HWCH #1 – The Bands

State and Analogue have already done pretty good write-ups of the various different bands they saw over the weekend so I’m going to try and keep this pretty brief.

The Whites of Their Eyes

Not every album you listen to will change your life. Not every movie you see will take your breath away. Not every book you read will dazzle you with poetic prose. Not every piece of art you absorb will alter your view of reality. Not every gig you attend will leave an indelible mark in your memory. To expect them to simply leaves you open to constant disappointment.

I consider myself to be a regular gig-goer. Sometimes these gigs are large affairs, involving touring buses, big crowds, formidable lighting set-ups and sound desks bigger than my bed. Other times, they are not quite so big but feature just as much technological tom-foolery, still-sizeable crowds and over-priced liquid refreshments. More often than not though, they’re small-to-tiny things, in a room above a pub, with perhaps less than a hundred people (a considerable percentage of whom I know), where the lighting is an unpretentious light bulb dangling from the ceiling and the sound-guy is friend of the singer’s.

In my time I’ve been dazzled by bright lights, big screens and bigger names. I’ve moved with the surge of a thousand people as a distant figure sings the soundtrack of my teenage years. These are indelible marks on my mind. But so often the power and intensity of tiny gigs is lost in the age of stadium tours and festivals.

Almost two weeks ago (shit, I’m so behind in my blogging!), I edged sideways into a room with fifty people above a tiny pub called The Whisky. We had gathered to see two English bands, Tubelord and Blakfish, who most of us had only discovered several months before when they played in the grotty upstairs of Fred Zeppelins. What unfolded that night proved to be one of the most intense gigs I’ve experienced.

Yay, gigs!

Y’know, considering the name of the blog is Stereotyping, I haven’t really been writing about music much lately.

There are a good couple of gigs coming up in the next few weeks and months that I really want to go to. Not sure if I’m going to make it to all of them but dammit! I’m gonna try!

- Ham Sandwich are supporting Sultans of Ping on Saturday in Cyprus Avenue. I haven’t managed to see the Meteor winners yet and to be honest I’ve heard very little of their music. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could be arsed paying 18.50 to see them seeing as I doubt I’ll stay around for the Sultans afterwards. LUCKILY, they’re playing a solo gig five days later on the 13th for 8euro in Cyprus! Sorted!

- The UCC Live Music Societies Battle of the Bands final is on the 12th, again in Cyprus Avenue (they’re doing well for themselves this month!). I was the head of the LMS last year and I know how stressful the Battle of the Bands can be but I always enjoyed the final – the atmosphere is great, the bands are usually very good and it always seems the bands that make it to the final go on to thrive in the music scene in the city so it’s good to see them starting off.

Chiptune / Gabber

Slowly, the blogging engine builds steam again. I’m determined to make an even greater effort to maintain this blog with some semblance of regularity. Think of it as a Lenten pledge but in a thoroughly unbelieving and a-religious way. Part of the problem I think is that there seems to have been something of a lack of good gigs going on in the Second City lately. That’s not to say there’s been nothing going on – we’ve had Blood Red Shoes, Super Extra Bonus Party, We Should Be Dead … and other stuff too, but I didn’t manage to make some of those gigs and wasn’t massively impressed by others. There’s been a few locals around the place too but all of these gigs just seem like brief sparks in an otherwise dark and disheartening January in Cork.

This Friday sees DJ Scotch Egg to Cork. I’d never heard of him before so I decided to check him out in the hopes that he might be worth going to (thanks to a word of endorsement from Niamh at UCC Campus Radio) and let me tell you, he definitely looks worth going to.

Hailing from Japan, but living in Brighton, DJ Scotch Egg is apparently – according to his wikipedia entry- is a “producer of chiptune / gabber music” which actually sounds pretty cool. What it basically means is he makes frantic, glitchy dance-type music with his gameboy, loop pedals and other such things. After the genius of Dan Deacon, I’m thinking this could make for quite an exciting gig. And after seeing video and hearing the myspace tracks, I’m all a flutter for what could be a class gig, this Friday (the 8th) in The Whiskey on Union Quay.

A Blog About Fight Like Apes? Nah….couldn’t be…

I know I haven’t been the most attentive of bloggers of late. Mea culpa, Internet, mea culpa. But there’s few things as good as a kick-ass gig to kick-start the blogging segment of one’s brain again. There was such a gig in the Brog last Thursday, where the Murphy’s Live competition thingy kicked off with My Evil Ex and Painting By Numbers competing for a place in the semi-final and it featured Fight Like Apes headlining to reel in the crowds.

I hadn’t seen My Evil Ex of Painting By Numbers in a pretty long time and had forgotten how they sound and indeed, how good they are. My Evil Ex’s blend of punk, rockabilly and Tom Waits-esque story telling was pretty damn good, as was Painting By Numbers distortioned indie type rocking. But it’s a good thing neither of them had to follow FLApes because they absolutely blew the ceiling off the Brog. A blogger enthusing over Fight Like Apes? Surely not! Their boundless energy and hugely infectious choruses converted plenty in the crowd and if they don’t win a Meteor then this country is in even worse shape than I thought.

Here are some pictures I took with my fancy (not quite that fancy) new camera.

