After a hard day's cleaning following our pretty damn successful giant Christmas dinner for friends, I fail to get any of them to come out with me to see the consistently amazing Angel Tech for free, with noodles. Not one to miss (often) a good gig just because no-one will go with me I plug in my shut-out-the-world headphones and wander into the misty night.
It is Rose Kemp's Birthday, so Mr Wolf's is full of balloons. Balloons and noodles and Chokers. The Secret Ego is playing as we come in, just a guy with a loopstation and an electric guitar and a drum machine. He sings some songs that I generally ignore, through buying beer and chatting and whatnot, but the overriding feeling I get is that the machines are running the music more than he is.
To qualify, it is a sad coincidence that lately I have been getting annoyed with the current proliferation of loopstations in 'the' music scene. From pop chart types (KT Tunstall *spit*) to underground musicians, they seem to be cropping up everywhere and not many people can make them sound fresh and unique with actual songwriting skill and talent. Like all this bloody vocoding/autotune in dance music. It's all about keeping your interest. Even bands that play one chord over and over again can make it interesting, like Mugstar or Godspeed. Local musicians who manage to do something good with a looper include Team Brick (who is never dull), SJ Esau (great songwriter) and Rose Kemp (amazing singer).
The real problem I guess, is that people set up a loop, play over it, sing for a bit and then realise that there's nothing else to do. How do you build it up? How do you change / add a chorus even end? The Secret Ego suffers from all these problems. He is best when he's just playing the guitar with a bit of a backing track. Still, he's much better in A Lion, but we'll come to that later.
This year I've consistently failed to have the full Team Brick 101+ experience, so I was quite looking forward to today. They don't dispapoint, two drumkits on opposite sides of the room, playing mid-paced two-chord prog-post-rock (if you had to give it a name). They are all improvising, the violinist takes turns with Team Brick to sing and shout incomprehensible things (sound not so good for the vocals). The soundman has endless troubles with the volume, turns the guitars off, can't make the vocals loud enough and eventually shouts it's too fscking loud!, hands over his money to the promoter and leaves. It's brilliant. Luckily there are at least a couple of guys who can actually take over and do a much better job.
A brief They Might Be Giants cover from SJ Esau and Max Milton puts a big smile on the birthday girl's face and A Lion plug themselves in. Again, this is my first 'Lion experience and it is pretty good, loud distorted songs that are, well different to most rock music and better for it. The only one I know is The Cold Hands of Lucille, which isn't loud rock, but is a Good Song. Ok. I don't know what to say. I wish they had a real drummer because the programmed beats didn't really work very well, even when we could hear them.
Tim from Angel Tech introduces me to his band mate saying this is Dash, he writes nice things about us on his blog. You haven't written anything bad yet, have you? No reason to, I say, you've been consistently good. Secretly I wonder if today will be the Bad One, but really I know it won't. They are fully plugged in this time, electronic drumkit, electric guitars and the songs are more together, more complete than I've seen so far this year. The songs are still stunning, witty, beautiful, euphoric, slightly disturbing and overal generally wonderful. Well I'm feeling very Christmas Holiday-ey, leave me alone! Anyway, hopefully this means the long-awaited album will be out soon. One of the newer tracks, Calm Down, can be found on their Myspace page: CLICK HERE.
