James Arden checks out the garage rockers latest album.
The Christian rock band from Brighton bring religion to the masses.
Recipe for modern R'n'B album: liberal helpings of guest rappers and an overdose of sexual euphemisms.
Review by Ben Pahari
(Line-up: Stand By For Action!, The! Spoon? (and the), Juliet Bravo and Vessels.)
Now, bringing to the stage your very own white boiler-suit clad gimp is, I reckon, a pretty safe bet as far as capturing your audience’s attention is concerned. Throughout the performance of Stand By For Action! ‘s songs, their mute, expressionless fourth member was fly-kicked, jumped on and had his face taped to one of the buildings supporting pillars by the band’s frontman. While (rarely) not being abused he posed statuesque, writhed around or occasionally ate pages from the book ‘How to Win an Argument’. Despite the fact that this was obviously the most memorable aspect of the performance, the music was actually pretty cool too. Brilliant drumming, scuzzy, bloody-as-hell-raw post punk guitar riffage and screamey FX’d vocals (which unfortunately you could barely hear due to sound set-up problems) were the constituent elements of Stand By For Action! ‘s raw, funky sound. Definitely the weirdest band I’ve seen since I last saw JFKKK at the basement, but these guys are much, much better (i.e. they actually play music). The gimp, I think, deserves special accolade for his performance.
Best musically of the four band line-up were experimental rock band ‘The! Spoon? (and the)’. The band diverged from the status-quo with innovative, rhythmically diverse songs keeping me with frequent changes in tempo and intensity throughout the performance. If you were looking for sugar-coated poppy hooks, you had clearly come to the wrong place; the admittedly pretentious, but often poetic vocals were all spoken-word but resonated with the tone and direction of the music, occasionally strikingly so during the most intense sections. The Spoon’s songs were also generally concise enough to avoiding the trap of becoming too prog; a definite positive. Among the bands most obvious influences are At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, and fans of either should definitely check out The Spoon.
Also on the bill were Juliet Bravo, a fairly straightforward rock/ metal band that may be familiar to some York Students, having played BOTB and some other gigs fairly recently. The band did what they set out to do (namely unhappy rock/metal) pretty well and had some good songs, but didn’t really do enough to seem too original.
The final act, Vessels, a very progressive instrumental group played some good, varied songs that showcased the obvious musical talent of the band members in the first part of their set. They were particularly impressive when both of their two drummers were really going at it in tandem, and also showed some different gears by mixing in dancey drum-machine beats into some songs. Unfortunately the latter part of their set was dominated by very long downbeat songs which I found pretty soporific.
Due mostly to the first two bands I mentioned this gig was pretty memorable and I’d definitely recommend anyone whose fed up with the same-old, same-old to check out the bands mentioned and future Burn the Jukebox and Basement Bar events coming up.
You must log in to submit a comment.
