Friday 17/03/06 Deconstructors, Automation @ Evol, Liverpool

March 21, 2006 by Neil Condron

About an hour before Gigwise sets out on it’s way to the Korova bar, the phone starts to ring, and it’s bad news: tonight’s main draw, Kings Have Long Arms, have pulled out. Apparently they’ve sacked their manager; the drummer ain’t happy and is refusing to do the gig. Bloody royals, eh.

Anyway, **** that: it’s the weekend, and nobody’s in the mood to let this minor setback get in the way of a good time – especially when two of Liverpool’s busiest bands are eager to fill the void left by KHLA. First up are Automation, stalwarts of the growing Scouse electro-pop scene and regulars on this particular stage. Automation lurk in the slightly darker corners of this particular movement: more Depeche Mode than O.M.D., more Black Strobe than Daft Punk, more The Bravery than The Killers. Pushing all the right buttons (literally), somehow Automation still fail to really grab us by the balls. Twisting And Shaking’ has a bit of Kraftwerk going on, ‘Fits You Up’ throws a bit of punk noise into the mix, but only the downbeat ‘Set It Off’ really stands out as something that’s totally their own – and, in a scene that often suffers from being a little generic, they need more of that.

Quite where The Deconstructors fit on tonight’s planned bill is a bit of a puzzler, as their amphetamine-swelled post-Americana is solar systems away from both the electronic gloom of Automation and the absent Human League-approved pop of KHLA. As a reshuffled headliner however, they seem at home, appearing more confident than we’ve seen them to date. The Deconstructors deal in ear-piercing peaks and bewildering troughs, contorting familiar musical arrangements through the decades until we’re being assaulted by something very strange indeed. Take ‘Stay Of Execution’, for example – a song that mutates out of The Cure’s ‘Lovecats’ into Love’s ‘7 And 7 Is’, or ‘You Reap What You Sow’, where melancholic Kings Of Leon-style country slips into Led Zep blues only to emerge as the kind of alien freak-out that Scott Walker probably toyed with when he was feeling really down. But it’s not all about clever tempo shifts and mood swings: in new song ‘Oh Brother’, they also have a linear, rocking pop song to match the jangling centre-piece of ‘Mexico’. The Deconstructors are building up a good pace now, and if they keep their set fresh with new material, who knows where that pace may take them? On a night when Kings abdicated, let’s be thankful we at least had pretenders to the throne.

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