Thinking is a dangerous pastime. Given very little time indeed, you get to pondering all sorts of thing like how good was the past actually was or whether there is anything better in the universe than Guinness or Korean pop music .One day Guinness will, of course, be declared a health food but probably not tonight and to instead distract me from the lo-fi surroundings of Stereo were Sonny Marvello, KVASIR and Kevin Harper.
Kevin Harper, formerly of Little Eskimos, had chosen to do the one man, several songs and the acoustic guitar thing but, to avoid accusations of keeping things simple, had brought along a recalcitrant drum machine that, as if haunted by the ghost of some disgruntled percussionist, took advantage of every opportunity to derail his set. True to his obvious good nature, however, he carried on regardless.
KVASIR, on the other hand, initially appeared playful - right down to his illuminated fencing mask - but his electronic concoctions remained too close to the click tracked damnation of the dancefloor to raise anything as uplifting as a chorus.
Sonny Marvello, despite their two year respite from making the world a better place for everyone with ears, proved themselves to be the princes of power pop that the righteous have always believed them to be. Their new songs rightly prevailed but the classic - and I use the term in the hope that time will do justice to these warriors against musical mediocrity in song writing - hits that should have been such as “Tiny Little Sparks” and the blue collar anthem “Pull Me Up” lifted their set into the sky.
Come to think of it, the stars up in the sky would surely appreciate a soundtrack provided by Sonny Marvello and that would truly be M-A-G-I-C.