Art Drop

The drop. In dance music it’s the anticipation created by the build up. The speeding rattle of the snare. The increasing intensity of the beat. The frenzied hysteria of the vocal. And then…pause. And whack! If you’ve done yr job right, the track lifts off beyond the stratosphere and out into deep space. Euphoria is fever pitch. Synapses jangle and race like bumper cars around the body. Limbs reach outwards and upwards and we. Have. Lift off. Chemical Brothers. Fat Boy Slim. Faithless. Especially Faithless. All masters of the drop.

It’s a bit different in London’s Tate Modern. Its vast, echoing atmosphere might be exactly the sort of cavernous space where filling-loosening beats and skyscraping vocals wouldn’t be out of place at all, but someone decided three decades ago to fill it with art you look at rather than dance to…and unwittingly created a visual version of the dance drop.

Take the escalator to the second floor (the tension builds), enter Viewing Room 1 (anticipation strains on the invisible leash connected to your brain), browse the rows and rows of exquisite art (the synapses start to jangle) and then…Baaam! There’s the drop.

First, it’s Georges Braques‘ ‘Mandora‘. That’s yr actual cubism, mate, in muted browns and ochres. It’s over 100 years old but still looks like the future. The guitar in the painting rings and sings and vibrates out of its actual canvas, pulling you in for a closer look, holding you there as you inspect its watery brush strokes, the detail in shaping the musician playing it and the sheer volume of sound they’re emiting. How do you go about painting something like that? Where d’you even start? What a skill to have.

Follow your nose and instinct and you’ll soon find something else worthy of special attention. There’s a whole slew of Joel Meyerowitz prints of New York; some atmospheric post-911 shots, some random photographs of brownstones and stoops and interesting people, then…Thwack!! A photograph of a Cape Cod porch at sunset that has all the isolated soul and melancholic tone of a Hopper painting. Really sensational. You’ll need to see that for yourself though. I never photographed it. Live in the moment and all that.

Turn the corner into another open gallery space and there at the back wall is…KAPOW! a Jackson Pollock – Yellow Islands from 1952, as the information card next to it tells me.

We’ve all seen Pollocks, of course. I’ve grown up wiv ’em, mate (sniffs). You can thank the Stone Roses for that. It’s a large, wall-filling painting, Yellow Islands. Possibly not Pollock’s largest, and defintely not his best, but to truly appreciate it you first need to stand back and take it all in; muted browns and ochres (again, funnily enough), but with dark inky blues and deep sea black chucked aggressively across the top of it. Move closer in and you’ll begin to appreciate the dripping white spatters of paint that run in random rivers across it. Closer still and little streaks of red appear, afterthoughts perhaps, or mistakes left in. There are too occasional light-catching sparkles – sand, I really hope. I read years ago that Jackson was fond of topping off his artwork with a sprinking of sand or ground down glass, and sometimes even a light spraying of his own blood. Maybe that’s what the red was. That would be wishful thinking though.

There’s more.

There’s (bam) a Magritte and (baam!) a Matisse and (baaam!!) a Picasso and then, baaaam!!! this absolute cracker, by an artist the luddite in me must admit to never having heard of. It’s called ‘View From The Window, Vienna‘ and was painted 99 years ago by Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky, an Austrian-born British painter.

It’s a beauty, eh? Thick oil applied to canvas, buildings topped in a dusting of snow and ice, an everyday view from a window captured forever.

The drop isn’t ordinarily a thing that guitar bands get their knickers in a twist over, but The Bug Club seem to have it sussed. Great band, The Bug Club. Take the repetitive intensity of the Velvet Underground, add some of Jonathan Richman’s mid-tempo nerdy and spoken-word swagger, add a generous portion of self-deprecating humour and then…pause. And screeee! Stomp on the Big Muff – or, as Sam did when they played Irvine at the start of ’23 – swiftly nudge the overdrive dial on the amp as far as it will go and fry those six strings in needles-in-the-red fuzz. Exactly 1 min 7 seconds for the drop…

The Bug Club – It’s Art

It’s Art is one of many great tracks on Green Dream In F#, the second album proper from one of the most prolific bands around; one-off singles, 12″ ‘singles’ with an album’s worth of unlisted bonus tracks on the flip side, limited live releases, compilation albums of early singles – of which there are many. They’re only four years old, The Bug Club, but already they’re a completist’s nightmare.

Thrillingly, they’ve recently signed to Sub Pop. Their non-stop touring might now be more manageable on a bigger budget. They might find themselves on a decent support slot. They might even crack some sort of chart or other. What’s clear is that they’ll keep writing great wee songs. And great wee short songs. Upwards of two minutes veers into nosebleed territory for the band. No frills, no fat. Guitar, bass and drums played with sonic flair, the see-sawing, call-and-response vocals singling them out as uniquely different from the others.

It’s all art, innit.