Sunday 30 November 2008

Everything more droning than everything else

And so last weekend I went with The Boy to see bands that we had mostly never heard of.



I could see what Satori were getting at. Sort of. The trouble with this kind of drone-doom is that there is a very fine line between euphoric mantra-like awesomeness, and tedious repetition. Satori fell the wrong side of this line. The problem was compounded by the fact that they are completely electronics-based, and thus have zero stage presence; and even though they employed a big screen and projector and wibbly films ("This looks like something I made in media studies when I was seventeen..." - The Boy), there was no getting away from the fact that we were watching two IT guys checking their emails whilst white noise was being played at 120dB.



For some reason that is not apparent - or indeed important - to me at this time, only two fifths of Atavist were in evidence; their support slot therefore become Atavist vs Nadja. It was all very improvised, with the first of their two "songs" never quite getting going. It was a bit more like a weird game of power-chord chicken, except that nobody won. The second half of the set rocked, though, falling entirely on the right side of the mantra/tedium line. More of that, please.

Leaving just Nadja. Initially it all sounded a bit sparse, but after a few minutes of carefully building layers of droning noise and dicking about with effects pedals it all started to make perfect doomy sense. We stumbled out with ears ringing, no memory of what had happened, but the vague recollection of it all being very awesome.

Beer may have been a factor in this.

Meanwhile, in actual news, my sister's boyfriend Neil made his bid to become Mister Doctor Sister on Thursday night, when he proposed to her; she of course said yes, and now has some shiny bling and a giant smile.

Huzzah!