Sunday night @ the Globe: Graham Costello’s Strata - June 18 (also album review)

Graham Costello, (drums); Fergus McCreadie (piano); Harry Weir (tenor sax, bass clarinet); Kevin Cahill (guitar); Gus Stirrat (electric bass).

(On the album: Joe Williams (guitar) and Angus Tikka (bass) replace Cahill and Stirratt and Liam Shortall plays trombone)

Sometimes a concert is a good way into an act or an album that had previously been beyond reach. (This happened for me with Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear. Seeing them live made everything click.) Sometimes it’s the other way round and listening to the album provides a way into a better understanding of the gig you saw the night before. This latter, for me, is the point I have arrived at after seeing Graham Costello’s Strata on Sunday night at the Globe. Listening to Obelisk, the album they were promoting at the gig, you get a sense of where the name, Strata, came from. There are layers to this music and you can spend repeated listens geologically exploring what is going on at different levels. This pleasure is one that, inevitably, is denied in a live setting but other factors usually more than compensate.

First off, I have to say that I think Graham Costello is an outstandingly good drummer and one that would enhance any band he joined. He needs to be in a band, (not leading one), of musicians that can operate at his energy level. The weakness, live, is I think, in the composing and arranging. What works well on the album is lost live. Subtlety is the first and major victim. Live, there are peaks and troughs as climaxes are reached and quieter moments pass before another crash on the spiralized cymbal (see photo) signifies a return to storm and tempest. Very quickly everything started to sound a bit the same as tracks fused into one another and followed the same routine of quiet and loud passages with most of the non-drum solos overwhelmed by the noise.  As William Shakespeare said in his review of the band, 'It is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' Perhaps it was the fact that I was sat closer than anyone else to the drummer and anything I heard had to get past him first!

There is further frustration in that three of the five musicians on stage are underused. Drum and bass provide some brilliant rhythmic work but it’s astounding to see a pianist like Fergus McCreadie doling out simple vamps with his left hand whilst drinking tea with his right. It was as if Costello had shackled a racehorse to a plough.

I would strongly recommend Obelisk the album and my copy has made it to that coveted end of the shelf where the albums of the year get to live until the top ten is compiled in December. The album was available at the gig and can now be bought HERE through Bandcamp in physical or digital formats. Dave Sayer