Four years ago I was a virgin to the London Calling experience, a thirty year old, two-day British music festival at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. Knowing that UK bands from Joy Division to Radiohead to Bloc Party have performed at this festival before they gained any mainstream popularity was sufficiently intriguing for me to try and attend London Calling and see what the fuss was all about.
Perhaps it was the fact that 2005 was a year when guitar heavy British indie rock was entering mainstream radio/TV airtime fast that made the festival experience back then a little ‘spinal-tapish’ with skinny teenagers belting away new-wave style tracks with all the predictable clichés the scene has to offer (the clothes, haircuts, three minute-three chord tracks, the works). Don’t get me wrong, I love independently produced rock music as much as the next man yet maybe my pretentious tastes and snobbish attitude to three minute pop-rock sing-alongs got the better of me and my expectancy was too much geared towards an experimental/challenging rock music festival.
Things haven’t really changed in four years time as I received an invitation to attend this year’s London Calling after-party where 4 bands (Golden Silvers, Two Door Cinema, The Films and BLK JKS) from the festival were set to perform to a small yet partisan crowd. Without going into too much detail, the three out of four bands that performed at the after-party were the aforementioned middle of the road British acts playing either post-punk heavy, guitar based pop-rock songs (The Films, Two Door Cinema) or 1980s dance-pop revivalist tracks (Golden Silvers) with unfortunately little to write home about.
BLK JKS however were a different kettle of fish altogether. The South African five-piece were one of the few acts to perform at a London Calling festival hailing from outside the British isles. From tonight’s billing, they were by far the most interesting to watch live too with their eclectic mix of psychedelic & progressive rock, dub reggae, ska, electronica, and of course sounds from Africa. Dubbed by Diplo as the African TV on The Radio, the moniker made perfect sense with respect to their live shows as the band played heavily experimental tracks, a culmination of Deerhunter-esque psych/noise rock, Jamaican based music and Animal Collective style electronica with progressive chord changes akin to a Mars Volta jam. A particular highlight would be a twenty-minute track that featured everything from completely unexpected chord changes, hard drum beats, funky guitar chops, the band taking turns on the vocals which ended with the drummer performing a heart-chilling wail with dub reverbs used throughout the track. The crowd were utterly transfixed. The band followed suit by performing their final song of the night, a seven minute jam as shown in the video above. It was a shame really that BLK JKS were the first band on the bill, performing at Paradiso’s small venue in front of a crowd under 100 strong whiles the rest of the bands gained much more attention; benefiting from the later show time and in the case of Two Door Cinema and Golden Silvers, a much bigger venue.
While BLK JKS’ debut album, After Robots (on Secretly Canadian, 2009) is quite a heavy, complex and long-winded album that might be a little hard to swallow for your average music geek, they’re definitely an act to watch live and their burgeoning reputation is very much deserved. The band’s future forays into creating studio albums will be heavily anticipated, by this writer anyway.
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