OH EM GEE: Crystal Castles // These New Puritans // The Horrors // Ulterior, @ The Astoria, 16/02/08

All my evil evil plans to go to many many many gigs this half term went along the way of track 4 of Lightspeed champion's debut album (look it up), but at least on the final saturday I got to go do some crazy dancing. The first band, Ulterior, seemed to be genuinely horrible people. Their sets started and ended with them positioning an electric guitar directly in front of an amp and leaving it there for a few minutes. Their myspace biography drones on about how they will preserve originality and ‘destroy the cult of the past’, which in theory is a good thing, but in real life they sound like an almost-as-good version of The Presets - whose debut album ‘Beams’ is soooo good, I can’t believe I missed it until a few weeks ago! (Oh, and they also have a new one out in April – more on that later.) Long story short, Ulterior have a few decent songs, but they could possibly work on their crowd-pleasing skills, instead of being tortured artists and 'invalidating all kinds of imitation'.

These New Puritans set started out slowly, but the crowd was full of goth teenagers with backcombed hair and too much eyeshadow who made themselves busy trying to look moody and unimpressed - it's hardly fair to blame the band for the complete lack of dancing. These New Puritans make leftfield indie music - their album is really good, with the exception of a few absolute rubbish ones. 'Numbers (aka Numerology)' is one of them. It is horrendous. It really does amaze me that a band good enough to produce some truly killer tracks ('En Papier', 'Colours', 'Infinity Ytinifni' for example) can make such an error of judgement that they think a 'Numbers' is worthy of playing. After being subjected to the worst song that band has ever made, things finally got moving when they played lead single 'Elvis'. I'm not going to run through everything they played as I have already forgotten them all, but the set was really very fun.

The venue was nearly overflowing with excitement when Crystal Castles took the stage, even some of the eyeliner and straighteners brigade got their backs off the walls. It was surreal, Ethan (is it Ethan or Ethin? or some people say it's actually Claudio) kind of sneaked on stage and made a few scary electronic gurgling noises before Alice ran on and the amazing 'Atlantis to Interzone' started. While it's technically a remix, in a live setting it can technically be regarded as a whole new song. It's amazing. One of the main complaints people generally have about Crystal Castles live sets is that they never play long enough, but this time the set went on for about an hour. 'Alice Practice', 'Air War', 'Mother Knows Best' and 'Crimewave' were all present - there were a few omissions (Where was 'Love and Caring'?!) but realistically when you're a band with about 30 different songs you're not going to be able to play them all. Due to my overestimating the robustness of my digital camera at some previous concerts I was megapixel-less for the show, but I bought a nice disposable camera for £2.50 and I'm currently waiting to see how the pictures came out. Probably crap. Oh, and it turns out my phone's video functions cannot cope with loud noise AT ALL, which means all the effort I put into trying to video one of the songs was wasted, because the backing track is solid white noise.

The Horrors played a set that was a complete anticlimax. All of their songs merged into one blurry graveyard screaming session. Knowing that I was not a massive Horrors fan I decided not to devote my efforts to being as close as possible to the stage and the band, but instead on voluntarily getting as hurt as possible in the moshpit (which I regretted a bit the next morning).

A quick note: If you are a person with massive white rasta dreadlocks, please do not combine this with being a person who jumps around at gigs. Everyone within a metre radius of you got whipped in the face with your massive disgusting hair and it actually really hurts a surprising amount and it's horrible and they smelt and there was a bit when part of one got caught in my teeth and a bit ripped off and got caught and I was nearly sick and of all the things that happened that night, the dreadlock in teeth moment was the one that came closest to ruining my weekend. Please consider others, and either stop going to gigs or get a haircut.

Jack Penate @ The Astoria, 26/09/07

Jack Penate put on a more than adequate set at the London's Astoria, but approximately half the crowd seemed to think they were at some kind of death-metal-football-hooligan-mud-wrestling fight extravaganza. It was the first time my parents had let me go to a gig on a schoolnight, and there weren't a lot of people my age there - for once me & my friends were actually the youngest people in the venue. There were about 3 seperate moshpit incidents that turned into fights, one leading Jack Penate to stop playing and lecture the crowd about how there was no need and it's not what his music is about.
The songs were really good, but there is something about Jack Penate that I find inherently annoying. It might be his Tony Blair-esque voice, or his slightly too rounded face, but that man incites levels of annoyance in me that I usually would reserve for people who are actually annoying. During slow number My Yvonne a female vocalist appeared onstage to do some additional vocals - at first I thought it looked like Adele, but my mate Harry swears she was wearing one of those gold name necklaces that said Julia. The main set ended with Torn On The Platform, but the encore included Learning Lines, a cover of one of those songs you sort of know of but can't remember the name of, and the excellent Second, Minute Or Hour.

DOWNLOAD: Jack Penate - Made Of Codes

There were two support bands, first folk-rockers Johnny Flynn who played a set that was reasonably pleasant to listen to, but not exactly danceable. The lead singer swapped guitars 3 times, and every time there was a smaller guitar. For the last song he got a banjo out, which almost ruined my whole evening. Please do not question my hatred of banjos - I will not go into details, but I do not like banjos. At all.
The second band were terrible. When I saw the poster, I thought 'Yay, Wild Beasts are playing.' Then I remembered that I had never heard of Wild Beasts, and that the band I was thinking of was in fact Foals, and Wild Beasts I had never heard of. The bass and lead guitarists both came on wearing turtleneck jumpers, and the singer did this cringe-enducing dancing that seemed to be based on copying the style of an angry pigeon.
The opening songs skirted the boundaries of good taste, but a few tracks in the whining falsettos became too much to take and several empty beercans started flying, along with a few ones that seemed to be mostly full. I didn't throw anything, but this was for the simple reason that I have the most inadequate throw of anyone I know, with about the same throwing skills as a newborn baby; I didn't want to embarass myself. It is a pity the band didn't feel the same way. Dressed up like a fourpiece Simon & Garfunkel both having bad hair days, I am considering starting a petition to make Wild Beasts illegal.

In other news, WOO YAY St Albans won the online monopoly board vote by a ridiculous margin. Getting more than twice the number of votes than the second place Exeter, locals voted a total of 104,107 times. Arguably St Albans only won because we are the most internet and Myspace obsessed town in the UK, but it does also show that people in St Albans love it so much that to us it's worth staying at home, making up addresses such as *keyboard smash* @ *keyboard smash* .com a million times a day for 3 weeks. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a certain boardgame to beat my brother at.