I’ll try and avoid a repeat of my Six By Seven blog, which hung on the fact that “they’re not as good as they used to be”, but Mercury Rev sucked last night. I’m aware that my tastes have changed greatly since i was really into them, like 4 or 5 years ago, so that has as much to do with it as anything else, but I was still bored rigid throughout their entire set. It’s all so safe, so middle-aged, so fucking….lame! Where once I found Jonathan Donahue’s weirdo Mark Almond-esque dancing mysterious and unusual and cool, I now just want to yell “get a job!”. Grasshopper! The man could very well play in Michael Bolton’s backing band, sneaking off for a quick wank over his stupendous fretwork every couple of minutes. Not one song had any hint of the kind of dynamic that once made them great. They’ve been playing them all for so long and they’ve got them all so polished that to hear them now, it’s hard to distinguish one song from the next in the continually plodding mid-tempo cabaret. If last night’s gig was represented on a cardiograph machine, it would be a flatliner. All the ingredients were there for a fucking awful gig; rediculously expensive ticket, rediculously shite support band who are the current NME hypes, but in reality are a bunch of posing schmindie losers (Minuteman, in case you hadn’t guessed already), and last but not least a tired old middle-aged band, and their middle-aged fans who follow them round blindly applauding for years after they released anything decent.

Posted: 07|17|02 at 7:52 am. Filed under: live reviews.
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