Zwan

Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 12, 2003

Meet the new Billy, considerably more cheerful than the old Billy. The last time I saw The Smashing Pumpkins was in the chilly gloom of the Dominion Theatre, and they were doing an excellent impersonation of a bunch of people each holding an air ticket for a different destination, It remains to be seen whether Zwan is really just Pumpkins: The Sequel, a smartly-packaged new vehicle for the obsessions and ambitions of Billy Corgan, but at the moment they look fired up and wired up, surfing on the energy of a fine debut album and obviously enjoying each other’s company.

When Zwan finally took the Shepherd’s Bush stage after keeping the fans itching for action for just long enough, Corgan?black shirt, shaved head with beeswax gleam, combat pants, Stratocaster?gave a brief smile of salutation, then promptly cut straight to the chase by kicking the combo into “Jesus, I”, the pomptastic epic which forms the climax of the new Mary Star Of The Sea album. There are two other guitarists in the line-up, former Slint-person David Pajo and Chavez refugee Matt Sweeney, but somehow their guitars are never quite as loud as Billy’s, and it’s the towering Corgster who hogs centre stage.

It wasn’t long before the Corg was into full fret-melting stride, wringing out weighty overdriven phrases which reeked of beads, incense, red light bulbs and 1968, except that Zwan are far too well drilled to allow their search-and-destroy instrumental passages to wander into fruitless self-indulgence. With unerring precision, they segued smartly into “God’s Gonna Set This World On Fire”, a kind of supercharged revivalist clapalong quite possibly designed to saw the floorboards out from under George Dubya’s Bible-belt apocalypse. “God don’t want no-part-time soldiers,” yowled Billy, and you’d almost swear he’d finally discovered irony. Hallelujah! (in a poptastic kinda way).

If you had to crush Zwan into a soundbite or two, you’d end up with something like “glamadelic grunge with a twist of Zeppelin”, or maybe a thousand gallons of Pumpkins doing a fly-past at Mach 7. Certainly it’s difficult not to feel that the ghost of Pumpkinland stalks these boards. Original Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin is thundering away behind the traps, and female bassist/violinist Paz Lenchantin and part-Filipino guitarist David Pajo complete the line-up like mysterious avatars of D’Arcy and Jimmy Iha. Mind you, you’d never have caught D’Arcy indulging in the hair-tossing, bottom-wiggling, arching-over-backwards posturing of Lenchantin, but maybe she’s just making a point of fencing off her own space in boys’ town.

No matter. Collectively, this lot could thrash the hide off a charging rhino before it had time to ponder alternative strategies, and there aren’t many places they can’t go (except for funky ones, since Billy obviously managed to skip class the day they did soul, rap and R&B). There are epic swathes of psi-metal boosted by megaton riffing and ringing guitar counterpoints. There’s the fabulous swoosh and surge of “Ride A Black Swan”, which seizes a fistful of Foo Fighters power-chord surge and keeps piling on the layers until they build into a chorus of cataclysmic majesty. “For Your Love” was nailed securely to the floor by Chamberlin’s laid-back but massively solid beat, while Lenchantin’s zooming bass line highlighted the New Order-ish leanings of “Settle Down”. They present some fine specimens of poignant-and-introspective too, especially a breathless “Of A Broken Heart” with the classically-trained Lenchantin waxing lachrymose on violin.

Judging by the interview sections on the DVD bundled with the new album, Zwan aren’t planning to give much away about their inner lives or creative processes. Luckily, the music tells its own story well enough.

Nobody notices the small figure with a mane of red hair in a duffel coat and huge backpack as she picks her way through the crowd. Seconds later, Neko Case is on stage.

As entrances go, it’s some way short of grand. She’s wearing no make-up and she swiftly strips down to jeans and a vest. She apologises for being late and for the fact that she’s left the shirt she had intended to wear?”with buttons”?in her hotel room. But, hell. She looks great anyway.

And she sounds even better. She starts with “Favorite” and you’re immediately knocked backwards by the sheer lung-busting lustiness of her voice. “Can you give me a bit more?,” she asks the sound engineer. “I’ll take all the reverb I can get.” The twang is surely the thang with Case.

