The weekend
Jun. 15th, 2004 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermarama(incidentally the Bad Fucks gig ended up not going on at all, due to staff shortage. There certainly was hardly any bugger in when we went there on the Wednesday night anyway.)
The Hob, Friday night
NaMaSTe's agenda is written on the singer's Led Zeppelin shirt. What lovely fresh-faced budding virtuoso guitar and bass players, what subtle fills and solid grooves from the drummer; what a classically slim wailer of a frontman, pixie-haired, making soul-feeling faces, standing back to air-guitar in sympathy when the man on the real one does his thing. What a shame the songs are pedestrian, held back by the careful correctness of the drums and their sheer lack of ambition. They can make lovely pseudo-Zeppelin, perhaps like some of the slower Soundgarden songs (after all, Audioslave makes it painfully obvious that Cornell would like to be Robert Plant), but what's the point? The horrible and incongruous cover of RATM's Killing In The Name Of illustrates it best. I bet it was at the tempo of the real recording, studiously followed and with all the tab carefully worked out. It had all the energy and aggression of a dead mackerel. I'm sure they could do something a lot better, they're all good at their instruments, if they'd let the songs go and see where they end up.
I'm told that Groove Monster are normally a great deal of fun and much better than this, particularly the front man who did nothing but the bare minimum this evening. That close-to-stoner kind of rock'n'roll again, but this time without any of the relish and with less than usual of the instrumentalism. I'll have to see 'em again sometime. This is less likely given that Amateur Ninja Club's excellent bassist has left, temporarily losing them their favourite support band.
Saturday, the Whistle Stop in Portslade
I didn't see Manic Cough, I only heard the last two songs from outside the door. What I heard filled me with no urge to rush through it, you may discern, but Ed tells me they were terrible in quite an excellent sort of way. An all-girl band, featuring someone I know as the only local girl likely to go more apeshit than me on a dancefloor on the drums. They spent the rest of the gig dancing a whole lot, bouncing manically and trying a sort of experimental gymnastic wrestling on the pub carpet. Bless 'em.
The Speedophiles make a lot more noise than you'd imagine a pub three-piece to be capable of. Take some JSBX slurring and groove and sixteenths, some Groop Dogdrill abruptness and cheap sex; stir with a flap-tastic Ampeg bass sound, a drummer making great use of trashy hats and a nutty singer and guitarist playing for two, mangling a wah and shrieking mock-innocent-like about various sorts of sleaze and you get something kind of good. Half of Flatpig were in the audience, and turn out to have engineered the demo I acquired. The demo is less raw than the sound in the pub and maybe a little less entertaining as a result but is still endearingly arm-waving. S'cool.
Naked Ape are in the nu-metal emo-core camp, bulling round the pit, enough guitarists that you can't tell from the sound when one of them stops to tune, one pretty good singer and one vocally-gurning bass player, earnest drummer who could do with a little more detail yet - you get the picture. I'm pretty sure I've seen the lead guitarist and his distinctive piercing audience glare before, though, and in Bon Jovi-esque commercial hellmongers Slavan. Bizarre. They weren't bad, if you like this sort of thing, which I do when it's done well.
Ed tells me his favourite band of the night are Manic Cough but I probably could have guessed that. We go to a new club night in the old BN1 club on Preston Street, and I remember why I get fed up of rock nights. The same faces playing the same songs, the same people stood in a different room. The new Slipknot single, not at all bad and with a brain-infesting chorus, gets a total of two of us on the floor, because people haven't had it drummed into them over enough years to consider dancing to it yet. Def Leppard and AC/DC cause actual, I kid you not, dancing round handbags. Knowing it's unlikely to get any better, and with the feeling of impending cold lurking in my throat, Ed gives me a lift home.
Get up and go to Essex to shut myself in a darkened room while it's beautiful and sunny outside. Oz damn near makes up for it when a random fingered messing on the bass turns into a spoony jam of jazz-like abstractness. We have no tools to turn this sort of thing into songs, and indeed it'd be deadly boring for most of an audience anyway, but it's nice to feel it happening under you. We know we can rely on each other to keep the beat so if one of us goes off there's always a path back, you know? He had to go dunk his head under the cold tap for ages when it finally wound down. That keeps me going through most of it but there's no denying the rising throat lump and the horrible energy shortage when I get behind the kit.
Come home, slowly, vegetate, slowly, and figure I may as well sit listening to some live music as not being as how I wanted to see Bloc Party. The gig is put back an hour for the sake of the football so I give in to the rising undeniable and hunt down soluble aspirin in a seafront shop, which makes things a lot more comfortable. The asymmetric-hairdo'd and handkerchief-skirted assemble...
Sunday, The Zap, Brighton
Dammit, I now can't find the name of the first support band anywhere. It was only going to be by way of warning never to pay money to see 'em. It would be nice if, by the end of a fair sized tour, they'd get the hang of playing their songs without the obvious mistakes. It would be nice if the bass player wasn't so obviously bored that he wandered off the side of the stage to talk to mates a couple of times. It would be nice if the singer had anything to say and a voice to say it in rather than merely an urge to appear louche. I think I can hear what sound they're aiming for, and now and then when they get properly off the ground there's a near miss, but all the efforts sound the same and none of them really hit it. Come to think of it, not much chance of having to pay money to see 'em in the near future without some radical change.
