Concert – Page 2 – Mondo Bizarre Magazine

April 12, 2025April 16, 2025 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

The Horrors, Hard Club, Porto, 09.04.2025

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Telma Mota

An immense density of everything.
The Horrors playing just like themselve. What was to be expected, was.

Alternative neo-ghotic rock, with guitar noise typical of garage rock and indie-punk, mixed with very present and intense keyboardsll, another characteristic of neo-psychedelia, together with the low light and the smog created by the artificial smoke originated a favorable and appropriate environment for the sound performed by the band.

Faris Badwan writhes clinging to the tripod that supports the microphone as if it was supporting himself too He swings a little, stumbling and ecstatic as he shouts the lyrics with in his very characteric voice. Faris barely speaks to the audience. That is part of the band’s style and idiosyncrasies.

The songs followed, one after the other. Starting with Silence That Remains, Three Decades, and Mirrors Image, until Who Can Say.

The intense strob was too present, overshadowing everything, and so annoying that it forced you to close your eyes and look away from the stage. Drummer Joe Spurgeon could barely be seen, or glimpsed through the shadows.

It was almost impossible to focus on the stage for an entire song due to the successive lightning strikes. In my opinion, it almost ruined everything. The only reason it didn’t, was because, musically, the concert was immaculate.

For lovers of the genre, The Horrors have very well structured songs and of a singular beauty and their last album – Night Life, is a good, very well done, record. During the encore they played three songs: Lotus Eater, Scarklet Fields and Something to Remember Me By
.
Outside, the warm air of the night relieved my tired eyes.

April 4, 2025April 10, 2025 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

The Legendary Tigerman, Casa da Música, 01.04.2025

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Marcos Leal

A gentleman is always a gentleman, and rock’n’roll is no exception.The Legendary Tigerman, Paulo Furtado’s pseudonym, is a well of talent. He is a performance artist par excellence and has the ability to surpass himself. We see it again and again, but we always expect something magical to happen. And it did!

An almost sold out Sala Suggia, dressed up to welcome the hottest rocker Portugal and his much-cherished women from Femina, on the 15th anniversary of the iconic album. A memorable evening that moved me to the limits of the most insolent glamour of my youth. This wonderful ability of rock’n’roll never ceases to seduce and amaze.

Phoebe Killdeer, Maria de Medeiros, Rita Red Shoes, Claudia Efe and her partner – Sara Badalo – brought the intended charm and sensuality only within the reach of the Ladies of rock.Helena Coelho, who will be the mother of Paulo’s child in a few months, was also called to the stage to perform Summertime, alongside Ray.

The songs of Femina were played in full with an enviable technical rigor, with adjustments here and there. There was still room left for songs such as Keep it Burning, New Love and Ghost Rider, from the album Zeitgeist (2023).

April Fools’ Day was rammed by the truth of rock’n’roll, which continues to be the fountain of youth for many like Paulo Furtado.The bar was risen again. This year is promising!

April 3, 2025April 4, 2025 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Mão Morta, Casa da Música, Porto, 30.03.2025

words: Marcos Leal (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Telma Mota

“Good evening. Welcome to the spectrum of fascism” – This is how Adolfo Luxúria Canibal greeted the audience at Casa da Música, after several songs from Viva La Muerte, their new conceptual nine songs album being performed.

Adolfo, the band, and male choir were dressed as if part of a revolutionary movement. Adolfo, with an assertive stance, standing on a platform, gestured, and, with his deep, hoarse voice, recited the songs’ lyrics like a speech, akin to a political rally.

It was, undoubtedly, a highly political concert. That is not new for Mão Morta, but not in the fashion of Viva La Muerte. In reality we live in, with, the rise of far-right movements, and the establishment of oligarchies and totalitarian regimes. With Viva La Muerte Mão Morta reaffirm themselves even more as a band of political and social intervention.

The band perfectly reproduced the stylistic variations of the album, ranging from the folk/jazz influences of Liberdade to the doom-like tones of Pensamento Único. Between songs, various recordings of thinkers, philosophers, and revolutionaries, such as Tim Leary and Angela Davis, further emphasized the political context of the show.

The concert followed the album’s sequence, opening with Deus Pátria Autoridade with its choral voices, and closing with Viva La Muerte!, the title track. Thus, the finale echoed with the sentence “Ninguém nasceu para ser servil e morrer” (“Nobody was born to be servile and die”)repeated until the last chord—a final message to take home and into life.

Viva La Muerte:
01: Deus Pátria Autoridade
02: Corre Corre Corre
03: É Proibido
04: Ressentidos e Ressabiados
05: A Liberdade
06: Pensamento Único
07: Líder Povo Nação
08: Ratoeira Bélica
09: Viva La Muerte!

