The Goo 1
NIALL MCGUIRK JEFFREY LEWIS AND THE VOLTAGE Workm
ans Club It is a glorious May evening and tonight I wanted to see what seems like an old friend in Jeffrey Lewis. Disclaimer, he’s not my friend – we haven’t met, it just seems that way through his music. When I get in, Dublin three piece Search Results are manoeuvring their way around the stage. They make a racket and have been rightly lauded previously in these pages. Jeffrey Lewis seems to re-invent himself every few weeks, never mind every few years. He has brought his anti folk with him tonight and given it a sprinkle of psychedelia. His latest venture is with The Voltage and his last trip to Dublin was with the Jrams but he is probably best known as a singer ADHAMH O’CAOIMH AMARO FREITAS Sugar Club With the everlovely environs of The Sugar Club heaving at the seams, Amaro Freitas, a young and profoundly gifted Jazz pianist and composer took to the stage following a short set by Pablo Santos, host of the always interesting ‘Different Rhythm’, a monthly show on Dublin Digital Radio that I would urge readers to indulge in. The crowd, well populated with our Brazilian friends, provided Frietas with an ecstatic reception whilst he slid into a ETHAN GOLDING MOVING STILL Tengu Back in November I put together a list of Ones To Watch for Ireland Music Week 2022 and included on that list was Moving Still, one of the most unique DJs in Ireland at the moment. Six months, an EP, one Boiler Room set and a recently announced B2B with Caribou’s Coy Haste at this year’s All Together Now and it’s safe to say Jamal’s star is truly on the rise. This past month saw Jamal’s first major solo set in the mist and heat of Yamamori Tengu, a hotbed for the city’s best and brightest. What sets Moving Still apart however, is breadth that his set brings to a venue which can often feel as tightly packed as the proverbial sardine can. Jamal’s vibrant, eclectic mix of world, disco and familiar but fresh dance tracks gave the mobbed dance floor a jubilant spark, more a fizzing sea of festivity rather than the heaving sea of bodies that a midnight DJ set usually creates. PAGE 17 technically dazzling yet serene opening odyssey that brought his audience to a reverential quiet. Which was important, as the soft spoken Brazilian introduced himself to us all and greeted his countrymen in Portuguese. His second piece, a live looped composition comprising various whistles, shards of prepared piano and sparse percussion, was as beautiful as it was fascinating, and throughout its seven minute duration artfully sidestepped the common failure of some music performed in this way, where things can become repetitive to the point of frustration, or become arty wank. Freitas deftly navigated the narrows of layers he laid for himself, able to work with (and against) the loops to bring colour and mood to his bustling textural undercurrent. As he spoke to us, gently between his set as ‘family’, he wove an intricate web populated by spare, solo renditions of pieces from the incredible ‘Sankofa’ album, and its equally impressive predecessor, taking us through his latest single, ‘Melanina’ and in between paid tribute to the almighty Coltrane with a stunning rendition of the one and only ‘Giant Steps’. songwriter playing acoustic folk punk gems that contain a lot of words. But the words are wise and clever. Tonight those clever words contained songs from many eras of his back catalogue along with the Crass song End Result (from his album of covers of the anarcho punk activists), the AC/DC track High Voltage (which pleased pretty much everyone in the crowd bar me), alongside a slideshow with stories of the Great Gatsby, The Fall of the Soviet Union and “everyone’s favourite movie” The Evil Dead 2, all accompanied by illustrations from his comic books. It was a Tuesday evening and we were ready for some sun to shine in our hearts. Jeffrey Lewis brought joy tonight and as he finished the show in his trademark understated way with his glorious paean to Meh, “I Guess It Could Be Worse”, we left the venue smiling. PIC: COLM KELLY