Underage Festival 2008

(All photos by me, please don't use without permission!)

The one-day extravaganza for all of London's annoyingly fashionable topshop-lovers returned for its second year. It was bigger, louder and more chaotic but I'm going to be honest: it wasn't as good as last year. This is mainly due to the fact that the line-up did not include as many bands I loved, but also there were way too many stages, and it didn't seem to be as organised as before. I managed to score myself a photopass which was a very interesting and fun experience, but from it I have also learned that the actual fun in gigs is definitely from jumping round and getting horribly sweaty. So, no more photopassing for me I reckon. Unless someone wants to pay me, but this is quite unlucky to happen.

First act I managed to catch was Kid Harpoon, but he was pretty boring so I headed off to see a bit of Nick Harrison, and to be honest I cannot actually remember for the life of me what I thought of this band, but they were probably OK. After this I saw Polly Scattergood playing in a shed for about 2 songs, and she was really good. I hadn't heard of her before but she is honestly really good.

From there it was Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man. This is a group I have been casually aware of for a while, but hadn't actually got round to listening to, and upon seeing them live I have no idea why anybody would want to listen to them ever. The singer, who runs around calling himself Frederick Blood-Royale, puts on this ridiculous moaning posh voice, like Antony Hegarty but about 10 times worse. The songs themselves seemed reasonably well-written but the rest of the band need to find a new vocalist.

From here I saw Pull in Emergency who I didn't really have an opinion about and still don't, White Williams who I thought were really intresting and inventive, and if we are going to go along the Santogold/MIA method of describing bands then they are a bit like a cooler New York version of Metronomy. I didn't stay for the whole set because I wanted to check out a bit of Poppy & The Jezebels who I though were OK and then I saw Cheeky Cheeky and the Nosebleeds in the Topman tent and they were absolutely fantastic. Really good slightly shouty indie dance-punk. After this one of my friends persuaded me top see a bit of Count and Sinden, who were good in terms of the actual music but they had a really annoying rapper person just sort of repeating 'yeah, yeah Count and Sinden' on top and this totally ruined it.

Care Bears on fire were crap. They were yet another band of american 10 year olds. There was one of these last year and they were crap also. Nobody had heard of them or liked them or decided they were good after watching them. Sorry, I am being horribly mean and nasty to these spoiled american tweenagers or whatever the disney channel is calling them at the moment but whoever decided to fly out this rubbish band and put them on the main stage is a fool.

I decided to go see FrYars, and have now made up my mind that I do not like his music, because it is annoying. Team Waterpolo I thought were reasonably listenable but slightly too middle of the road to appeal to me, Those Dancing Days were awful and then I saw some very small new unsigned band called A Girl Called Kate which is a rubbish name for a band but they were really good. Then for about 5 minutes I saw SCUM and they were the most amazing noise terroroists and it was fantastic, but based on the music on their profile, the recordings bear no resemblance to the live show. Then I spent a short while being slightly more impressed than I thought I was going to be with ridiculous emo outfit My Passion before i headed off to take about a million photos of Florence and The Machine, who was amazing in just about every way every way possible. That's all there is to say really.

After that I saw a bit of Sons & Daughters. i was quite impressed, but not so much that since then I've actually bothered to listen to any of their stuff. XX Teens are crap. In every way. Goldilocks was quite good, but rap when it's not knowingly taking the piss out of itself I never find that exciting. After that it was back to the red bull bandstand to see a scary girl metal band called Kasms. I think my obsession to weird scary electro bands is translating into also having the ability to appreciate non-electro scary hardcore music, which I find slightly worrying. Next time you see me I will look like this probably. Then it was off to see Ipso Facto, who aren't that good, but for some reason in my head I think of them as nice people even though they wear strange black and white outfits. From here it was Dizzee Rascal, who in terms of musical skill is not a great live performer but everyone was dancing and having fun so we will forgive him for that.