But she also loves to leave acres of empty, rolling prairie to allow the songs room to breathe. There’s no drummer, just Daryl White on stand-up bass, Jon Rauhouse on banjo and pedal steel and Neko’s own guitar.

Ten minutes into the set and a stripped-down version of “Twist The Knife” reveals just why John Peel claimed it was the best song he’d heard in 10 years. For “Pretty Girls” from current LP Blacklisted, she straps on an electric guitar, but it’s still no way as loud as that voice. You thought Bette Midler’s cover of “Buckets Of Rain” was ballsy? Neko’s version makes her sound like Shirley Temple. Not that she isn’t capable of nuance and subtlety. She slows Dylan’s melody right down and when she sings “everything about you is bringing me misery”, there’s a delicious frisson to the pain that few others have the emotional range to evoke.

Next up is the title song from her second album, Furnace Room Lullaby. “It’s about cutting up your boyfriend and putting the body in the furnace,” she tells us. More evidence that the levels of sex and violence in folk music make Eminem look like a choirboy.

It’s followed by a Hank Williams cover and?like Hank and Gram before her?Neko’s country is white soul music. The point is emphasised with a version of “Poor Wayfaring Stranger”, which betrays the gospel influence she talked about in a recent issue of Uncut.

She almost keeps the best until last with “In California”, a song of such unimaginable beauty it sounds like something Jim Webb should have written years ago for Glen Campbell. When she announces that it’s available on Canadian Amp, a DIY album recorded in her kitchen and only on sale at gigs, there’s a stampede to the back of the room to snatch up all remaining copies.

Jesse Malin

THE BORDERLINE, LONDON

TUESDAY JANUARY 21 2003

“Just wait til see you me with my fuckin’ band, man,” Jesse Malin had said backstage at the Royal Festival Hall, after opening solo and acoustic for Ryan Adams last November. And he wasn’t kidding.

He’s flanked by two razor-sharp dudes who look like they walked out of a remake of West Side Story, but turn out to be bassist Johnny Pisano and guitarist Johnny Rocket. It may just be a trick of the light, but keyboardist Joe McGinty is sporting what looks suspiciously like a black eye. And unsmiling drummer Paul Garisto has clearly taken time off from his job as the enforcer for some gang of street hoodlums from Queen’s or the Bronx. Then there’s Jesse himself. He’s a punk but a sensitive one, which explains why he looks like he can’t decide whether he wants to audition for The Ramones or to be Bob Dylan.

On balance, tonight it’s The Ramones who win. Malin once fronted a punk band called D Generation (who even opened for Kiss at Madison Square Garden, he tells us in one of his wicked asides). And with the full-throttle roar of a ripped-and-torn band behind him, the legacy of Joey and the boys, The Stooges, the New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers refuses to lie down.

He opens with “Downliner” from his Ryan Adams-produced album, The Fine Art Of Self Destruction. He’s still clutching the acoustic guitar he played at the Festival Hall. But it’s really only there for show, because we can’t hear a note as the band thunder behind him as if their lives depend on it.

Almost immediately, he’s into an exhilarating version of “Wendy”, the best cut on the album?and, hey, he dedicates it to Uncut. This, it transpires, is not a thank you for the five-star-album-of-the-month review. He’s getting those everywhere. It’s because on the free CD with January’s magazine, we placed the track next to the great Tom Waits, a juxtaposition which means that should he be hit by the proverbial 10-ton truck tomorrow, Malin would at least die happy and fulfilled.

In between the songs, there’s a fund of New York stories, including a tale about looking for Barbra Streisand’s dildo when he had to remove furniture from her apartment during a brief spell as a van driver. Most of the songs from The Fine Art… are given turbo-charged outings. But there are some new ones, too. “Fuck the police,” he spits as he dedicates a snarling new rocker called “Arrested” to Pete Townshend. Then they play “Death Or Glory” for Joe Strummer. “I didn’t go to school much,” Jesse tells us. “But Joe was my professor.” He returns alone to give us the evening’s only acoustic moment with “Solitaire” before the punk gang return for a rabble-rousing, stop-the-war version of Nick Lowe’s “What’s So Funny ‘Bout (Peace, Love and Understanding)”. It’s one of those nights that restores your faith in the power of rock’n’roll to change the world.

Then, outside on the pavement, we find the car has been clamped. Fuck the police, indeed.