I'm just not quite over you.

Back at school now, and therefore, posts are going to be a little thin on the ground for a while. I’m kinda disappointed it’s taken me so long to get this one actually, because we had a really good evening last weekend at this month’s Acoustica.

Vijay Kishore

Didn’t much fancy Celtish, the main band (as ever), but the support act for the evening was a feller called Vijay Kishore who I’d heard was a bit special, but had missed the previous time he’d come to Gloucester.

He looked pretty unassuming, just him and a guitar, (which is always a bit of a barrier for me as you may have worked out, by now. Give me mandolins, loopers and pedal steel washboards!). But what he does have is this quite amazing, haunting voice that you really need to hear to believe. The comparisons with Tim Buckley are obvious, but we also thought his voice sounded a little like Ryan Adams (without the obvious unpleasantness and falling over).

But to be fair, he’s got an awful lot more to him than just this voice. His playing was quite interesting and the songs themselves were strong. And what I really liked about him was the way he didn’t bolster up substandard stuff with any kind of vocal contortions. He used his voice pretty sparingly at times, to be honest, and could even have gone for it a bit more. But that’s a good thing.

I can’t claim to have any talent in predicting the next big thing, but surely, if there was any justice in this ol’ world, Vijay Kishore would be it. And I couldn’t help asking myself why on earth the rest of the Blog universe is not collectively looking for a change of underwear. I mean, Jose Gonzalez…

Any way, having jumped ship on Celtish pretty early, we happened to see Vijay in the bar afterwards with a black guy who looked a lot like Curtis Mayfield (I don’t mean he was in a wheelchair, he just had the whole Superfly thing going on, if you can imagine it). Turns out this was Dave, his road manager, who let me know that although Vijay doesn’t have any legal downloads available, there is a rather nice YouTube performance that I can embed here.

Now if only I knew how to do this.

I’m on it, honestly…

The Jake Flowers Scandal

What I do have as an offering, however, is a couple of tracks from the beguilingly named Jake Flowers Scandal, who come from Shropshire and seem to be made up of a reformed folkie – Jake Flowers – on guitar and Ed Gauden on drums. They played a great set at Green Man, on the Green Man Café stage, making a welcome change from the sensitive types we’d had previously. I get the impression that this drums-and-guitar line up is a bit of a goer at the moment – I seem to have seen it a few times recently – and the Scandal, do it pretty well.
Jake has a Myspace page for his folkie guise, which is worth a visit, but these tracks are from his Scandal Myspace page – there are a couple of other tracks streamed there too.

It’s a good rough sound and it goes down well with good rough cider! (Let me tell you…)

Stalker

The Rooster & the Shepherd