Look and you will find. Take a walk on the wild side. Eat more vegetables. Well, I did try to eat more vegetables, but my heart just wasn’t in it. Fortunately, in the basement of that vegetable kind of place The Hug and Pint , I instead found Gravelle, Liquid Metal and Middle Class Guilt. Time for a walk on the wild side, perhaps?
First appearances are everything and so it was with Middle Class Guilt. The singer had wrapped himself in his grandad’s argyle sweater and, by doing the mix and match thing with red sunglasses and a copious amount of diffidence, magically turned himself into something of a testament to anti-style. Ably assisted by a stage full of musical colleagues, he then peddled the band’s nearly but not quite discord directed musical wares with an artistic focus that verged on the manic. Art rock aficionados and converts are go!
Talking of converts takes me neatly on to Liquid Metal. Given my love of old fashioned attributes like melody and chorus, this band’s mix of subsonic rumblings, synths tortured since the days before such things were digital and angry man urban ramblings should have driven me to an act of righteous retribution but, instead, those very things made Liquid Metal a force to be reckoned with. Kaboom and damn the kittens!
Where was I? Kittens? No, Gravelle. A duo with an altogether more commercial focus than the other two bands, Gravelle made their songs dance to the desires of the sequenced drum machine in search of that perfect retro reference and, with obvious pop sensibilities and a sizeable portion of mascara style in their mix, they made each three minutes more interesting than the previous one. Babooshka, Babooshka, send me a scented letter!
Three bands. One Venue. No kittens. Wild!