I left Dizzee early to check out the amazing Bonde do Role, who were incredibly fun to watch and came across as really genuinely hilarious people. From here I saw Foals, which was absolutely insane. The tent was so packed that the crowd barriers were actually bending, and some safety-conscious stage manager decided to temporarily stop the set and get all the photographers OUT RIGHT NOW, ALL OF YOU, IT'S FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY YEAH ETC ETC. Which was quite annoying. After this was headliners Gallows, who were not exactly something to listen to whilst doing your homework but the insane onstage (and eventually offstage) antics were a sight to behold.

SO THERE YOU HAVE IT. More than a month late, and badly written as well, and no mp3s either. I am spoiling you people I really am.

MORE PHOTOS:

summer's over

since i've last been on here i've managed to fail to go to the partyshank gig I was advertising, had a wicked time photographing loads of bands at the underage festival, spent a week sheltering from welsh rain in a welsh caravan, saw loads of brilliant comedy acts in edinburgh, got my results (they were good), rocked out at the reading festival then cheated at a ridiculous number of card games with my brother in southwold. I've also given up using capital letters because THERES NO TIME, DAMMIT.

this summer has been amazing, and i am planning on gradually writing about all the musick-related stuff eventually - even if that means you'll have to wait til october.

A Severe lack Of Blogging

I am back from 3 weeks of having amazingly good fun sailing the seven seas from Liverpool to Norway (OK - there aren't actually seven seas there but you get the idea), then running round the tiny fishing town of Maloy and generally spreading mischief and mayhem - well, as much as you can when bars are charging £6.50 for a pint of beer.



Anyway, this summer I am going to be away from the computer quite a bit - hopefully not as long as my nearly-two-month absense that has just happened, but SGM is not dead. Things here are due to be a bit slow for a while, but I have a couple of gigs lined up for this week: Partyshank and Glamour for Better in Bedford, and the amazing Underage Festival in Victoria Park where I will be taking millions of photos with the photopass I have managed to acquire using underhand and corrupt methods - lying, stealing, bribing, murdering etc. Catcutter Records have sent me a compilation CD which i'm going to listen to at some point, and it's pretty much all bands i haven't heard before but having been out the 'sphere for about a month I am ready to listen to some new exciting bands.

Also, on a bit of a side note, the Forestry Commission is building a massive forest in the fields across my road. Which means I will have to have a big party there at some point.

Scenesters, Sneakers, Hipsters, Blogs

(image credit: karina shah)

Blood Red Shoes released their debut album on monday. I'm about ten blog years behind with this, but it's well good. I was reading in the enemy and the reviewer was saying how the guitars were full of 'raw sexual energy' or something - I'm not too sure if the guitars are all that 'sexual', but there's some really good tracks and what I really like about it is the way it's got a whole range of emotions, including all the more negative ones, they are properly shouting and it's got loud aggressive guitars - but it's still about a thousand miles from the border to emo territory. Playing the whole album, some of the songs are a little bit same-y but I think you can forgive that when the songs are as good as they are, and on their own each track can stand up as a decent bit of rock and roll. There aren't any cringingly awful tracks, unlike say 'Good Time' or 'Numbers', on Crystal Castles and These New Puritans' debut albums.



And now onto SebastiAn, king of whoosh noises and glitchy violin masterpieces. Four new tracks have surfaced all at roughly the same time, on the Motor EP are Motor, Momy and Army; all quite nice and relatively standard Ed Banger industro-techno that we've come to expect from SebastiAn. And soon to be released on Ed Banger Records 3 is Dog, the most insane change in direction since Marilyn Manson recorded that folk-pop album in 2004. It's got unintelligible Metallica-style vocals and heavy metal guitars. It probably was put together electronically, and still sort of fits the style of a HGHLY BLGGBL BNGR, but if you close your eyes you can almost see Jimi Hendrix's corpse jamming it out. Judging by the 'minimix medley' put out by Feadz, Ed Rec 3 is gonna be pretty amazing. Some of the stuff on Ed Rec 2 got boring very quickly, such as Limousine by Vicarious Bliss (which, if I ever hear again, will probably lead me to kill someone). And 'Robot Oeuf' by Uffie may be the best thing she has ever done.



