Friday 11 April 2014

Kimchinary and Pindrop @ Southbank / Chorus Festival

Hooray for Korean burritos! In and of themselves - the kimchi fried rice, cheddar, gochujang special sauce, pickled coleslaw, spring onion sour cream and pulled pork delights served up in lightly blackened wrap by @Kimchinary are a lovely, fresh, crispy, tangy, piggy wonder - but also because if I hadn't been loitering and scoffing on the Southbank Centre balcony outside the Queen Elizabeth Hall last Saturday afternoon, I wouldn't have been spotted by @Ericapig, who is one fifth of acapella experimentalists Pindrop, who, as luck would have it, were shortly to be performing in the QEH as part of the Southbank's Chorus Festival 2014.

Now, because I have an impoverished soul, even the thought of choral music makes my insides go all squirmy, like a claustrophobe discovering the only way up to their job interview is via a four-man lift with three people already in it. Indeed, I had narrowly avoided a panic attack minutes earlier when exiting the Royal Festival Hall to discover someone choralling all over the Beatles' Yesterday, the song that more than any other makes me want to stream and gibber into the nearest chip wrapper. However, the description of Pindrop as a mere quintet who, better yet, use a loop machine in one of their songs, brought my panic down sufficiently for me to want to poke my head in...

I am certainly a fan of a distinctive voice, whether it be Guru ('Mostly tha voice'), Evidence ('MCs without a voice should write a book'), Muddy Waters, Bjork, Bobby Womack, Axl Rose, Robert Plant or whoever. But most of the music I listen to doesn't so much depend on the use of the voice as an instrument, so it's not something I've ever given much thought to.

Watching Pindrop perform was a revelation. Imagine if the only paintings you've ever seen are your mates' in secondary school, and then you accidentally wander into the National Gallery. Or the person who'd just invented snooker dropping through time and finding themselves tableside at the World Championships.

Although that makes it sound like this is just a group of people who can sing, which is not so. That would be true of any of the people who performed at Chorus 2014, I expect, shrivelly insides or no. But Pindrop do something interesting and exciting as well as just something you and I can't do, and gave me no squirminess or discomfort whatsoever. (In the Grand Hall of half-assed compliments that one is sitting on a velvet pillow, I realise, but you don't know my insides.) They're mesmerising, surprising, and joyous.

To demonstrate just how good they are, this is how they sound when recorded through a bloody phone, for god's sake. Give them a listen, and then see them live.