Live Review:

Marble Valley (support: Player 1, The Standbys)
York City Screen Basement
27/01/10


Steve West is not, I suggest, a man that takes himself very seriously. Maybe it’s a side-effect of having played in one of the most influential rock bands in history – in that you wouldn’t feel you had a lot left to prove to anyone – but West positively exudes a sense of high jinks just waiting to happen. A case in point: having allowed his band to kick-start proceedings with a comically lengthy instrumental medley, an already heavily inebriated West finally emerges, not from backstage but from the bar – and with a tray of tequila shots held gingerly between both hands.

Let’s be straight: Marble Valley do not make brilliantly interesting music. There’s more than the occasional flash of the sardonic lyrical stylings and loose, by turns sludgy and twee, sonic approach of Pavement (in particular, see ‘Computer Man’); although it’s all tempered by an obvious fondness for the sort of FX-based weirdness epitomized by much of The Flaming Lips’ work circa Transmissions From The Satellite Heart.

What Marble Valley does have going for it, however, is Steve West the frontman. He shakes and shimmies, he rattles a maraca, he swings the microphone; he is a walking encyclopedia of rock ‘n roll power poses – only, it’s all performed by a man that looks disquietingly similar to The Bear from Bo’ Selecta (albeit with more facial hair). Marble Valley are an absolute riot live and this is in no small part down to the general air of jovial, good natured abandon pervading the show.

By Lachlan Marais-Gilchrist

* * *

((URY)) Music attempt to interview Steve West, with mixed results: http://ury-music.blogspot.com/2010/02/interview-steve-west-pavement-silver.html