Crash The Pose
The Macbeth, London
29.04.06
Picture the scene. Ellis, frontman for Guildford hyper-thrash punks Crash The Pose is stripped down to his boxer shorts, rampaging through a trendy East London boozer screaming and bellowing into a crackling microphone as he carves through the cheering crowd, spitting in people’s faces and spinning their baseball caps through the air.
It’s fair to say he’s had a few. And a few more. He’s fucked up. Behind him the band try to concentrate on holding it together, busting out lose and raw hardcore thrash, a high-speed blur of hardcore noise while Ellis tries to knock his own head off. They play a song that is reportedly ‘Wasted’ by Black Flag but sounds more like someone being sick at high speed. Borderline genius and a whole lot of chaotic fun!
Annihilation Time are not your usual self-righteous hardcore band. Claiming to endorse ‘weed, LSD, mushrooms, hash, beer, booze, Vans and Deep Purple’ on their record sleeves, Annihilation Time are a loud and dirty mush of Motorhead’s sheer volume, the bite and snarl of Black Flag and Poison Idea and the seventies rock grooves of Thin Lizzy and of course, Deep Purple.
These Californian street punks like their drugs and rock n’roll and play tonight with an intensity and ferocity that is positively jaw-dropping. Their combination of punk attitude and energy mixed with balls out rock n’roll threatens to destroy the whole venue as the audience bounce off the walls to the band’s machine gun fire attack in tracks like ‘Teenage Rebel’ and ‘Fast Forward To The Gore’.
They don’t, unfortunately, play their amazing version of Thin Lizzy’s ‘Bad Reputation’, but they do tear us all a new arsehole quite sufficiently with every song they play.
Annihilation Time are pure filth. If you don’t want your mind shot to bits, don’t breath in the fumes.
A message to promoters: when putting on a show, try to remember to actually promote it. London soul-punk septet Jesse James can usually pack out the Underworld, but there has been very little advertising for tonight’s show, and hence the venue is barely half full.
The venue is reasonably empty for a Sold Out gig. Goths’ dressed to the nines huddled inwards to hear the unknown sound of The Ivories. As the not only drop dead gorgeous, but extremely talented drummer bangs hard on her drums, heads turn, and the front of the stage fills up with boys, and their camera phones, desperately waiting patiently to take a souvenir pic. The singers scuttle reminds me of The Kills or Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, and the music is reminiscent of early Siouxsie & The Banshees. In a nutshell, watch this band, they are on fire! Just like Giant Drag snuck in and took the world by storm, this almost (1 male bassist) girl band definitely have the makings of something great. I remember murmurings of their CD being launched in stores over the next week…
With Andrew as the only original band member, the new guitarist, and bassist, are rumored to be from Leeds…hence referrals to Leeds in some of the lyrics. As the newbie’s basque in the limelight, and ignore the screeching feedback, the crowd divides into 2 camps-bored!, and die hard’s! Not only could you not see anything(I was in the front!), but you could hardly hear any of the vocals. With Andrews voice being so close to the baseline you would expect the levels to accentuate his voice as much as possible-like their damn CDs. The backing vocals, and baseline were so much louder than the vocals, if you closed your eyes it was like being at an instrumental, with random shoutings of “hey now, hey now now now”? If that wasn’t confusing enough, the track “Temple Of Love” emerged out of I don’t-know-what-the-hell-just-happened?
On paper Beatallica‘s is a simple formula – one likely concocted by a bunch of chaps with little else to do in the wake of Beavis and Butthead’s passing – but on the basis of the rapturous response generated throughout the duration this evening’s 80-minute set, few of the astoundingly packed gathering would seemingly give a shit.
Now I admit, I’m not the biggest De La Soul fan in the world. I like a fair few of their songs, but I wouldn’t put them in any of my top artists lists, but after seeing them rock the Jazz Café for almost 2 hours, I now know they are definitely on a must-see artists list.
Striding on-stage with pride in their hearts and co-ordination in their track-suit tops – to celebrate Celtic clinching another Scottish Premier League title, apparently – Mogwai make for a slighly-less-than rock ‘n’ roll sight. Follically challenged, almost wholly devoid of style and with facial features perhaps only a mother could love, they represent the antithesis of pre-packaged pop clone nonsense. Then they plug in and play and suddenly things begin to make sense.
Reading that a label was on Def Jux used to guarantee brilliant out put and a hot live show. Lately however, the label’s releases have been increasingly disappointing, so at least it’s a good sign that they tried something that sounds a little different with Cool Calm Pete. However, as quirky and fun as his album Lost may be, he really needs to work on his live show.
Don’t you just love it when everything get’s kind of fucked up and the things you were expecting of an evening don’t turn out the way you were expecting them at all? Some Girls feature members from a huge list of respected and far cooler than you hardcore bands (some of which include The Locust, Swing Kids, Give Up The Ghost and many more) and the last type of band you would expect to see support them would be a bedraggled bunch of Swedish Guns N’ Roses obsessives hell-bent on recreating Axl and Slash’s finest moves. But that’s what we get tonight in living rock n’roll clichés the Vains Of Jenna. Apparently Some Girls met the band on the ferry over to the UK and quickly befriended them. The largely tussle-haired bleach-blonde members of the band had just thrown everything they had into a van and were intent on heading to the UK to find their fame and fortune. They had nowhere to stay, no gigs booked and knew virtually no one in London. They were just going to do it. 
And then it just gets stranger. Anyone whose been to a lot of gigs will at some point have been hit by some kind of projectile missile thrown by a member of the audience at one point. I got hit by an entire bottle of piss at the Reading Festival once, and myself and Zac once spent an entire Marilyn Manson set at the same festival trying to hit him with buttered rolls but I have never, not ever, been walloped around the back of the head with a banana whilst watching a band. Ten minutes into Some Girls set., having successfully fired off a succession of jarring white-noise hardcore violence, some lunatic who has smuggled a horde of fresh bananas into the gig starts a full-scale fruit war and the whole place explodes as yellow fruit boomerangs spin through the air and explode on contact as the band let loose barbs of razor-tight spazz-core precision like ‘Hot Piss’ and ‘Dead In A Web’ never missing a note or a beat as they dodge the bananas. Could someone please explain what the hell is going on?
Hey peeps, thought I would fill you in on the LAST EVER TEST ICICLES SHOW ON THIS PLANET!
Although there was a referral by Rory about a Smashing Pumpkins gig that was “better than them” when he was 14. I still don’t believe the crowd went completely as mental as I saw it explode that night! For a band which is not legendary for sing-along-anthems the lyrics “Still so far…yet so close” have the crowd singing, and hanging onto every breath. ‘Circle, Square, Triangle’ leaves the venue standing on a very small thread, with people getting crushed like an overcrowded football game!
Sandwiched between industrial overlords Fear Factory and death metal noiseniks Misery Index, the Astoria is probably be the last place in the capital that you’d expect to find Gibraltar’s Breed 77 this evening. Far removed from the delightful mile-a-minute chaos that came before them, their flamenco-tinged tribal metal anthems are tonight awash with a new found confidence and maturity; filling every inch of the cavernous venue and shaking the walls.