6 day riot

6 day Riot at the Spitz. No, not a headline from an East End rag, but one of the most exciting bands I've seen for a while performing at the lovely Spitz, one of those trendy art gallery/restaurant/clubs on the site of Spitalfields market. The place had been quiet, almost deserted for the first two acts; a pianist, and the truly awful Cerise, and yet as 6 day Riot appeared the numbers grew, photographers arrived from nowhere, and the audience hardly needed encouragement from the band to move closer to the stage, all signs that the word was out about this band.

When this band first found me on Myspace, I clicked on the link dubiously, as the name conjures up something Emo like. I was expecting Funeral for a Friend, and instead got Crooked Still/Altered Images/Nizlopi. And it works. They sound great.

6 day Riot began when Danish multi-instrumentalist Søren Burke met Scottish former gymnast and fashion student Tamara Schlesinger, now a singer song writer, at a gig in 2004. She asked him to play guitar on her solo album, and they started writing songs together. Joined by Jonathan Beyer on upright bass and Daniel Deavin on drums the live sound has unified into a glorious mix of sounds, and the band has now recorded their first album.

They have a lovely manner with the audience, a gentle way that gets responses, and style all their own. Both Jonathan and Søren in shirts and waistcoats, Daniel in an orange shirt, braces, and a pork pie hat , looking like he'd just left Babyshambles, and Tamara looking stunning in that slightly kooky way that either looks amazing or very very wrong. And Tamara looked amazing. She reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn in a little black dress with a floaty layered skirt, a diamante collar and belt, footless tights and black high heels with her hair pinned up under a small black hat trimmed with netting and perched jauntily at an angle. Audrey Hepburn playing a ukulele!

Their songs vary between folk, blue grass and pop, and it's easy to hear Eastern European influences too. Søren and Tamara's voices blend beautifully, a swirl of deliciously sweet harmonies that weave their way between the steady rhythms of the songs. These are tunes that you sing as you leave the venue and are still in your head when you wake the following morning, their light sound, happy melodies and gentle rhythms infectious and happy.

And if further proof were needed that this is an exciting band on the threshold of bigger things, the audience left when the band did, unwilling or unable to risk spoiling their evening by waiting for the headline act. Perfect - Folking.com

6 Day Riot Have A Plan reviews:

"a great big, bouncy, cynic-defying barrel of fun" Word

"sunny harmonies, calypso beats, buoyant melodies and quirky lyrics. Unashamedly poppy and irrepressibly charming" NME

"Stealing beats and licks from all over the folk-pop globe, ukulele led acoustica bursting with a joyous Afro-Latin energy... recalling the post punk clatter of Bow Wow Wow with a side order of Vampire Weekend" Uncut

"Lush" Independent on Sunday

"Fin de siècle folk-pop.. splendid" **** The Times

"Woozy Folk-Pop, a glorious jamboree of sound and sentiment. Come join the parade." Clash

"rich both lyrically and musically, an enchanting album" The Fly

"Excellent. A must have to make the scalding hot summer melt away into the crisp, sublime world that 6 Day Riot create." Drowned in Sound

"Think Los Campesinos crossed with Emmy the Great at an evangelical church meeting with a revolutionary political agenda" Artrocker

"Unashamedly poppy and unashamedly fun while touching on serious, almost cathartic issues makes for a fine, fine record." 8/10, 405

"Fuzzy, expressive, eccentric earthy pop songs" The List

"A spur of the moment outburst of joy and elation, the arrangements here are finely crafted and utterly gorgeous folk-pop gems, all plinky ukulele, rousing horns, Eastern European rhythms and wide-eyed fanfares. A bracing listen, possessed of grace and momentum, honesty and conviction, tempered by sadness but refusing to be overwhelmed by it" **** Maverick

