Reviewed on Thursday September 1.
I go to a fair few gigs. I’m lucky because seeing shows is my job, but I’m also unlucky because it’s, you know, my job – spend enough time slaving away at any occupation and ‘slaving’ threatens to become the operative word.
That’s both the reason and the excuse for this review. Simply put, I don’t know how to write about Kid Congo And The Pink Monkey Birds’ showing at the Oxford Art Factory. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then this is a sprained hop before a cathedral, and there comes a point where words simply blister and break.
Kid Congo played music. That’s not an understatement: that’s what he did and does, with the kind of natural grace that people exude when they do a complicated thing in a way that implies it requires the least output of energy imaginable. He sailed through songs, powering through ‘Psychic Future’ as though waltzing through a trash fire, and the singular combination of utter collapse and considered construction defined the set from beginning to end.
Indeed, it was a heap of opposites, a hymnal and yet everything that threatens the prettiness of the word ‘hymnal’; a set that saw a pin-stripe suit clad Congo thank his one-time bandmate Jeffrey Lee Pierce with both a quiet, touching, “Thank you Jeffrey” and two Gun Club covers – ‘She’s Like Heroin To Me’ and ‘Sex Beat’ – that proved neither quiet nor considered. Pierce and Congo share a perfect simplicity, and to hear the latter play the songs of the former was to watch a fist ball up around another fist and to bear witness to intensity boil over into something else entirely.
Though Congo’s most recent record, La Araña Es La Vida was paid ample attention – ‘Ricky Ticky Tocky’ proved a highlight, all spasm and swagger – cuts were selected from throughout his back catalogue, and cries for an encore to the encore were met with a version of the Psychedelic Fur’s ‘We Love You’ that had the room whirring with heat and with heart.
I don’t know. What am I even telling you? These are only words, and Kid Congo’s set touched a place language don’t go. Gig of the year? Sure, if you want to lean into that particular crutch. Truth is, it was more than that; a gig that didn’t feel like a gig, and an experience powerful enough to make a crumpled music critic remember why he got into this messy business in the first place. But don’t take my word for it; just ask the merch seller, wide-eyed, handing out shirts after the show and half-heartedly collecting money, as though stunned. “I’ve never heard of those guys before,” she said, lump-throated. “And now I think they’re my favourite band in the world.”
