We arrive at the Croft early because it is just down the road from my house. Time for a drink before the festivities, time to try and persuade as many people as I can to come and support some of the best bands I've seen so far this year. Admittedly I've been going to see Angel Tech since 1998, but the others are all this year's discoveries.
The overture is provided by Snakes On A Plane who fill our ears with works created from simple beginnings, intelligent soundscapes of basic licks that develop organically into screaming noise, heavy distortion or even just manically-timed counterpoint. Keyboard player Alex remains impassive throughout the performance, while his bandmates spasm into action around him each time the music launches into a new direction. I find this group and its sound quite compelling, something I could listen to for hours although there are those amongst my companions who feel they develop the music beyond their capacity for ideas.
Itchy Tasty are a four-piece instrumental metal band, occasionally erring on the side of mathematically complex riffs with the emphasis heavily on seriously rocking out. Their front man, known in these parts as wildly random entrepeneur of sound Team Brick, still sweating from his role in the background of SOAP - where he veered between screaming noise and supporting guitar - introduces each song as being somehow related to investing your money wisely in the European Stockmarket, comedy interludes to what is sometimes comedy music. Excellent grooves make way for heavier guitar riffage backed up by seriously solid, complicated and at times wondrous drumming.
By stark contrast, Azalea City Penis Club play as if they found the Blues in a back alley somewhere and resurrected it following a nasty accident involving a particularly heavily loaded bus full of public schoolboy wannabe punks. They shout, but they're not angry. It's supposed to be lighthearted, but it just comes across as shallow, uninspired and bereft of musical forethought. Here's what you do: learn that the blues generally has three chords. Learn some vauge bluesy riffs. Turn your guitars up. Turn them up more. A bit more. Now play a bit faster... faster. That's it, quicker than disco, slower than speed metal and now, just let me shout. Oh it doesn't matter what about... damn. I've just invented rock and roll.
Angel Tech are not rock and roll. For years they have confounded description, taking us to the giddy heights of the solar system at the end of the 90's, songs without obvious structures that ebb and flow and make you smile. These days the music has the same edge and after a period of acoustic gigs, they are fully re-established with a vengeance and an album in the pipeline. Songs about relationships, break-ups over music tastes ('the jukebox will tear us apart again'), the always tragic and brilliant 'Angel Tech RIP' rebuilt upon a hotbed of electronic drums and hypnotic melodies, sometimes erring on the dance side of things with techno or drum and bass rhythms. On top of this the music stalks between Nyman-esque piano ostinati, incidental film-like artworks and almost pop, not quite rock simple songs. I know - it all sounds terrible but it's brilliant and like nothing else on earth. A special treat for the old-time fans is the resurrection of one of their older songs, which has me imagining I was ten years younger, which I suppose I was the last time I saw it performed live.
It is a terrible cliché to complain about the dreadful mediocrity of industry-piped lift music as seen on TV, but this was a night for learning that the spark of inspiration for guitar-based music is not as dead as the media would have us think. Here we have four very different bands who are all exciting and different in their own unique ways without compromising good ideas for MOR pop by numbers. It also seems that these days you don't have to go far out of your way to find such music, not least since I live just around the corner from the venue.
