Live music listings: July 2008

Doors 7.30
£5 via WeGotTickets
£6 door

London outfit Lucho continue to promote their second album ‘Hell, heaven and earth’ - an organic and eclectic album of Americana/roots style music heavily informed by folk, country and blues. With influences ranging from The Band to Tom Waits via Calexico the quirky and idiosyncratic arrangements within each song allow the delicate and emotive melodies space to soar when sung by vocalist and chief songwriter Gary O’ Brien. A Waits style upright piano plays jazzy chords for a heart-breaking ballad one minute while terse, blues-influenced guitar licks snap at the singer’s heels the next and syncopated, hillbilly- drumming turns the time ever so slightly askew – taking the listener to a different time and place.

On stage Lucho are one minute alt. country stomper and the next jazz torchsong – with Mexican trumpet and blues guitar held together by solid drums,double bass and piano. A night with Lucho promises an eclectic mix of original music played by a kick-ass band.

The front cover of The Rushes' album is a picture of a geyser surging into a wide-angle skyline taken on the band’s first trip to Iceland. Not a bad visual metaphor for the feeling of their songs –expansive piano and guitar backdrops, with sublime vocal melodies rushing through them.

Vocalist Gerard O’Connell met fellow student Dan Armstrong at Leeds University. Inspired by a litany of greats, from Sam Cooke to Van Morrison’s sorcerer-poet records, Gerard tried his hand at writing, while Dan bought a second-hand piano and took on keyboard duties. The line up came together when they found percussive dab-hand, Colchester man and Mining student Joe Allen. ‘I’d messed up A-Levels trying to be in bands’. He had been at a studio in Leeds the day before as Dan and Gez went in and they asked him to help out with their recordings. A chance meeting with the Verve's manager and a booking to play Iceland's Airwaves Festival in Reyjavik, while still unsigned, set them well on their way.

  The band were so moved by Iceland that they decided to use ghostly, elemental pictures taken on that trip for their album and single cover. The pics look like classic desolate Americana landscapes, only something unfamiliar about the cold colours hints that they were taken just south of the Arctic Circle.

  Not long after returning to London they signed a publishing deal, and were snapped up by Island Records. Island sent them into the West London’s Eastcote Studio with the legendary Victor Van Vugt, who's worked with Beth Orton, PJ Harvey and produced the Murder Ballads album for Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

  Van Vugt pushed, pulled and teased an urgent, confessional, soaring piece of work out of them – emotional turmoil clothed in meticulously arranged harmonies and bright instrumentation, a contrast that brings to mind a Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. The majority of the songs were inspired by ‘a complicated relationship’ Gerard had.  ‘It’s a document of a two-year period’.

  The album is called To The Surface.  It’s a record that sees them bloom as the next generation of a lineage of American and British rock and soul; from John Martyn to Van Morrison to Pearl Jam to The Verve.  While you might hear traces of these acts, The Rushes songs take the bloodline and forge something new and vital.

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