Geschwindigkeit Fleck

Deaf Wish, NSC Nov 6th 2012.

How can you not love living in melbourne, not only do we get a day off to allow the bookies maximum access to our wages on Melbourne Cup Day but we get an awesome free Deaf Wish show put on at our local venue..I was still feeling like crap after a prolonged flu spell but no way was I staying in bed for this.
Eastlink werent quite as exciting as the youtube videos suggest (hard to find a decent pack of hyenas in Northcote I guess) but they were still pretty slick with the pack of guitarists savaging then picking over the carcasses of
simple 3 chord riffs and vocals shared between drummer and bassist.
Psy Ants were down from QLD and were closer to the jesus lizard end of town than the shellac side. The guitarist moved down to the floor at one point which upped the energy level a bit , but ultimately i was still left feeling a bit true radical miracle especially when i learned the band had split up, reforming only for the record launch tour..err how does that work?
So Deaf Wish are everyones favorite bands, cant say ive seen them that much but I look forward to it when I do catch em. This is the first time Ive seen them with the original lineup (ie girl 2nd guitarist) and the sound is back to the “mum gets punched in face” wall of pain rather than the almost poppy tones they were moving towards with that last LP. So good to have them back and back to what they do best.

Landverraad, FluffFest, Rokycany CZ. Sunday July 22nd 2012

Another fantatstic band i stumbled upon on Sunday afternoon: Landverraad, a dutch anarcho combo, played in a packed out and very sweaty 2nd stage tent. I walked in at the end and and had to film from the back , they said they were running late, it soon became apparent why, when their short bursts of songs were preceded by extended excited monolgues from the singers.„they just ran later and later but no one was complaining.

After at the merch stall i asked why they were dressed as squirrels..they explained they were actually wolves but seemed quite open to the idea of being smaller rodents.

TOY. Cowshed, Standon Calling. Aug 4th 2012.

Standon Calling is primarily of course a dance festival, with bands filling the daylight hours when all self respecting doof-heads are twitching off the previous nights excesses in their tents.
What blew me away though was the TOTAL lack of interest in the band stages, ok the headliners filled the main field (although beardyman and death in vegas are hardly old skool rock and roll ) but apart from that the bands were very poorly attended. The cowshed in particlar was deserted for much of the weekend.

To be fair it was hardly a stellar line up but there were a few acts worth braving the cow slurry for, TOY being one of the highlights of the weekend for me:  impossibly young, implausibly skinny and irritatingly cool they flew through a set of vaguely droney, radio-friendly guitar pop that was witnessed by me and Jeff exclusively. (Jeff being the omnipresent head banger who is a fixture of the uk festival scene - always nodding centre stage from 1st to last band - its his shadow cast on the bands amp in this clip!)

La Miseria De Tu Rostro, Fluffest day-2. July 21 2012.

The day started well with chicken with blue cheese and a couple of  pilsners for breakfast then went uphill when i stumbled upon an amazing hardcore band on the way back to the tent!!! Of course you always find unexpected delights at a festival but fluffest has  a walkup stage where anyone can just put their name down and play..the quality was surprisingly excellent (including I FIND OUT ONLY NOW a covers set by self defense family) -  these guys (and after being told their name 30 times I had to get them to write it down for me) were from Chile , touring europe, and played a briusing set in a very small tent with a level of intensity and adrenalin that propelled me through the rest of the day.

Alimanas. notsuoH, Houston. Aug 17th 2012.

..so Lazercuntz split up a week before the Houston show and another band was needed to make up the bill..Id already asked Alimanas but like all houston bands they were as vague and non-commital as only texans can be. Fortunately the guys in donkeykick had contacts and the band was confirmed to play.
notsuoH apart from having an awesome name is a brilliant venue full of fabulous art and junk and crazies, its in an old department store ( Clarke and Deans) on the mainstreet : two venues operate next door to each other independantly ..it works but its weird. Jim the owner/operator(?) gave me a tour and the upstairs is as incredible as down!!

So like all chaotic venues operators the world over it seemed appropriate for Jim to run two gigs on the one night (3 if you count the attrocities being commited n the bar next door) , “early”..and “late” shows..what could go wrong?…  except when we arrived after 10pm there  were 2 bands left to play on the early show..that left our  lineup to run backwards with the last guys going on at nearly 2am…but heh..this is texas : no one was too bothered : “things work themselves out down here”.

Wonderful, fucked up , too hot, too drunk on cans of pabst, p.a frying chaos!!! Why wouldnt you fly from boston to houston and then on to Oakland next day to play 1.5 songs ?

