Archive for November 16th, 2008
The Cardinals in Edinburgh
So on Friday I popped up to Edinburgh for another Cardinals gig. Edinburgh’s just as beautiful as I remembered it, although very windy, and I had a brief nose in Avalanche before picking up a copy of The Skinny to digest with a cold pint in a pub.
The Skinny’s great, incidentally. The paper itself at least, not had a good chance to look around the website. Their Ten Tracks for £1 is a great thing too – you should check out Popolo on this month’s compilation ;)
Soon though I was met by Louise and we had a brisk stroll to the venue where there were a few folk queuing but we went for a few drinks at the Filmhouse and were met by her friend Eira.
The gig venue, the recently-refurbished Picture House was great – a good size, nice fittings, great sound – apart from the bar which was mind-meldingly expensive (on a par with London prices, seriously). The girls were most amused by the venue’s transformation from what they last knew it as, a tacky club populated solely by underagers.
The Cardinals’ set started off efficiently enough and the band seemed in good spirits. The venue was more packed than it had been in Manchester (Edinburgh was the only venue on the tour to sell out, strangely). After playing an entirely decent set of songs, they went into an epic rendition of Wonderwall which was where the evening turned around for the better.
The post-Wonderwall part of the set blurs quite well into one for me as the band were relentless and breathless in their playing. Sometimes the Cardinals (well, Ryan anyway) likes a bit of banter but aside from one or two instances, Edinburgh’s show was bang-for-your-buck night. Barely letting the feedback die down between songs as guitars were swapped, the band just played and played.
Often the Cardinals split their gigs into two hour-long sets but not in Edinburgh. They simply played non-stop for two-and-a-quarter hours. The usual Cardinals jams were present and kept getting more and more epic, with Ryan Adams evolving once more into the guitar god, casting rockstar pose silhouettes onto his oversized novelty amp. Whether it’s Adams or not, seeing someone nail a guitar solo legs akimbo, leaning backwards, Adam’s Apple poking out and just completely lost in a wall of noise is an incredible sight.
After this cavalcade of songs it became time for I See Monsters, a quasi-trademark set-closer for the Cardinals and they played to form, ramping it up into a huge, chugging finale…
…. And kept on playing! As I say, I See Monsters is such a big way to end a set that it felt entirely unnatrual to go into a song such as Two next but nobody in the crowd minded. I should however make mention to the girl who fainted just in front of us as I See Monsters was building up. A couple of guys helped her to the back (I tried to help for a bit but realised I wasn’t really being that useful and made it back to my spot for the big riffs). I hope she recovered ok.
For the final song of the night though, Easy Plateau was pulled out and played to perfection, ending with a (seemingly) ten-minute metal-style (metallic?) ending of Ryan shouting something over and over into his microphone whilst downtuning his guitar and searching for sources of nourishing feedback, with Brad standing up hitting the gong(!) whilst standing on his bass drum pedal and the rest of the band just trying to keep up with the bizarreness that was unfolding.
It’s not unfair to say that the ending may have polarised some Ryan fans but personally I happen to love a) noise, b) people enjoying themselves onstage and c) Ryan Adams being Ryan Adams – whatever that may mean. It was the perfect ending for me, and the sort of performance I’ve been wanting to see since hearing the Chicago bootleg from Jan 2007 (especially What Sin Replaces Love with similar ending).
The three of us then bounced down Edinburgh’s cold, beautiful, cobbled roads til we found Star Bar and had a couple of quiet drinks (on a Friday night!). Lovely bar.
My Saturday was spent trying to remember which bits I had enjoyed most about the previous evening’s performance and watching Gilmore Girls cooped up on the sofa with Louise and her housemate. This situation reminded me once again how much I want to live with girls. It just works for me.
The only three downsides of my trip were a) that I didn’t take any photographs at all and Edinburgh was looking stunning in the crisp, dry wintry weather, b) that I completely neglected to make reference to Ryan’s song ‘Thank You Louise’ the whole time I was in Lou’s company and c) that I contracted a plague-level cold. I am currently attempting to nip that in the bud by self-medicating with doses of paracetamol, ibuprofen, decongestants, tea, Ryan Adams bootlegs (especially last year’s la Maroquinerie, Paris – perfection) and chocolate muffins.
As luck would have it, this all coincided with the leaking of a certain band’s Elizabethtown sessions… But I think I’ll write more about those another time.