"Tamara Schlesinger, the mainstay of 6 day Riot is really a folk reincarnation of Annabella Lwin of Bow Wow Wow, with added mariachi, strings and a sharp take on the world around her. Her lyric writing is sophisticated, shying away from the obvious and the cliched, and taking on the personal and the political in intelligent ways ('O those kids' a song about runaway canoeist John Darwin, is the outstanding track, a folk operetta in 3 minutes). But it is the marvellous musical melting pot that is most exciting part. The hard drums, the sweet strings and the generous use of uke, accordion and melodica, these are all used to generate joyous folk pop. At times, as on the drunken carnival waltz that interrupts 'Go! Canada', this is a wild extravagance, but for the most part the multiple possibilities are presented with restraint. "
**** Americana-uk

**** Narc - Various

Maybe it’s because the island’s surface area is so small – making a high population density and so very easy to hear and be influenced by the same things – or maybe it’s because any given band’s music has to travel such a great distance to reach foreign ears and so similarly bent groups tend to run together in waves, but it often seems like the UK exports a tremendous number of sound-alike bands. Think about it; a decent cross section of the British bands making waves on this side of the pond (including The Arctic Monkeys, The Fratellis, The Kooks and Babyshambles) are pretty interchangeable as far as their styles and overall sounds are concerned. 6 Day Riot, however, are blessedly different and so derails the above theory completely. The group recently played North By Northeast music conference in Toronto and, in anticipation of their showcase (and presumably in an attempt to diffuse the cost of the journey) the band has written and released an EP of songs about Canada.

The material might be about Canada and the band might be from the UK but, as soon as Bring On The Waves begins, 6 Day Riot sets itself so far apart from the pack that they might as well be from another planet. From the gentle ukulele coupled with singer Tamara Schlesinger’s wistful voice that opens “Go Canada!,” listeners know they’re in for something different. The overwhelming vision that the EP invokes is one of a little girl playing happily in a large, sun drenched room and caught in a daydream – oblivious to the fact that anyone’s listening. It’s an incredibly romantic moment that’s had not to fall in love with. As she sighs along, she makes up her own rules as she goes that hook listeners because they are just so immodest; mixing sticky sweet melodies with a delivery that could just as easily be used for nursery rhymes.

The band, for their part, cultivates a potent mixture of music that’s part folk and part Celtic traditional with hints of gypsy flavor and intimate sweetness that compliments rather than challenges Schlesinger and is, at once, very old sounding but very new because it has been re-envisioned here with archly pop-minded intentions. The instrumentation and song writing of “Sky Father” and “The Last Stand” instantly recalls the craft and (to a limited degree) approach of Two Minute Miracles, The Burning Hell, Red House Painters and Geoff Berner but made all the more salubrious because of the band’s sweet and (this is not a slight) oblivious delivery; nothing about Bring On The Waves feels contrived, calculated or willfully different for the sake of difference and that’s becoming an increasingly rare commodity.

If this band has the stamina to make a full-length album as endearing and engaging as the four songs on Bring On The Waves, what we may be looking at here is the next important band from Britain. It would be a nice change because 6 Day Riot may single-handedly make it okay to play music that wears its heart on its sleeve again. - Ground Control Mag

"Traditional English folk music has been dug over so many times that it is in danger of becoming barren, bands plant the same old seeds in the same soil, over and over again; thankfully some of our British cousins are practicing some sort of folk crop rotation. They bring in klezmer and trumpet amongst others to add to the usual staples of drums, upright bass and guitar. With Tamara Schlesinger’s vocal travelling on the top like a jockey on the hump of a camel it makes for an interesting ride.

