24/04/04 @ the Gaelic Club
Sonic Animation
the Offcutts
dj Tim Boffa
got there later than usual this time, but the venue was able to compensate by running things later than usual too.
"i like to come to grips with your hips, you're heavily influencing the way that i seat."
first band Offcutts was a group i had been particularly excited about last year since the release of the twin ep Paper Bag/Plastic Bag. the idea was they were two opposite sides of the same band, a rock cd and a dance cd. and when live, they have impressed me more than once when they mix and blend those two elements together to form a new, strange brew.
opening with four of their "paper" songs, the set was alright but things really stepped up a gear when they moved on to their "plastic" songs. comparably simple, perhaps, the dance tunes starts with one of them flicking a switch on the floor or to the side to start a pre recorded backing tape for them to sing and play their instruments along to. simple, but very effective. if you were to view them as a rock band first and foremost, then they are really doing something fairly new and exciting (in an age when every new rock band on the radio could sound like 1991, or even 1985,) and any rock band that can do a drum'n bass tune gets top marks in my books. i guess it's not a totally new idea. Gerling and Pre_shunk has already done this rock-band-plays-dance-music before. but these days Gerling's lost in retro-punk-rock and Pre_shunk's doing some scary dance/metal shit. so i'd put Offcutts at the top. biggest disappointment was the fact that their set only lasted around 40 minutes, for i know full well that given the time, they could have done an even more impressive job.
an at-the-time unidentified dj (Tim Boffa again, i've been later led to believe,) up on the second floor mixed up a loud, funky set spiced up with some local flavours of Soma Rasa and Friendly, in there somewhere. that went on for a bit over an hour. even though no punter really knows the dj, there'd probably've been a better crowd dancing about if they could actually see that this wasn't just a mix cd in the cd player they were nodding their heads to. shame. squeezed up to the front against the edge of the stage in order to escape from the onslaught of the sound system, the mix set was pretty good, should've had the whole place moving more.
"i tried to write a rap, a meaningless rap, to big up myself but it turned out crap."
seeing Sonic Animation for the third time in five months, second of those times in this very venue. can you tell that i'm a fan? they may not be brilliant, intelligent, trendy, popular... or whatever other adjectives you care to throw up to describe your latest electro-clash/grime/glitch-pop sensation, but i don't think Sonic Animation ever set out to be compared with other dance acts. they themselves have in the past commented on the fact that they by far prefer to play in rock venues (like this one we're in tonight) and they're closer to a rock show than a club night. and the way they conduct themselves on stage is more akin to a top notch local rock band than a couple of bobbing heads behind decks and effects desks. they even got themselves two loud, fuzzed up guitars along with their keyboards, technologies, iBooks and electronic drum kits. their songs also allow them to fulfill their rock'n roll fantasies, with practically all of their popular tracks featuring simple opening lines and choruses everyone in the room knows and can shout along to... and, to the best of out ability, we all did just that.
set was harder than usual. they got thru their pop songs pretty early and dug themselves into some hard tech/trance styles. perhaps they too have noticed how hard they were going and had to break up the flow with the joke tune "This is not a love poem". whereby they told the crowd "this is about the right time in the set to go grab a drink, go to the toilets..." then they got back on the harder tip and twisted out a pretty heavy set by their standards. (or maybe i'm getting too old for Sonic.) i usually label them techno, for i never before noticed how much trance sounds is in their harder tunes. getting too pedantic on ya? like a fucking trainspotter? alright, i'll just say, another top quality show. shame some people got just a little bit too excited over the return of Theo and Robbie.