Anyways at least I got to see Alimanas, probly the only mexican anarcho band I will see in my life.  They were everything I thought they would be..I love those drums, I love that bass.. and to be honest Im a sucker for anyone who sings punk in a language other than english..nice guys too.

Weekend Nachos. Fluffest Rokycany, CZ. 20th July 2012

I only got a brief clip of the first band I saw at flufffest: Weekend Nachos..

Maybe it was because everytime I got my camera out some dickhead stagediver picked me out as a soft target : 3 times in the set my glasses got knocked off as I got lept on by intent young men in north face jackets !!!

Maybe it was becase without the vocals it seemed a bit pointless…

And maybe it was becase i got distracted by the chick in the ribbon showing her girlfriend how the band made her nipples hard….

Self Defense Family. Fluffest Rokycany, CZ. 20th July 2012

The singer was apologetic before they started : explaining there would be little opportunity for moshing/stage diving during their set…and that’s the way it went. They were the band I was most excited about seeing on day-1 and for me they delivered big time. They were however one of the bands who seemed a little diluted by being spread across the endless acreage of the main stage but they are so cool they transcended that minor obstacle. The other challengewith the main stage on the first days was vocal levels…maybe it was a dodgy mike but a lot of  bands suffered from lack of audible vocals….which in the case of SDF is unfortunately a real passion killer…

Obviously id never seen them before but the line up didn’t match any photos or vids id seen, with girls on bass and guitar (adding some girlgang vocals too) and I only recognized a couple of songs but one of them was the almighty “Crime gets you off” so I staggered back to my tent with a huge grin on my face.

I had a shocking cold so for me day-1 ended after defeater (about 10’sh) but my word the party continued: I was woken up just before dawn by the bass riff to “shes lost control” so I got up to investigate.  In the disco tent (by day the second stage) there were 10000 people on stage, MGMNT’s “kids” was playing and everyone was doing that “fuck-ive been on my feet drinking for 16 hours -if I keep shuffling I wont fall over and pass out” dance, the bar was still open and everyone was still merrily quaffing pilsner – Meredith favorites “the Silence wedge” didnt get to do their stuff until well after sunrise, but as always they were brilliant and very well receieved.

Sick fix. Flufffest , Rokycany, CZ. 20th July 2012

The Tent stage was the best place to see a band…up close, loud as, out of the rain. Downside was there was nowhere to escape the raining bodies and by sunday arvo - after 4 days of bands and 4 nights of disco -  it smelt like something had died in there…and lets face it - chances are a few things probably had.

First band I saw in the tent was Sick Fix, what a woman…..she single handedly made up for the conspicuous lack of females in the line up as a whole. Its worth noting that the audience had a pretty good balance though…

 My notes say “imagine if Loophole had a really, really big back yard or if Golden Plains was curated by Wattie”

Defeater. Fluffest, RokyCany CZ. July 20 2012

Just one of the great things about Fluffest is its proximity to civilisation: I was able to wander into town for a truly wondrous kebab and get back before Defeater came on (and importantly after Loma Prieta had finished…). Id been looking forward to catching the band but the locals left no doubt about their position on the outfits confused/misguided political persuasion ( the email thread on the flufffest website doesnt exactly clear the water) with anti-militarism/nationalism signs unfurled in frontof the stage, the band played to a steady hail of (plastic) glasses and bottles but I was pretty impressed by the frontman who handed it well, keeping his message positive and personal.

This a cool band …they owned the big stage and Im a bit partial to that big guitar sound…and the not too screamo, not too hardcore vocals, Only problem I had with them was that after the singer had mentined that they came from Boston a few times they started to sound like Buffalo Tom but it was the end of a long Pilsner fuelled day….

Mere Women. Ritual Record Store, July 8th 2012.

Are we allowed to say Xmal?? Are we allowed to say Siouxsie (2nd album)??? Are we allowed to say Kukl???? Probly not out loud but that was what I was thinking as I watched these guys. I cant help myself, I give up: I can t watch bands without picking up on echoes from a time before zeroes and ones.

We dont get too many decent bands from sydney, and these guys inherited an awesome drummer from the last :Bare Arms. The restrained synth and guitar sounds may have an 80’s feel but the band are not trying to recreate anything, easily the best thing ive heard for along time. The song “Lets Make Amends” has been lodged in my frontal lobes for a couple of weeks , the LP sits front and centre on my ipod, and I will have the vinyl waiting for me when I get home….thats if the postie can read Mr T’s handwriting.

BTW the zoom has a wide angle lens..dont think I had the thing stuck in their faces!!! Saying that though this is the best quality clip ive ever got out of it though…more shop gigs for me…