Mão Morta are:
Adolfo Luxúria Canibal (vocals)
Miguel Pedro (drums, electronics)
Antonio Rafael (keyboards, electronics)
Vasco Vaz (guitar)
Ruca Lacerda (guitar, percussion, drums)
Rui Leal (bass, double bass)

Choir:
Fernando Pinheiro (conductor)
Jorge Barata
Lucas Lopes
Paulo Santos Silva
Tiago Regueiras

March 25, 2025March 30, 2025 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews

Gavin Friday, Hard Club, Porto, 21.03.2025

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Marcos Leal

The dark, rainy night seemed to have been ordered on purpose for the recital of strong emotions and deep feelings that would adorn room Sala Dois of Hard Club.

And who better than an experience, talented and, above all, theatrical musician to deliver.

Gavin Friday was thar man. Coming from the late 70s the post-punk, founding member of the legendary Virgin Prunes – pioneer band that inspired many alternative music projects – Gavin presented Ecce Homo, his most recent solo work.

Ecce Homo is impregnated with love, longing, loss, lamentations, anguish and strong experiences. An ellipse of throbbing emotions.

However, despite this lyrical density, the musicality is exciting. Curious!

Electro rock’n’roll, with many hints of liturgical music and traces of industrial experimentalism, delivered with very different dynamics. Be it powerful and melodic rises, or accentuated descents, at times abrupt, at times contemplative. It makes your skin crawl several times, and forces to you to stretch your neck and close your eyes to feel all of its refined and majestic enchantment.

It was a magnificent performance, in which songs from Ecce Homo predominating, such as: Lovesubzero, Ecce Homo and Lamento, an intense song, in which he recalls the loss of his mother. Virgin Prunes songs like such Sandpaper Lullaby and Caucasian Walk were also played.

I left there thinking that the bar was too high for this year. What next?…

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Calexico Trio,Casa da Música, Porto, 04.02.2025

Spring Came Earlier

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Sara Oliveira

Spring came earlier. It was not announced. It arrived and that was it.

How good it was to be at Casa da Música, in the immense filled Suggia room to savour Calexico. If there is a band that can transmit the warmth, sun, and swing of a spring night, even from within a room, in the middle of winter, it’s Calexico. Joy and well-being was a constant throughout the concert. Joey Burns was at his best, and the result was a perfect interaction between band and audience. Believe it or not, there was dialogue and direct translation mode singing during My Love Don’t Leave Me Now. It was cute and very funny to watch.

The band created and conceived by Joey Burns and John Convertino, came with Martin Wenk – trumpet, guitar, vocals, occasionally harmonica, an excellent multi-instrumentalist musician, super competent and very relaxed. As for Joey & John, is it even worthy mentioning? Everything that comes from them is always magical and infinitely majestic. A symbiosis, a synergy of talents.

Calexico opened with Don Quixote and Gypsi’s Curse, Epic and Glimpse and went around through alleys and melodic paths where styles ranging from folk to rock’n’roll intersect.Joey Burns continues to be an affable and friendly communicator. A born and very experienced entertainer. As always accompanied by his folk guitar called Amália Rodrigues.

Spring came earlier.

November 21, 2024November 30, 2024 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Bernard Butler, Casa da Música, Porto, 17.11.2024.

A Handful of Songs

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Telma Mota

I knew that Bernard Butler was a guitar genius due to his creativity and originality.

I confess I didn’t knew he was such a communicator. He is very humorous, entertaining and truthful in his discourse, not even shying away from self-deprecation.

His pop rock is of a singular richness and his ease in transposing it on stage is, to say the least, appreciably comforting. I can feel colours from all shades of the rainbow in Butler’s songs, coated in intense, personal and introspective lyrics. It’s not hard to see yourself in one song or the other, and that’s why it’s easy to navigate his world.

In this concert at Casa da Música, Bernard’s first ever in Porto, he presented Good Grief, his new album in 25 years, gave us songs such as Deep Emotions and Pretty D, and obviously iconic songs from People Move On, such as My Domain, and the closing Not Alone.

From his collaborations with other artists he brought songs like Although (McAlmont & Butler) and Shallow The Water (Jessie Buckley & Bernard Butler).

A solo concert so intimate, just the man and his guitar(s), that you could talk to the musician and sip the stories from his Gibson ES-355, which, in his hands, almost speaks.

I was delighted by the riffs, sometimes intense, sometimes soft, but all of them imbued with charismatic melodies. Butler is a storyteller and a speaker of the sensations that come from those stories. What’s impressive is the way in which those same sensations fit, in a perfect symbiosis, with the dynamics of his songs. It’s a gift.

I think that’s all I needed to see and hear on a pre-Christmas Sunday evening. It was indeed well worth leaving the house for!

November 19, 2024November 21, 2024 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Temples, Hard Club, Porto, 14.11.2024.

Lost in translation. Definitely.

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos Telma Mota

Temples are a band of dreams. The magic feeling is constant throughout the band’s performance. Atmospherically very rich and diverse in the structure of their songs, they take us to rest in meadows that stretch far as the eye can see. An immensity of nostalgia and divine emotions that, in fact, can only be reached in temples of sound in which music is the supreme divinity.

You almost feel a cool breeze on your skin that gives you goose bumps, a constant throughout the concert. In Move With the Seasons I almost levitated, in The Guesser I dreamt and in Fragment’s Light I almost cried. What more could I ask for?

