although it does crib a couple of lines from "(What A) Wonderful World", but we'll forgive that and mention that it comes out as a single next month and is actually worth checking out.