Wednesday 26/10/05 Amusement Parks On Fire, Merz @ Barfly, Liverpool

With most students having gone to Liverpool’s premier student night, the local scenesters propping up the free bar at the party over the road, the discerning gig-goers checking out Nashville’s answer to the Arctic Monkeys, be your own PET, and a lot of other people inconvenienced by a derailed train in Central Station, only a modest crowd make it to The Barfly tonight to catch Nottingham noise-architects Amusement Parks On Fire.  By the time the first support act and their mates have ****ed off, Gigwise estimates that only 30 people, including Merz’s crew and the sound engineer, remain for one of the most tipped acts of the year.  Ah, the trials of the toilet-circuit...

 

Merz – real name Conrad Lambert, lurching alone on stage like a blue-fringed Jimmy Nail tonight – gets the best deal in terms of exposure – he gets to play to the other bands’ fans as well as to the handful who remember him from his first stab at this music malarkey around 1999.  The mish-mash of a crowd is not lost on Conrad, who comments on the ‘different facets’ of the audience.   If the truth be told, the tiered floor of this converted theatre encourages too many people to sit and chat rather than listen to the bands.  But enough of that, because tonight we are witness to a remarkable talent from whom the merest whisper could silence a thunderstorm. 

 

Six years of major-label wrangles, crippling debts, and signing back on the dole could have pulled Conrad under the waves but instead, Coldplay’s favourite Mongolian (via Bristol) has dragged himself back to the surface with a clutch of new songs of redemption.  Bounding from keyboards to acoustic guitar to howling Fenders, Merz pleases his few fans with old tracks ‘Lotus’ and ‘Many Weathers Apart’, while delivering new tracks such as the Paul Simon-like ‘Butterfly’ and the DJ Shadow dynamics of ‘Warm Cigarette Room’ with the panache and passion that caused so many industry tongues to wag all that time ago.  This time round, stripped of all the unhelpful hype, it’s a rarer, more delicate creature.  He deserves, and will receive, much more than this.

 

Despite having their every move tracked by one of the major music TV channels, it remains to be seen whether Amusement Parks On Fire will have enough to crash the current new wave-influenced mainstream-indie party.  With more than a little of Keifer Sutherland in ‘Lost Boys’ about him, teenage prodigy Michael Feerick leads his black-clad band through killer single ‘Blackout’: an explosion in an effects pedal factory looped over a crisp, robotic backbeat.  But after this, APOF don’t really go anywhere new – a charge that can also be laid against their (well, Michael’s, since he played everything on it) album.  Tracks like ‘Wiper’ and ‘Smokescreen’ may promise the otherworldliness of Spacemen 3 or My Bloody Valentine, but all too often the songs are obscured by the swirling sonic clouds, coming across like a second-rate, less controlled …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.  There’s not even an ‘Asphalt (Interlude)’ to break things up as on the album; and when closing instrumental ‘Local Boy Makes Good’ begins to shake our ribcages, we’re left wondering at what stage opener ‘Blackout’ finished and this track begun.

 

In truth, it’s still early days for Feerick – having an album out at the age of 19 may make him the Wayne Rooney of post-rock (I wonder if the tour bus stopped off at any brothels… ) but, with a stern manager like Sir Alex Ferguson to keep him on the straight and narrow, the local boy should make good after all.  For the time being, however, the name Amusement Parks On Fire evokes less an image of singed Mickey Mouse ears as it does a minor blaze at Gulliver’s World.