As the songs flowed, bodies moved to the rhythm of the band’s sound, applause was effusive and appropriate for the marvellous setting. The band felt that the audience was with them and James Bagshaw, the band’s singer, ended up saying that this was thee crowd of the tour. I bet it was.

I dare say that Temples are one of the best bands of the last 20 years, for its originality and musical creativity, and that Sun Structures is a masterpiece of musical art.Outside, the city is perfectly suited to what was experienced and witnessed indoors. Perhaps because its the city of temples. I still feel it all very much alive and present in me. Thank you, James, Tom, Adam and Rens. Don’t make us wait another 10 years for your return to Portugal and, in particular, to Porto.

November 12, 2024November 16, 2024 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Whispering Sons, Hard Club,Porto, 08.11.2024.

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Telma Mota

The preamble serves to highlight the aesthetic evolution of the band at all levels. Whispering Sons developed well and got a place in their type of European rock.

The band is instrumentally cohesive with a very remarkable and secure well-structured rhythm section. The symbiosis between bass and drums works perfectly. In the melodic section, the guitar delivers sharp, strident and melodic riffs and knows how to respect the silences and dynamics that characterize the songs of Whispering Sons. The keyboards work as a safe network in a nostalgic tone that gives all that fog, at times thick, at times soft, sailing between chilling breezes. Up there, on the trapeze, Fenne Kuppens’ voice, dense, semi-hoarse, deep and disturbing makes the difference and imprints the stamp that characterizes the Belgian quintet.

Whispering Sons’ performance at Hard club presented a growing and coherent setlist starting with Balm, Something Good and Surface, moving on to Walking, Flying and Try Me Again. It was a concert in crescendo that left everyone, myself included, satisfied. The Great Calm, the band’s largest record is to be heard from beginning to end. And it was with a feeling similar to the album title that I set out on my way home.

October 8, 2024October 14, 2024 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concerts, Reviews

Rafael Toral, Understage-Rivoli, Porto, 04.10.2024.

words: Raquel Pinheiro; photos: João Octávio Peixoto/TMP

We’re literally seated, in the dark, in the Rivoli’s underbelly. My old friend Rafael Toral is presenting his new album Spectral Evolution. Spectral Evolution is a single continuous instrumental track. The concert follows the same format.

“There are already too many ruptures in the world, I’m more commited in peace, integration, healing, reconciliation, and this record assumes it.” said Rafael, on an interview, about Spectral Evolution. I wholeheartedly concur with him.

Spectral Evolution, one of my three favourite records of 2024 so far, does have an healing, a come together effect. It’s brings forward emotions, release, serenity.

Here, live, at least where I was seated, for me that was a little disturbed by the sound in itself. It’s part of the nature and the beauty of live music.

I’m not going into technical details or guitar approaches, many of which I’m not even sure or fully aware of. I’ll go with sensations, emotions, a report of how the sound and music reached me, what I made of it.

A piercing, erthquakerish, lound sound, under, or along which, church like and birdsong like music appears. Scratches, signals, noises. It moves towards gentleness, a slight return to higher intensity. There’s a coming and going, a departure, an arrival, a departure, an arrival, a departure. It goes up, higher, louder. It recesses. It floats. It pierces the heart, the muscles, the soul, the senses.

Hadn’t seen Rafael in person in a while it wasn’t no much a case of reconciliation, or even reconnection – we connect through his music, and in the usual current ways – more the joy, the affection, the hugs, the kind and godspeed farewell words in the now emptiness of a minutes before filled room. It was a good-bye matching the essence of Spectral Evolution.

May 2, 2024May 2, 2024 Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Lloyd Cole, Casa da Música, Porto, 28.04.2024.

words: Paulo Carmona freely translated by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Paulo Carmona

Lloyd Cole is one of those unique cases in which a man, a guitar and his voice manage to give an whole concert in which the audience does not fall into a dragged sleepleness apathy like. There are several factors for that: The first one is the voice to be in shape in the highs and lows and the knowledge of using breathing to achieve what is intended.

Another factor to have in consideration is the compentency is the playing of the electro-acoustic guitar. The rhythms, the freestyle, the intensity, the silences and the arpeggios. All very well played and pertinent to the flow of the songs. And the songs, of course.

When a song is well written, well harmonized and has a poem that tailor suits it because it is felt, loved and conceived since it naturally; with guitar and voice, or orchestra it will always be a great song. That was what, once more, Lloyd Cole offered us. Always nice and afectous, supported by is British humour, including about mid concert pause, explaining it is mandatory for guys his age, he was an excellent entertainer from beginning to end.

The menu included more introspective songs such as Like Lovers Do, My Other Life, 2 CV, Today I’m Not So Sure, The Afterlife, The Idiot, Butterfly and more iconic and uplifted songs like Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken, Jennifer She Said, Brand New Friend, Perfect Skin and Undressed. On the much demanded and thanked encore Lost Weekend and Forest Fire were played.

On my way home, on the aftermath, I was thinking a cup of hot tea and sweet, sweet biscuits would be right the thing.

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