Thrones, Zombi, Team Brick, 24th July

The first act Barefoot sadly gets away from me, they are apparently bass and drums and difficult to Google. Team Brick on the other hand is easy to Google, but more fun to actually experience in the flesh. Tonight the journey is atmospheric, with padded sticks on a floor tom, a suspended board, echoed through the usual array of delay pedals. The sound builds, TB sings, the white noise hits. We start again. It's not an easy thing to describe and I often suspect that he isn't even singing any actual words but the overall effect is mesmerising. The set ends with TB singing a repeated phrase over and over again, the noise ends and he is just there with an acoustic guitar, singing.

Zombi have a fun synth. They like it so much that it forms the very basis for all their songs. Breathy synthy chord over the top of the wibbly 303-style bassline put me in mind of early trance. The drummer hammers out some solid beats. Occaionally he goes really mad, all strictly within the tempo to a click track so persistent we can almost hear it in the music. The sounds are reminiscient of all the moments where old prog bands linger, but without the soulless guitar solo's and singing. This is just the breaks, the intros, the build-ups and the endings.

Thrones fails me completely. Not only in being just one person with a plural name (have that M$ spelling and grammar checker!) I am promised a legend and instead get a drum machine with too much distorted bass on top. Regardless of how many other great doom bands he's been in, I can only judge from what I see before me and judge I do. There is some technical skill, some great powerchord on bass, but the the faint tapping of a drowned-out drum machine and other noises in the background make me wonder what the point of it all is. So I don't like Doom. I can't stand the incorrigable deliberate slowness of it and when all you have is a bass player...

Back in the bar I find I'm not the only one. There are some die-hard fans in the back room still, but it seems the consensus is that the band of the night is the one that I miss.

On the way home, someone nearly gets run over by a taxi who is running red lights.