‘The Last Stand’ has some interesting drumming that circles like percussive echoes from canons ricocheting off each other in some huge naval battle - add in some faintly mariachi trumpet and you have something as satisfying as pastrami on a bagel. This sort of tasty mouthful is repeated across all four tracks. Tamara’s vocal dominates ‘Sky Father’, whilst ukuleles chime the opening of ‘Gerald & the Gliders’ and with the soft velvet touch of the vocal, it is a seductive mix. If you stir all of the ingredients together you get ‘Go! Canada’ which shows 6DR off to their best advantage, a sparkling mixture of old and new which makes this a very tasty appetiser for their next album."
Americana UK - Americanan UK

"...the recent EP of irrepressibly charming new songs gave evidence of a band accelerating to greatness." Pete Paphides (The Times Pop Picks 2009) - The Times

6 Day Riot @ Pearson International Airport
Friday June 13, 2008 @ 03:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Band: 6 Day Riot
Hometown:London, UK
Venue: Pearson Airport
Date: June 12, 2008
Reporter: Zack Vitiello

BACKGROUND/COMPOSITION:
With a name like 6 Day Riot, the first thought is that this band is going to be the musical equivalent of a high school bully, kicking the shit out of unsuspecting concert goers and stealing their lunch money. But don’t be so quick to judge — the British quintet are headed by Tamara Schlesinger, an adorable five-foot munchkin with a voice and smile so sweet you may burst into flames if you look at her hard enough. She’s that girl from school that no one realized was gorgeous until Senior Prom. Then she walks into the room and every guy there wishes they had asked her.

But other than the looming potential for a broken heart, 6 Day Riot wouldn’t hurt a fly. Their music is buoyant folk-pop, complete with trumpets, violins and ukuleles. Once they start playing you’re going to wish you had the courage to ask Schlesinger for a dance.


Grade: 77
Comment: It is slightly ironic that 6 Day Riot played their first NXNE show in Pearson Airport — they had just gotten off a plane from England not long before the performance, but worked through the jet lag as they attempted to draw an audience from the stressed, frustrated and tired individuals walking by their sorry excuse for a stage. They get an ‘A’ for effort, but the airport is simply a lousy place to play (and see) a show.


Accepting that their performance would not involve a lasting audience of eager onlookers, 6 Day Riot made the best of the situation and turned the performance into a tutorial in busking. "Spare some change for us poor Londoners!" begged Schlesinger from behind her miniature guitar. I almost ran to the closest ATM and extracted my life savings — that’s how cute this girl is. But on they played, cheery as can be, turning to one another to exchange bursts of laughter and music. When a small child walked up and dropped a Toonie in their open guitar case, all five musicians stopped what they were doing and looked on in heart-felt humility.

Imagine walking out of the baggage claim after a 12-hour flight and getting hit in the face with a horn solo. Needles to say, passerbyers looked mighty confused. But 6 Day Riot held nothing back, filling the terminal with a rocking blend of accordions, cellos and electric guitars. It may have been the band’s impressive energy or Schlesinger’s equally impressive good looks, but 6 Day Riot managed to gather a significantly larger audience than Great Lake Swimmers, who had played there several hours earlier. Unfortunately, that didn’t require much — I counted 10 people who were actually watching rather than waiting for someone to come out of the automatic doors to the left side of the band.

Dressed like they were coming from a 1940’s funeral, 6 Day Riot added a nice touch to the Brit-folk dynamic with dress pants, suspenders and vests for the guys and a frilly dress and head-piece for Schlesinger. She really did look bloody fantastic. Have I mentioned that yet?
- Chart Attack

....From the Savannah Room to the Cameron House, I went from the pro to the newbies with London's 6 Day Riot but they were no less impressive - in fact, factoring in the thrill of discovery, they may have been my favourite act of the festival.

The five piece, fronted by an adorable Scottish girl, work similar terrain as Beirut and DeVotchKa, which is to say indebted to old world, eastern European Gypsy-folk influences. But rather than the dramatic weight of those two acts, they offer up celebration and delight delivered with superb songs, musicianship and period costumes.

It's not necessarily difficult to fill the tiny Cameron House to capacity, but it's saying something that throughout their too-short set, people kept trying to get in and were turned away. The band have one full-length under their belts and have released a new EP for this year - Bring On The Waves - which I foolishly didn't grab a copy of. Alas. - Chromewaves