Oh and be jealous - look who rolled up to Rough Trade and bought the t-shirt. Oh yes, I did. The fact I am semi-terrified of wearing it out for fear of ruining it I am counting as irrelevant. Seriously though, So-Me is possibly the best graphic artist of the 21st century. I'm not saying he has superhuman photo-realistic drawing skills, and I'm sure most of his work is photo-traced, but he has brilliant taste. And he's better than Kate Moross anyway.



This year's Underage Festival: The line-up is not that impressive if I'm honest. It will still be fun but I'm not buying the souvenir t-shirt this year. zShare time!

Blood Red Shoes - This Is Not For You zShare
SebastiAn - Dog zShare

Blood Red Shoes @ Underage

OK, so the story goes that Ginger Rogers, 30s tap-dance icon, had to re-do a scene so many times that the camera man asked why she'd changed out of her white shoes into some red ones. She hadn't, it turned out she'd danced so hard they were covered in blood.
Ironic, it seems, that during the set of Blood Red Shoes, who got their name from the above anecdote, somebody TROD ON MY TOE and IT REALLY HURT, and then later on i took my shoes off and there was A LITTLE BIT OF BLOOD!

Photo Credit: hoombo choomba

Blood Red Shoes are a two-piece post-punk disco rock band from Brighton. The set-up is unlike anything I've seen before, like a double-backwards White Stripes in reverse. It consists of Laura-Mary Carter on guitar and Steven Ansell on drums, with both contributing to vocals. Their songs combine noisy, aggressive guitar, almost superhuman drumming and subtle, gently layered vocals that still sound good when the crowd are spitting them back.
The best track had to be the finale 'It's Getting Boring By The Sea', which I promise is an absolute killer I defy anyone not to love. The tune is immensely catchy, yet surprisingly tricky to remember; for me this is a song to play again and again.

DOWNLOAD: Blood Red Shoes - It's Getting Boring By The Sea (Via The Blue Walrus)
ALSO: Buy a wicked cool Blood Red Shoes shirt or one their records @ www.bloodredshoes.co.uk/
AND: Download the Blue Walrus Coming Back Mix, it's my official soundtrack to what remains of the summer.

A Punch In The Face

Photo Credit: jez cave
After Lethal Bizzle, we headed to the Myspace stage to see Crystal Castles at the Myspace Stage. It was really annoying, because they had scheduled Crystal Castles at the same time as cooler-than-thou Parisian sex pests The Teenagers. Crystal Castles and The Teenagers are both blogosphere and personal favourites, and I was torn as which to go to. In the end we decided to go for Crystal Castles, because they were
a. WAYYY more energetic, and we were feeling pretty pumped after our half hour of shouty hip-hop.
b. From Canada, so therefore more likely to be elusive for future live performances.
c. Not performing in a circus tent, and we'd heard the Converse/Artrocker tent where the teenagers were in had a rubbish atmosphere.
Before CC came on, the crowd were rapidly filling with anticipation for their arrival. A screaming chant of 'CRYSTAL CASTLES! CRYSTAL CASTLES!' started out, and it quickly slumped into an all-out wail of joy as Alice and Ethan appeared onstage, sipping from cans of Stella Artois (Shock! Horror!) and eating from a pack of marshmallows.
I will now refer you to a review that appeared on blog bible Drowned In Sound:

"To really be effective, Crystal Castles’ malevolent, malfunctioning eight-bit terrorism needs to be loud enough to envelope the audience in its pulsing dark heart, to wash over you in ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches and bruising drum bombast that pierces your skull with their sheer shrill force, burrowing deep into the brain like a fever. As it is, owing to those considerate chaps at the Tower Hamlets council and the stifling acoustics of the inflatable stage on which they play, the would-be caustic choir of end-is-nigh sirens that layer the huge ‘Atlantis to Interzone’ remix with which their set begins sound more like a police car siren drowned at the bottom of a canal, Crystal Castles a shadow of themselves."
- Jack Shankly.

