Why do bands still insist on dabbling in drum’n’bass? It was always an absurd, overwrought style, even when it first assaulted our eardrums in the mid-1990s. It’s more like a technological malfunction of the drum machine than a natural, felt groove, hurtling along, as it tends to, at a ridiculous 200 beats per minute. Ironically, Marseilles’s Watcha Clan probably think it’s one of their strengths that they throw a couple of tracks into their live set powered by this anachronistic rhythm, but they are much more effective when utilising less familiar grooves.
Rich Mix is a relatively new north-London arts centre. It comes across as part art school union building and part soulless airport departure lounge, but we shouldn’t hold that against it bearing in mind the number of interesting world-music gigs they've put on over the past couple of years. In fact, back in November 2009 I reviewed Transglobal Underground there, and there's some interesting parallels to be drawn between this London-based global grooves outfit and Watcha Clan. Both bands have one foot in contemporary club culture and the other in the ancient traditions of much of the planet’s music. Both bands also clearly love film music, resulting in their compulsion to make their club-orientated material more substantial with multiple overdubs in an attempt to produce something sweepingly epic as well as something bodies will gyrate to.
But one asset that Watcha Clan have that Transglobal Underground lack is a permanent charismatic front person. The big-eyed and dreadlocked Sista K is the focus of this quartet of super-versatile musicians (I lost track of the number of instruments that were played by the two – most of the time – guitarists) and she’s particularly good at dealing with the moments when the band are unusually quiet and she simply has to pull in the audience for a couple of bars with a haunting vocal melody - sang in either Spanish, French, English, Arabic, Hebrew or Yiddish - until the sampled beats come crashing back in.
Without such a character, a performance like this – with a guy at the back just deftly tweaking knobs and pressing buttons – could easily feel like little more than a diverting DJ set. But perhaps I’m being a little unfair, because despite the fact the band didn’t have a live drummer, they were capable of creating organically involving grooves with well-defined highs and lows, which got the crowd moving and did full justice to their latest album, Radio Babel, from which most of their set was taken. In fact, in a few instances songs from the album seemed to breathe with more life, in the necessarily simplified arrangements.
For example, “Hasnaduro” came across like Amadou & Mariam at full tilt, with its intense Gnawa trance rhythm. Likewise the set’s penultimate number, “Fever is Rising”, motored along nicely before building to a fierce wall-of-sound climax. Although this does brings us back to the – let’s face it – horribly dated and tediously hysterical drum'n’bass rhythm which the latter song made use of. Another groove past its sell by date is the Balkan dance groove, which on “Balkan Qoulou” came dangerously near to tipping over into Eurovision Song Contest kitsch.
Watcha Clan are at their best when they explore rhythms less familiar to Western audiences, rather than trot out songs with a reggae, break-beat, drum'n'bass or Balkan template. In other words, when it’s hard to place the roots of the song (such as on the loping “With or Without the Wall” or the haunting Klezmer-meets-chanson ballad “Im nin alu”) they become so much more interesting. But that’s just one over-demanding audience member’s view. The rest of last night’s crowd seemed to love every minute.
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