New Music 2017 - Part 20 - This Is The Kit - Moonshine Freeze

As much as I love discovering music that is new to me, particularly so live, there is after ten years of festivals the opportunity to see progression. I could cite examples over a longer timescale than this but I am excited about a band that I first saw live playing the Walled Garden stage, at Green Man Festival 2015.  At that point they were touring the LP 'Bashed Out'.  This Is The Kit is appearing at Green Man Festival 2017 and the band will have a new LP from which to perform songs.

This Is The Kit - Moonshine Freeze (Rough Trade Records, 7 July 2017).

Here is This Is The Kit at that Green Man Festival gig back in 2015. The sun came out for the first time that day.

Walled Garden stage, Green Man Festival, 22 August 2015.

To categorise the music of 'This Is The Kit' is almost impossible and I like that: folky, bluesy, roots, and always just inventive, slightly off-kilter and gloriously, but tastefully, unpredictable. You can see why they are back at Green Man; also why Rough Trade and the band have signed some paperwork. It says a great deal about the ethos of all parties concerned.
One of the standout performances of Green Man 2016 was another Rough Trade artist and it wasn't even the first time that I had seen them live either; that was Warpaint.

Dyn Gwyrdd 2015 - Green Man - Part 2 - The Walled Garden

I like the smaller stages, that is no revelation unless you haven't been reading for long and in which case hello and welcome. Of those stages at Green Man Festival the Walled Garden stage is the one that matters most. Here is just a flavour of what happened within those four walls last weekend.
I'm not going to do this in chronological order, as of the festival, but I will start with an artist that I have serial convictions, as regards failure to see live, going back as far as 2009. Nothing is ever that simple...

Emmy The Great - Walled Garden stage - Friday evening.

To some extent I like it simply for its unpredictability. Here it is in the rain late on Sunday morning.

and, just minutes later...

Meilyr Jones playing and it is raining no longer!

That is Stephen Black, aka Sweet Baboo. playing bass on the far left of the shot. Never knowingly under used! It is not the only time, as this post unfolds, that artists appear more than once...

This next artist was not the easiest to photograph - she put me in mind of Angel Olsen at Green Man last year.

The opening act on Saturday was Anna B Savage.

On Sunday, and utterly different, was Norwegian singer and songwriter Aurora Aksnes.

Back to Saturday evening...  no band is as aptly named as this and the latest album 'Bashed Out' carries the theme admirably, right down to the point of walking on stage attired as on the cover artwork of the album. It was too warm for the jumper to last even the first song and the hat was removed soon afterwards too.

This Is The Kit - Kate Sables on banjo (at least for now) and Rozi Plain (see below) on bass.

Rozi Plain played the same stage on Friday afternoon in support of her latest LP 'Friend'. 

New Music 2015 - Part 51 - This Is The Kit - Bashed Out

I thought that I had mentioned this release in a post already as I have been listening to it often, but seemingly I did not. Be that as it may, This Is The Kit is very much on my 'to see' list at End of The Road Festival 2015.

'Bashed Out' is the band's first full LP, released by Brassland Records a few months ago.

The title of the album is slightly curious, albeit precise, and that the seventh track on it is 'Nits' only reinforces the feeling that this is indeed something slightly odd. It is also very good indeed.
For those that need to have music categorized, I sometimes find it (un)helpful, this is a big problem. It is not folk, it is not entirely acoustic either and then we find ourselves in the territory of alt-folk/nu-folk/freak folk.
The problem is that, in as far as I can tell, we are no better off than the mediaeval map makers whose works tailed off at the edges of what they understood and when things got really tough included mythical creatures, possibly as a warning to those that might wish to venture from the "known world". That territory is now musically well populated but remains, in designation at least, 'beyond the pale' and that in itself is a very old term indeed.