The First / Thousand Autumns / Jamie Lenman [Live Review – The Boileroom, Guildford, 11/10/13]
Opinion
Jamie Lenman (AKA Radu The Handsome)
If you had been scanning the Internet for a decent gig to head down to last night, come across the listing for this show, and then Googled the name of opening band Radu The Handsome, you wouldn’t have found anything to do with music (apart from the listing for this gig). You would, however, have found a ton of references to Vlad the Impaler’s allegedly homosexual brother, and perhaps his appearance in an obscure Doctor Who audio story. From this information you might have deduced that this band are a bit into Doctor Who, and might even suspect – rightly – that Radu the Handsome are not a real band at all, but Doctor Who illustrator and ex-Reuben frontman Jamie Lenman and his new band performing under a pseudonym.
But let’s be honest, that’s pretty unlikely. Read more…
We all know the feelings unique to Monday mornings. The bleary-eyed knackeredness, the aching muscles, the brain filled with thoughts and memories of the weekend that, perhaps, make us wish we hadn’t been born with neurons. What you need is to wake up – to be unceremoniously jolted out of your inertia-filled state of conscious unconsciousness. We all have our own rituals with which to achieve this: a morning workout, jog, cigarette, coffee, espresso, Red Bull, perhaps all of the above. But these options require actual physical effort. At the very least, you need to get out of bed. Hassle. 
Wow. Seriously, just wow. As incredible as progressive music is, it remains a rare treat to discover music of that ilk which manages to condense an epic’s worth of consciousness-twisting ideas into a space of time more usually reserved for punk songs about being angry, being angry about being angry, and/or indulging in immature toilet humour, and then makes it work in a way that keeps you coming back for more, never becoming bored even ten listens later. A series of tiny balls of complexity that will take months to really unravel, ‘A Conundrum On My Coffee Table’ is a spectacular mini-album that should keep your headphones glued to your ears. Just remember to tear them away when operating heavy machinery.