1FG top10 gig’s of 2005
1-Liars @ the Kilburn Luminaire
Ok, you know, we are obsessed with Liars, I shelled 10 quid for the three songs in ‘We No Longer Knew Who We Were’, I saw them make it night in Barcelona, one of the main reasons I had for starting a night was getting somewhere to play their stuff like, real REAL loud, I even (*gasps*) went up to London to see them live, I knew it’d be worth it, and it was, I was even pissed off with the pitchfork review of their previous album, which totally missed the point (this was before, when what they wrote kinda mattered).
Anyway, I was saying, I went to see them live. Picture dis: skirt wearing man plays guitar and points his finger at the crowd like a deranged preacher before engaging in some sort of weird scary bellydancing while a moustached cheerleader and the nice-looking guy crash on a pair of drums, shards of distortion and dissonance fly left and right like the Lord Nazgul blowing up Gandalf and the fucking hobbit burguoisie to smithereens, the perfect soundtrack to the bat scene in Fear and Loathing in las Vegas if the bats had decided to BITE.
Anyway, this was the first track they played:
Liars- Drum and the Unconfortable Can
Just to, y’know, say hi. The new album, Drum’s not Dead, out in Mute next year, will take a bit to sink in, it’s more sparse and psychedelic than ‘They Were Wrong So We Drowned’, very haunted and intelligent and beautiful in a warped way, comes across like a dark ghostly version of the Animal Collective on a night-trip in the woods of Mt. Eerie, I’ve given it repeated spins since I got it and its seducing me like everything else they have done, there’s a ghost stalking you in the space between the sounds, black magic.
(thanks to Dan for this)
2- Les Georges Leningrad @ The Void
3- Coachwhips @ Freebutt (Another one I had forgotten, I can’t believe it, this one is the stuff of legends, Coachwhips split up after this tour, cheers to gareth for reminding me I wuz there.)
4- Wolf Eyes @ the Freebutt
5- Polysics at Primavera Sound
6- Grabba Grabba Tape @ the Freebutt
7- Comets on Fire at the Hobgoblin (I forgot to put this one but one Lord Nuneaton Savage dutifully reminded me)
8- Quintron @ the Sussex Arts Club
Ok, this guy lives in New Orleans (‘Cajun Atlantis’) and has made his own keyboards and this drum buddy contraption and there’s even a video where you can watch it presented by the New Orleans weirdo undergound and he looks like the Green Giant meets Lee Hazlewood sans moustache and his wife Miss Pussycat is a piercing-gaze awesome belle puppeteer and she plays the maracas and yelps and yells and shrieks like Poney P after drinking six six six shots of whiskey in a row and at some point of the gig they go like, ok, this ‘is the climactic moment’ and unleash an avalanche of balloons onto the crowd, wait, they don’t play gigs, they organise ‘dance parties’.
Enough to make you love him, but wait for the music, if ? Mark and the Mysterians were tech-savvy rockabilly vampires pounding and crashing along tomorrow, they would sound a bit like this. Sweet (it was also very nice to meet Steve at the gig).
Quintron & Miss Pussycat- Fly Like a Rat
Off the flabbergasting Swamp Tech they released this year.
9- !!! @ Concorde 2
10-Hyperkinako & Help She Can’t Swim @ the Freebutt.
Special mentions- Zongamin @ Koko, Bruza and a bunch of Grime types @ the Ocean Rooms, Mu @ TDK Cross Central, Arcade Fire at Primavera Sound, Lady Sovereign @ Union (actually it was crapola but ICFTS DJs ruled and so did G$nuin$ playing East 17 and pissing off her tour manager wanker), Jason Forrest @ Wrong Music, Erase Errata @ Primavera Sound, Scotch Egg always.
Regretfully missed- Gang Gang Dance at Psykick Dancehall, Les Savy Fav at ATP and Damo Suzuki network w Burning Idiot Noise at the Engine Rooms.
It’s Hella tonight (GO GO GO) at the Engine Rooms and LCD Soundsystem on thursday, but had to freeze the list at some point.
As a bonus track, if only because I don’t think we’re gonna have time to post anything else this week (so busy man), here’s something by a band I’d have loved to see live back in the days, probably it would have been one of those druggy debauched ‘non-musical’ affairs, maybe it would have ended up in some sort of fracas, surely I’d loved it.. it’s of course by one of the coolest double dragon teams ever, Royal Trux ! Here they cover Money for Nothing and do it in such an awesome filthy way they almost manage to justify the whole fucking career of the Dire Strait’s, now there’s some food for thought.
Check out their medidative photo, they’re just pondering ‘How the fuck do we do this’?
Like this
Though a muddy road…
(cheers to Joao for the tip)
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