infomachine

Seal Cub Clubbing Club

YACHT

23rd August 2008

Seal Cub Clubbing Club
The Laze
The Uprights (I think)
@Brudenell Social Club

YACHT
@The Faversham

As an exciting birthday night out for Jim Hemmingfield Poetry (you should book him for gigs, he’s brilliant), we went to a free gig hosted by Stench of Muscle at the Brudenell in Leeds. Unfortunately, the first band (who I think were The Uprights but may well be wrong) were just a bit bland. They sounded a bit like the Pixies, and yes this is me damning with faint praise.

The Laze were less appealing. Very technically competent, good riffs, etc, but not as eclectic as they thought they were. When they started going, they sounded like the kind of band that would jump between metal, opera, jazz, funk, military tattoo, etc, and they kind of were. But when I say “jump”, I mean play one riff for about an hour, then play some sax-jazz for about an hour, then play some funk for about an hour, and so on and so on and so on and so on … If they were able to merge all those styles, if they were able to jump between styles without sounding like they were stopping one song and starting another, if they were just slightly more interesting, then they’d be amazing. But they weren’t.

The bassist’s rock god moves were pretty cool, though.

And then we got through to Seal Cub Clubbing Club. These guys were pretty good. Taking a lot of influence from Devo, they had the whole nasally shouting, americana, leaping between styles thing that always gets at least some positive action going. I was thinking pretty ok until they played their slower song (no idea what any of the songs were called, as the lead singer had a Wirral accent): beatboxing, synths, big heavy reverbs, it sounded mental. In a good way.

And their keyboardist looked like he was actually asleep. Which is the new punk rock.

After finishing off here at about midnight, we tramped down to the Faversham for some birthday dancing action at Bad Sneakers. We managed to catch the end of the set from YACHT, an american duo doing the whole drum machines and shouting thing that comes off really fash-y over here. But goddammit I liked them. Really silly, lots of fun, and something that you can dance to. They come highly recommended. The only problem with the gig was that every single person in the Fav looked like a dickhead. If you’ve ever seen Nathan Barley (and I highly recommend it), it looked EXACTLY like the club night that Nathan puts on. Of course, when the club night itself started, it became exactly that. It’s not that the music was bad (it really wasn’t), but the fact that whoever was DJing seemed to have a clever computer that told him, for each song he was playing, what the least appropriate song to follow on was. It was like some kind of beautiful art thing, but made dancing really hard.

And, as we all know, it’s all about dancing.