Black Lips and other Things, Crawdaddy, 03/05/08
May 7th, 2008
Yerwan at Fictional Sheep acquired a hape of tickets to the Black Lips gig in Crawdaddy, and offered me one, or two actually, so, liking free stuff as I do, I attended.
First up were/was The Mighty Stef. They/he were/was grand. Grand is a grand word isn’t it. Where I’m from originally, everything was grand. The weather was grand, school was grand, I was grand. Anyway, they/he played some aggressive cowboy sea-shanty music, and did their/his best to liven up the reluctant, sober and scared crowd.
Next were The Things, with their F-grade burger-rock. They weren’t grand at all. They were hilariously bad. 80% of their problem was their singer. He’s a fuck-pillar (insult from FS). “Come on yizz cunts, dis is a rock an’ rowel show,” he declared, “come on, yizz…… c.. cunts,” he went on, somewhat unimaginatively. The other 20% of the problem can be divided thusly - 15% the bassist’s haircut, and 5% the forgettable music. I’ve actually forgotten all of it. Forgettable music can, I think, be entertaining on a given night, if it’s not purveyed by deluded morons. I’ve never come across anybody so unjustifiably assured of his own greatness. The highlight of their set was when the singer left the stage (to climb things and look for attention), and the remaining three, the musicians, played a decent outro. Hold some auditions gents, and lose the (brain)dead weight. (By the way, if I’m missing the point here, and The Things are some sort of Spinal Tapesque parody geniuses, do correct me.)
I don’t want to seem overly negative, or unsupportive of Irish acts. I’m all for local talent, but it seems perhaps that all it takes is for some shitty Irish music rag to get behind a band, and suddenly talent is no longer necessary. Granted, there are a lot of indie-rock acts around, many of which sound similar, but that doesn’t mean bands with a slightly different sound are more notable by default. I’ve seen a lot of Irish bands in the last year, some of them excellent, but The Things were really bad last Saturday night.
Black Lips, according to wikipedia (a reliable and flawless online resource), have a reputation for urinating in their own mouths, vomiting and flashing, and also for catchy flower punk. Thankfully they stuck to the latter. The white-blazered guitarist did spend a lot of his time spitting into the air and catching it in his mouth again, but they were generally an entertaining, talented and completely shit-faced bunch of chaps. Most of their songs seem to fit one of three templates (straight punk, flowerier melodic punk, or bluesy/country/beard punk (I’m not good with genres)), but that didn’t seem to be a bad thing, it sounded great, and the mumbled interludes were likable, amusing and short. “Eh.. this is a good one,” said the leather-capped guitarist before one song. It was.
That’s all for today. Tonight I am going to see the poppy trio of bands CSS, The Futureheads and MGMT in the Academy. It will probably be full of teenyboppers, but it seemed too cheap to turn my nose up at. Wish me luck.
It’s like it was invented for him.