I Completely Disagree With This. The crowd were in a frenzy, the sound was almost deafening, and although I am no sound engineering expert, I am almost certain that Jack Shankly isn't either, so neither of us should comment on the abilities of an inflatable stage to project sound. I was more than enveloped in the music's pulsing dark heart, and the adrenaline rush was insane. Serious crowd surfing started, and the security were giving all crowd-surfers a decent telling off, (is it for insurance purposes or something?) whilst also finding the perseverence of some peoples' repeated attempts to surf to the front hilarious. The pit was open and as the ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches washed over me I was inspired to run in, fists waving, until I was pushed out by three different people roughly twice my size. Usually I am one to shy away from the actual 'moshing' but repeatedly I was going for it, especially when killer track 'Alice Practice' came on. This is one of those songs that is repeatedly referred to as having completely indistinguishable lyrics and for some reason I feel really proud of myself when I manage to work out what some of the satanic-sounding lines are, such as 'Drop it: it's dead' at the 1.57 mark. Despite the fact nobody could understand any of the words that vocalist Alice was throwing at us, a huge amount of the crowd were still shouting something along to the tune.

The set was perhaps the most surreal half-hour of my life: everything about Crystal Castles spells out something that shouldn't work as music. Incomprehensible screaming in place of singing, minimalist 8-bit instead of backing music - everything is wrong, wrong, wrong - yet somehow manages to be right. Looking at their t-shirt design, Madonna with a bleeding black eye, it's like they have taken everything about conventional music, boring popular music in particular, and punched it in the face. It's unlikely Crystal Castles are going to take over the world, and if they ever get a number one I will eat my own wardrobe. Thinking about it, it's a miracle that a band so truly innovative, unorthodox and downright weird have enjoyed the mainstream appraisal that they have. I love Crystal Castles!
DOWNLOAD: Klaxons - Atlantis To Interzone (Crystal Castles Remix)

Underage Festival

Two Fridays ago I went to the first ever Underage Festival in London's Victoria Park. To be honest, it was possibly the best day of my life. This is probably down to any number of the following reasons:
a. It was actually a really good event.
b. My tastes in live music are still a bit unrefined.
c. I am a very enthusiastic person about anything.
d. Maybe I just thought it was really cool and like being cool.
Anyway, I really should have written this ages ago but I went away for a week the day after and it is quite hard to blog from a depressingly windswept French campsite. The queue to get in was really long, and despite the fact it opened at 12 and we were queueing since 11.15 it was past one O'clock when we got in. This meant we missed the Errorplains at 12.20, but it's okay because the Errorplains really aren't that great. The security were thorough in checking everyone for contraband, including evil items such as chocolate bars, water and the public enemy that is hairgel. (Yes; a boy in front of us in the queue, who for some reason felt he might need to re-style his elaborate fringe, had his hairgel confiscated.)

Photo Credit: Photographer_Rz

We arrived in time to see Lethal Bizzle, a rapper who has recently re-styled himself as some kind of indie pantomine sideshow. He was wearing huge black sunglasses, a chunky chain made of wood, and a black t-shirt with 'LETHAL BIZZLE' emblazoned on it in bold white lettering. Lethal B is not my cup of tea musically, and I feel in no way compelled to buy his album, Back To Bizznizz, released earlier this year. However, he is pretty fun to go see live. The track that everyone remembers him for is 'Pow', which was released in 2004 and despite being banned by most radio stations because of gun references, reached number 11 in the UK singles chart.
The show was full of audience participation: as well as Pow, he performed new track 'Bizzle Bizzle' and MC Hammer's 'Can't Touch This'. With every track, the crowd were screaming the chorus lines and waving our arms like we were at a rap battle somewhere in the middle of 8 Mile.
I would be surprised if a single person there was taking Lethal Bizzle, aka Maxwell Ansah, seriously. His lyrics could have been written by a 12-year-old, and he was wearing a shirt with his own name on it. But it seems Lethal has found himself a niche in the market, as the grime sideshow at rock shows. This Autumn, he's touring with Gallows and then The Enemy on the NME Riots Tour. No mp3 links, because I do not reccomend listening to any of them, but check out his live show - I will be surprised if you don't enjoy it.
www.myspace.com/lethalbizzlemusic
VIDEO: Here is Lethal Bizzle performing Pow.