It was really fun. The first band was a kooks-wannabe local indie band and weren't really all that interesting, but I will forgive them because I'm sure they'll get better. Next up was Semifinalists, a band made up of a small japanese man wearing even smaller jeans, a drummer in massive headphones, a lead guitarist with the worst haircut seen this side of 1996 and, somewhat inexplicably, Dev Hynes on bass. They were really weird and nobody seemed that impressed. But, their one redeeming feature as a band was their very cool band t-shirts (I can't find a picture of them anywhere on the net, you're going to have to trust me on this) which were, unfortunately, on sale for about £13.50 more than the shrapnel in my pocket.
Anyway, enough bashing the support bands, Lightspeed Champion put on a genuinely entertaining and lovely set. The first few tracks were performed 'acoustic' - meaning just Dev on guitar and another guy on violin (note to self: find out who) and even the occasional bit of harmonica thrown in. A few tracks in, it finally went 'full band' - half of 'Semifinalists' joined in, contributed some backing vocals, and a drummer girl appeared out of nowhere. Things started to get a little bit crazy during 'Galaxy Of The Lost', when roughly three quarters of the people in the venue all decided to try to get as close as possible to the front of the stage at exactly the same time. It didn't exactly become a mosh-pit, but things got pretty sweaty. In between songs was filled with cheery banter, such as before 'Everyone I Know is Listening to Crunk', which was introduced as 'a reasonably stereotypical song about, um, breakups and stuff. Oh, and it's also about hip-hop.'
All of the songs performed were from the recently released ‘Falling Off The Lavender Bridge’ album, with the exception of the encore track that we were specifically asked not to write about on the internet and one other. Written on the tracklist as ‘Prostitute Song’, Dev had to explain to us that the song as of yet doesn’t actually have a title, but it was about a Brazilian prostitute and that was there to remind him. It was really good and even though nobody had heard it before, by the end of the track everyone was singing along to the chorus. We were told it will be on the next album, but until then there’s ‘Falling Off The Lavender Bridge’- definitely a must-have for this spring!
Buy the album from Rough Trade
DOWNLOAD: Lightspeed Champion - Everyone I Know is Listening To Crunk (zShare)
And just for the LOLZ, here is some actual crunk.
DOWNLOAD: Missy Elliot ft Fatman Scoop & Ciara - Lose Control (zShare)
3 comments:
Violinist is Mike Sidell from 'Hope of the States'.
don't be silly, ferry is indonesian, not japanese. and fyi, it's not 'inexplicable' that dev was on bass at all. if you knew your history you would know that ferry was in test icicles before dev, when they were called balls and they were also in another band together; namely, naked babes. google it.
Ok, you are completely right. To label him as japanese was lazy journalism, but this is a blog and i am not a real journalist, so I hope you will forgive me for that.
And yes, you're right about the whole test icicles stuff, but it's still a bit strange to see the headline act playing bass for his support act. It's not a bad thing, it's just unusual.
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