 

 

 

Ronan from Painting By Numbers

Aoife and Dylan from My Evil Ex

Back After A Nice Rest

Due to my combined bouts of laziness and busyness, this lengthy review of Rest’s recent Cork gig by the young and talented Patrick Lucy is only being posted now. Sorry about that. But, nevertheless, enjoy!

Cyprus Avenue bore witness to the opening show of a three-date autumn tour by post-metal behemoths Rest on Friday night, a typically intense set offering another welcome glimpse at the devastatingly heavy direction that Graham, Steve, Johnny and Colm intend to take with their forthcoming LP.

To begin the evening’s festivities, opening act Sea Area Forecast saw the renowned Galvin – most recently of Lerner fame – stepping into the spotlight to front an edgy and concise three-piece, who’s spiky, assertive rock captured the attention of most within the venue, due in no small part to the melodic sensibility and well-calculated dynamics that grew in stature as their set progressed. Good stuff.

The “renowned” Galvin.

Next up were Private Underground Residence, another three-piece, albeit one who compensate for their lack of a bass player courtesy of a handy octave effect on one of the guitars. I have to admit that I didn’t catch as much of their set as I would have liked, given that I was busy readying myself both mentally and physically for Rest, but what I did see suggests that this was my loss. Quirky and intricate guitar interplay not dissimilar to some of Don Caballero’s work gave way every so often to intense, commanding yet almost incidental vocals. A more subdued number towards the end of the set featuring synth and spoken word vocals caught my attention in particular.

And so it was time for what most people had paid their hard-earned for, though you might not have thought it given the hubbub of crowd chatter that became irritatingly apparent during the more sparse and ambient sections of Rest’s set – something I didn’t really expect to encounter that much at their headlining shows anymore, but oh well.

Bitchiness aside, Rest somehow continue to impress me more every time I see them. The opening number, an as-yet unreleased metallic skullfuck undoubtedly earmarked for the new record, saw Graham and Steve unleash more of the deliciously sinister guitar harmonies which have increasingly become a Rest trademark of late. One of the most remarkable things about Rest’s support slot with Isis earlier in the year, and something which became doubly apparent on Saturday, was how much bombast and aplomb they instantly exuded with their opening number (very much a by-product of the heavier direction they’ve taken); previous shows usually having been kicked off with more slow-building and ethereal material, material which I feel sits more comfortably towards the middle of their set. Speaking of which…

The only way the tempo and mood of the set could effectively go from such a barnstorming introduction was down, and no better way to do it than with the haunting e-bow intro to Is Our Blood Not Enough?, the closing track from Rest’s stunning 2004 debut LP. The breathtaking segue into Drowning in Flame (and back out again) that takes place about two-thirds of the way through what is altogether close to a fifteen-minute epic has been a live favourite for quite a few years now; one song effortlessly assimilating the other before spitting it straight back out. This piece as a whole goes a long way towards showcasing exactly what Rest are about: sparse, melancholic, down-tempo passages giving way to a sense of foreboding uneasiness, before erupting into a frenzy of pulsing drums and hypnotic, intertwining guitar melodies, ultimately climaxing with some of the heaviest riffs this side of Mastodon. In short, a stunning amalgamation of the visceral and the cerebral.

Tellingly, this was to be the only material from the aforementioned debut that we would hear on the night, as plenty more jaw-dropping new stuff was aired, along with both cuts from this year’s epic Operation: Impending Doom EP. However, despite an increasing tendency towards the more brutal approach that I’ve referred to, Rest have no intention of letting go of the beautifully melodic side to their character that has won them much of their fanbase to date, and one new track in particular welds the pretty and the ugly together to devastating effect – three minutes or so of sweet, lullaby-esque post-rock submits to some intriguing passages of frantic, Botch-inspired riffage which eventually bring matters to an exhilarating conclusion.

Despite the usual pre-show grumblings of “probably not quite enough rehearsal”, Rest were ferociously tight where and when they needed to be (i.e. the majority of the time), this as always due in no small part to the devastating quality of Johnny’s drumming, which I feel in danger of understating purely because his talent is so obvious to anyone who catches even a few minutes of a Rest set – similarly blatant is the fact that he’s very much the powerhouse who drives the band’s sound.

“New” bassist Colm meanwhile demonstrated on the night that he’s more than pulling his weight in the writing process with astonishing bass accompaniment throughout; sometimes locking in flawlessly with the guitar riffs to provide yet another layer of harmony (or discordance as the case may be), sometimes offering just the right level of understated accompaniment and atmosphere, and often accenting Johnny’s pulverising drumming to devastating effect.

The only negative I could personally draw from the night was that the crowd were in some cases too cool or in others not paying that much attention; at times I felt like the gig could have been in Dublin. The atmosphere was not what it should have been. But speaking exclusively about the music, I couldn’t have hoped for much better.

Now to a lot of people, it won’t come as much of a surprise that I’m gushing superlatives in Rest’s general direction, but it has to be said that these guys definitely aren’t as widely recognised as they ought to be, and in my experience are a bit of a musician’s band (a very bad thing from a rent-paying perspective!). At the same time, whenever I take someone unfamiliar with their stuff to a show, irrespective of musical taste, they more often than not come away deeply impressed – so, if you’re looking for artistically dazzling music which is carefully crafted and expertly delivered, and for some reason have remained unfamiliar with Rest until now, you have little excuse for not checking out one of the best exponents of any sort of rock music in the country.

Patrick