It seems that some changes at Blogger have rendered this site unusable in netscape 7. which means I am now typing in Explorer, something which I only usually do under severe provocation, and a scenario which is likely to make my already-sporadic posts even less frequent.
Anyone who bothers to read these occasional blogs will know that theres usually been a gig which prompts me to post. This is no exception - I was at King Tuts last night for a 3 band bil, which turned out to be a 4 band bill, thanks to the addition of the Henry Martini Rifles. With headlners the Thermals on at 11pm a long night awaited me. I only caught the last 3 or so songs by Blind Pew, who seem, ahem, "good at what they do". Good showmen if a bit OTT with lots of rock star poses; what I heard was that kind of blusey stuff that's soooo popular at present - if anything, a mix of Dead Fly Buchowski and Kain. Which augers well for them at least, their closing number with the singer producing pictures of peope he'll be going to hell with (Hitler, Lady Di) was memorably entertaining.
Dead or American I can recognise as a 'good' band too, again, good at what they do. unfortunately i can't hope to concoct a review of them as they're not generally what I'd choose to listen to, even if they do have a couple of songs which are, well, song-based, rather than stop-start mosh-friendly mayhem. I guess that the band listen to everything from Converge to Fugazi, but I tend not to. You can hear wee elements of the Pixies in there but sadly for me it's the Alex Eiffel/Planet of Sound area where wussy hummable pop tunes come second to RAWK.
Still, DoA go down well, play well and are by no means bad. Which can't be said for the HMRs. 3 guys with a rhythm unit, but sadly not a patch on the 3 Johns (the last act to try and succeed in this format) they scream and shout their way through a collection of 2-minute squalls of tuneless noise. There's so much I could say, which might be handy for those punters who fled the venue, but it'd all be bad, so let's leave it there.
The Thermals fill the venue again, latecomers arriving from, i presume, downstairs. Not surprising. They're on Subpop - one-time home to Nirvana of course - and they perform a similar trick - noisy 3 (max) minute tunes but with a hook every time, albeit forever buried in a complex tune. I've reviewed their album and chosen the rather forced (but fairly descriptive) analogy of "Guided by Voices on crack". We get around 30 songs all clocking in at around 120 seconds, every one which could easily be extended to three times its length if they fancied a job making catchy hit records for the mass market. Sadly the sound is very poor, especially near the front when I'm taking photos, and little better in the middle of the hall - thus, basslines are lost, guitar comes and goes, and the album's impetus is lost. See www.thethermals.com for downloads, in case you were there and weren't converted.  ¶ 6:11 PM