This was the first night of a new club night from Black Flag Promotions and turned out to be a real dog's dinner of an affair with far too many bands on the bill in a rather odd new venue that is the 4th music Venue on the Pentonville Road. It sits about halfway up the hill, claiming to be an carbon neutral eco venue. The bar is upstairs at ground level and is quite chi chi before you go downstairs to a room with very odd acoustics.
We had already missed one band and KICKSTARTER were on when we went down to hear theIR very poor attempt at hip hop/rock like a tenth rate Jay Z. They might have got some of their friends going but they soon had us fleeing back upstairs to the bar.
LISTEN ZARA could barely make us go down to hear them opening with a piss poor, almost goth version of Gimme Shelter. We did make it down to hear them murder The Model and their girl singer kept everything she sang in the same monotonous lifeless tone. That didn't even work as they slaughtered Bela Lugosi's Dead and they were just painful.
The place seemed less than half full all night and the next band on, HOUSE PARTY MASSACRE, play the sort of party rock that really has me rushing for the door. I'm sure if I was under 23 and on whatever the current drug of choice is I may have enjoyed them, but I'm not and didn't which meant by the time we got to the two bands I was here to see I was already wanting to go home.
TAURUS TRAKKER did their best in the situation in a room that had vastly differing sound dependant on where you stood. They opened with a lively version of their latest single, A Rakket U Trust, and got the sparse crowd going on Wild Women in a Small Town. It was pity that some of the lyrics got lost in the vortex of awful sound as we needed to hear all of this sorry tale.
Martin then introduced a new song, Upside Down and Shake Me, that sounded pretty damn cool before he gave us his song about Waiting for Mick, his good old cousin Mick Jones who he is happy to wait for all day and no matter how much the deadline gets put back it's still cool.
They then got Dave Wright up on saxaphone for Gurus: another new song that sounded as good as anything could in this room before they had to cut the set short as they ran out of time and left us with a fine version of Bag For Life.
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Finally it was time for SANGUINE to finally come on. Now, the last time I saw them was when they opened for Megadeth in front of about 1800 people at the electric Ballroom. This time they are in front of about 18 of us stalwarts and I feel sorry for them having come all the way from Exeter for this shambles of an event.
They open with Don't you Feel Me and the soundman hasn't figured out that Tarrin is the lead singer and needs the vocal mic up loud so she gets lost in the mix a fair bit. Break You Inside has a good grinding riff and they sound pretty punchy but again the vocals are almost louder off mic than they are on. Save Me seems to be a plea from the band to stop the idiot from one of the other bands from kissing the guitarist's nipples. Or to release them from the awful sound in this basement, perhaps.
Contagious sees the sound man finally boost Tarrin's vocal mic to an almost decent level as they get as close to evanescence as you'd want them to be before a good version of Simplify, their single out earlier on this year.
They bravely battled on with a song that I think is called When you Go Waaarrgh. Yes, I also want to scream at the sound guy or whoever set up the sound system in this place because it sounds so horrible down here. Bangkok Nights had a good crunch to it and the closing song Social Decay is every bit as angry as a song with that name ought to be even if they closed it with (implausibly) a chorus from Jump Around.
If this night is to continue I'd suggest to the promoter to book no more than 3 bands and make sure they have more in common than any of these bands did with each other. Oh, and get a decent DJ to link them together a bit better. Then we might be onto something.
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