I think I've seen second supports Kill Kenada before but it turns out I'd only missed them as first support at the Freebutt over a year ago. That's a fair bit of progress to have made in the meantime. I can see the point of this more clearly and I think they're hitting it. It's fast and angular, for straight-legged jerk dancing, frantic and awkward and all sorts of good stuff. If I was going to pick, they need to keep the momentum up rather than stopping for a character-jarring bumble between songs, and the guitar sound is often too clean and nice to get properly off on, but I suspect the combination of art, noise, jerk and middle-class already has them as some people's ideal band. Fair enough.
Bloc Party get described as funk-punk and art-punk and other frantic new combinations. The funk probably comes from the drumming, which leans heavily on lead-foot bass, high-speed busy hats and off-beats of various sorts, and from the abrupt, spacious bass guitar. I s'pose the speed and the guitar stabs give the punk, but that's more about a type of precision than anything. The lyrics are like half-formed snatches of conversation, bits of ideas hung together in odd combinations, hinting at a deeper meaning in a way that that threatens to be intolerably cheesy. But the drummer has a mic for half the gig and comes across like a sullen, gangly, post-puberty Harry Potter, who's gone away to uni and found that he's nothing that shit-hot after all, taken up politics and sarcastic bitterness to cover for it but would secretly like to come clean.. And the singer has a remarkable, unusual voice, sending the fragments over as meaning and information rather than just for melody and show. Let's be realistic for a minute, this is four lads from London who'd like an excuse to make music for a living I'm sure but they've got a hold of the idea of getting something across and making a good attempt at it. The test for me is She's Hearing Voices - the changes come across better in this live version than they do on the recording, which says to me that they know what the song's about and what it's for. Sounds daft but that's what turns a bunch of chords into a song, you know?
It's not completely captivating, they seem to be watching the crowd nervously to see how we like it, still conscious that they're only fresh out of it themselves. They go off and on for the encore thing and they look decently sheepish while someone behind me shouted that encores are shit and they should get on with playing. I'm looking forward to hearing an album, to hearing if they can keep on heading upwards.
And after the delayed start it's half midnight by the time it's done. Half midnight on a Sunday and the streets of Brighton are as near to quiet as they get. A few screaming drunk girls, fat seagulls rooting in bin bigs. More seagulls stretching their necks to scream on the rooftops, and the aspirin wears off and my throat swells solid.
The Hob, Friday night
NaMaSTe's agenda is written on the singer's Led Zeppelin shirt. What lovely fresh-faced budding virtuoso guitar and bass players, what subtle fills and solid grooves from the drummer; what a classically slim wailer of a frontman, pixie-haired, making soul-feeling faces, standing back to air-guitar in sympathy when the man on the real one does his thing. What a shame the songs are pedestrian, held back by the careful correctness of the drums and their sheer lack of ambition. They can make lovely pseudo-Zeppelin, perhaps like some of the slower Soundgarden songs (after all, Audioslave makes it painfully obvious that Cornell would like to be Robert Plant), but what's the point? The horrible and incongruous cover of RATM's Killing In The Name Of illustrates it best. I bet it was at the tempo of the real recording, studiously followed and with all the tab carefully worked out. It had all the energy and aggression of a dead mackerel. I'm sure they could do something a lot better, they're all good at their instruments, if they'd let the songs go and see where they end up.
I'm told that Groove Monster are normally a great deal of fun and much better than this, particularly the front man who did nothing but the bare minimum this evening. That close-to-stoner kind of rock'n'roll again, but this time without any of the relish and with less than usual of the instrumentalism. I'll have to see 'em again sometime. This is less likely given that Amateur Ninja Club's excellent bassist has left, temporarily losing them their favourite support band.
Saturday, the Whistle Stop in Portslade
I didn't see Manic Cough, I only heard the last two songs from outside the door. What I heard filled me with no urge to rush through it, you may discern, but Ed tells me they were terrible in quite an excellent sort of way. An all-girl band, featuring someone I know as the only local girl likely to go more apeshit than me on a dancefloor on the drums. They spent the rest of the gig dancing a whole lot, bouncing manically and trying a sort of experimental gymnastic wrestling on the pub carpet. Bless 'em.
The Speedophiles make a lot more noise than you'd imagine a pub three-piece to be capable of. Take some JSBX slurring and groove and sixteenths, some Groop Dogdrill abruptness and cheap sex; stir with a flap-tastic Ampeg bass sound, a drummer making great use of trashy hats and a nutty singer and guitarist playing for two, mangling a wah and shrieking mock-innocent-like about various sorts of sleaze and you get something kind of good. Half of Flatpig were in the audience, and turn out to have engineered the demo I acquired. The demo is less raw than the sound in the pub and maybe a little less entertaining as a result but is still endearingly arm-waving. S'cool.
