Ut
Peepholes
Trash Kit
The Lexington, London
Friday September 23 2011

Peepholes: drums and electronics. The band themselves call their music 'doom bore trance', and for that phrase alone I like them. If nothing else, you've got to admire their courage in putting the word 'bore' in their own description. A red rag to smart-arse reviewers, there, surely.

But me, I'd say that's 'bore' as in a drill bit digging in. There's something insistent and implacable about the Peepholes racket.

The drums prod everything forward, the electonics sound like New Order with a tension headache. Over all this, male/female vocals are buffeted about amid clouds of reverb, as if the ghosts in the machine are coming to get you. Well, they've got me.

Trash Kit: guitar, bass, drums in a crash-bash clamour. I'm trying very hard not to compare Trash Kit to The Slits, pre-reggae era. It seems so gormlessly over-obvious to compare one clattery, energy-burst, all-female punky outfit with another.

But there's definitely a touch of Slits-ish zest and animation in Trash Kit's pandemonium, coupled with the emphatic, spiky assertiveness of, say, the Au Pairs. Not that Trash Kit are all furrowed brows and stern polemics, mind. They're far too much fun for any of that. They kick ye olde rock 'n' roll around with a cheerful irreverence, making their point with much prickly, chiming guitar and a rhythmic rough and tumble.

And now, Ut. A legendary band, in certain quarters. Ut began in 1978, when they emerged as part of the New York no wave scene - that shifting collection of artists, moviemakers, and noiseniks, linked by nothing much except a resolutely anti-commercial agenda and a desire to get out there and make art.

No wave was the movement that found even the anything-goes attitude of punk too restricting - and the no wavers had a point. For all its supposed iconoclasm, most punk bands stuck pretty closely to the conventional rock 'n' roll formula. Not Ut. An all-girl trio who never assumed specific roles in the band, switching between bass, guitar, and vocals from song to song, Ut created a recalcitrant beyond-rock racket, and opened the door for much that came after. The band relocated to London just in time to collide with the post-punk 80s, and over four albums carved out their own odd but influential niche.

Ut's on-stage modus operadi isn't so unusual now, of course. These days it's not uncommon for bands to swap instrumens mid-gig. In fact, it's almost become a signature stunt for some of the new century new wavers we've encountered in east London dives over the last few years. But Ut started all that. Now they're back to finish it.

The band's beyond-rock racket is still in full effect, and if it's a more familiar noise now than it was in the past, that just illustrates how many bands have taken leaves from the Ut book. If you ever went to a gig by An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump or KASMS, to name but two, you'll have witnessed the Ut influence at work in the twenty-first century.

Arguably, the ubiquity of the Ut influence makes Ut themselves seem rather less radical now than they once were. So it's all down to the racket, then.

With a bit of beat-input on some songs by a (male) drummer, who allows the core trio to concentrate on guitar/bass/guitar drones and sibilations, Ut brew up their sparky cacophony - and all its seething abrasions are intact. 'Swallow' kicks things off with a mass of guitar-buzz and a blattering drumbeat.

'Canker' has an unexpected lightness of touch and an almost jazzy feel as it shimmies along on its hypnotically recirculating guitar figure. 'Dr. No' is all angles and dissonances, Ut staking out the territory they made their own long ago: avant-rock that succeeds because of, rather than in spite of, its deliberate lo-fi unorthodoxy.

The set progresses in a stop-start fashion. The songs themselves rattle along with ragged vitality, but the instrument swapping (and tweaking, and adjusting, and tuning) that occurs throughout the set takes the momentum out of the gig.

The between-song gaps lengthen, and the audience's attention wanders. Perhaps this indicates one area where Ut have been bested by their protégés. An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump used to swap instruments in a blink, and I don't think I ever saw 'em tune up once.

It all creates a slightly incongruous air of muso introspection, overlaid on Ut's rambunctious tumult like a finely-crafted rug on a rough concrete floor.

Much as I appreciate finely crafted rugs, I'd much rather have an unadorned dose of rough concrete tonight. But in the end, it's a scrabbly triumph. Ut succeed almost in spite of themselves, and certainly in spite of their muso-ish tendency to worry at the details.

I suppose it just illustrates how far we've all come. Ut's enticingly awkward sound still has its effect, but I bet they didn't fuss too much over between-song tuning interludes when they were no-waving it up in late 70s New York.

Ut: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Trash Kit: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Peepholes: Website | MySpace | Facebook

For more photos from this gig, find Ut by name here.