HERE COME DE REMIX!
Posted: April 28th, 2003, by OllieThe above is an indicator of the calibre of music I was subjected to in the latter half of my Saturday night. Luckily, before I was plunged head first into a rather surreal UK Garage hell, I was fortunate enough to attend the very final Why Can’t We Just All Get Along shindig at Nottingham’s Junction 7. For a somewhat amazing ?2 you got 4 bands, bargain central I say. First on was Brown Owl who did the whole math-rock thing (remember that?), plucking for crunching rather than soothing. The overall opinion of people I spoke to was that they needed more vocals, but I think they did just fine as they were, a great opening band.
Next, stepping up with less than 24 hours notice, Scout Niblett sang and played drums, and then sang and played guitar, and then shouted, and then rocked out with some big old riffs. The number of people rammed into the room meant that apart from the few in front of the stage, no one could see more than the top of a blonde wig, but the general strangeness meant she went down quite well.
After some more oddness in the form a bearded man and his rather worrying monkey friend, the spectacular Unit Ama stepped up. Not too sure how to describe them, but each song of theirs was an exercise in building things up with angular schkrings and yelping vocals, before breaking things down until the guitarist and bassist were leaping around pulling disjointed shards of noise from their instruments held at arm’s length, as if they were saying “WHY….WON’T…THIS….DAMN….GUITAR….WORK?!!” over and over again. Tremendous stuff.
More monkey things, and then curators of the evening Wolves! (Of Greece) proceeded to shred every eardrum in the room. There were two very clear signs that something special was happening. Firstly, the singer was covered in blood from the outset, and secondly, by the time they finished their relatively long set, at an epic 20 minutes, one of the speakers was smoking. Blinding was a word that sprung to mind at the time. As recently pointed out by someone at Skippy’s Cage, Wolves are a band that people will claim to like because the music is very challenging and difficult to listen to, so they can see themselves as hip or whatever, but it is obvious that the motives behind the band are a world away from fitting into any trendy new experimental/noise/hardcore clique. They do also exert more energy in one short set that most bands could in about twenty, which is no mean feat.
A wonderful evening. Thanks to Chris Thrash for introducing me to the joys of, amongst other things, The Ex-Models, and to my wisdom tooth infection (urgh) for introducing me to the sorrow of non-alcoholic beer.
Ollie
Ollie lives in Cambridge and puts on gigs as part of Crushing Death and Grief.
http://www.myspace.com/crushingdeathandgrief