Naked Ape are in the nu-metal emo-core camp, bulling round the pit, enough guitarists that you can't tell from the sound when one of them stops to tune, one pretty good singer and one vocally-gurning bass player, earnest drummer who could do with a little more detail yet - you get the picture. I'm pretty sure I've seen the lead guitarist and his distinctive piercing audience glare before, though, and in Bon Jovi-esque commercial hellmongers Slavan. Bizarre. They weren't bad, if you like this sort of thing, which I do when it's done well.
Ed tells me his favourite band of the night are Manic Cough but I probably could have guessed that. We go to a new club night in the old BN1 club on Preston Street, and I remember why I get fed up of rock nights. The same faces playing the same songs, the same people stood in a different room. The new Slipknot single, not at all bad and with a brain-infesting chorus, gets a total of two of us on the floor, because people haven't had it drummed into them over enough years to consider dancing to it yet. Def Leppard and AC/DC cause actual, I kid you not, dancing round handbags. Knowing it's unlikely to get any better, and with the feeling of impending cold lurking in my throat, Ed gives me a lift home.
Get up and go to Essex to shut myself in a darkened room while it's beautiful and sunny outside. Oz damn near makes up for it when a random fingered messing on the bass turns into a spoony jam of jazz-like abstractness. We have no tools to turn this sort of thing into songs, and indeed it'd be deadly boring for most of an audience anyway, but it's nice to feel it happening under you. We know we can rely on each other to keep the beat so if one of us goes off there's always a path back, you know? He had to go dunk his head under the cold tap for ages when it finally wound down. That keeps me going through most of it but there's no denying the rising throat lump and the horrible energy shortage when I get behind the kit.
Come home, slowly, vegetate, slowly, and figure I may as well sit listening to some live music as not being as how I wanted to see Bloc Party. The gig is put back an hour for the sake of the football so I give in to the rising undeniable and hunt down soluble aspirin in a seafront shop, which makes things a lot more comfortable. The asymmetric-hairdo'd and handkerchief-skirted assemble...
Sunday, The Zap, Brighton
Dammit, I now can't find the name of the first support band anywhere. It was only going to be by way of warning never to pay money to see 'em. It would be nice if, by the end of a fair sized tour, they'd get the hang of playing their songs without the obvious mistakes. It would be nice if the bass player wasn't so obviously bored that he wandered off the side of the stage to talk to mates a couple of times. It would be nice if the singer had anything to say and a voice to say it in rather than merely an urge to appear louche. I think I can hear what sound they're aiming for, and now and then when they get properly off the ground there's a near miss, but all the efforts sound the same and none of them really hit it. Come to think of it, not much chance of having to pay money to see 'em in the near future without some radical change.
I think I've seen second supports Kill Kenada before but it turns out I'd only missed them as first support at the Freebutt over a year ago. That's a fair bit of progress to have made in the meantime. I can see the point of this more clearly and I think they're hitting it. It's fast and angular, for straight-legged jerk dancing, frantic and awkward and all sorts of good stuff. If I was going to pick, they need to keep the momentum up rather than stopping for a character-jarring bumble between songs, and the guitar sound is often too clean and nice to get properly off on, but I suspect the combination of art, noise, jerk and middle-class already has them as some people's ideal band. Fair enough.
Bloc Party get described as funk-punk and art-punk and other frantic new combinations. The funk probably comes from the drumming, which leans heavily on lead-foot bass, high-speed busy hats and off-beats of various sorts, and from the abrupt, spacious bass guitar. I s'pose the speed and the guitar stabs give the punk, but that's more about a type of precision than anything. The lyrics are like half-formed snatches of conversation, bits of ideas hung together in odd combinations, hinting at a deeper meaning in a way that that threatens to be intolerably cheesy. But the drummer has a mic for half the gig and comes across like a sullen, gangly, post-puberty Harry Potter, who's gone away to uni and found that he's nothing that shit-hot after all, taken up politics and sarcastic bitterness to cover for it but would secretly like to come clean.. And the singer has a remarkable, unusual voice, sending the fragments over as meaning and information rather than just for melody and show. Let's be realistic for a minute, this is four lads from London who'd like an excuse to make music for a living I'm sure but they've got a hold of the idea of getting something across and making a good attempt at it. The test for me is She's Hearing Voices - the changes come across better in this live version than they do on the recording, which says to me that they know what the song's about and what it's for. Sounds daft but that's what turns a bunch of chords into a song, you know?
It's not completely captivating, they seem to be watching the crowd nervously to see how we like it, still conscious that they're only fresh out of it themselves. They go off and on for the encore thing and they look decently sheepish while someone behind me shouted that encores are shit and they should get on with playing. I'm looking forward to hearing an album, to hearing if they can keep on heading upwards.
And after the delayed start it's half midnight by the time it's done. Half midnight on a Sunday and the streets of Brighton are as near to quiet as they get. A few screaming drunk girls, fat seagulls rooting in bin bigs. More seagulls stretching their necks to scream on the rooftops, and the aspirin wears off and my throat swells solid.