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Shooting Crayfish/The Climb/8 Point Turn/Omar's Silver Lightship/Robolint/John Shoe/Thousand Natural Shocks
Bradninch Guildhall - 30/8/04
One big in-joke...
“Yeah, I preferred our old stuff too”, which pretty much sums up Shooting Crayfish tonight. They’ve lost a few members y’see, and sounds completely different because of it. While they were a pretty fantastic ska band now they play an uninspiring kind of poppy indie. They’re not the same band at all and it’s odd and slightly deceiving that they’ve kept the same name. That sentence made no sense. Oh well. The point is they’re not very good at the moment, this could change and at times they showed that they still can write pretty decent songs if they want to, it just seems like they can’t be bothered to. Which is an even bigger shame than the other one. I hear they're better on record, we'll just have to see...
5 out of 10
Some people probably love The Climb, I’m not one of them. They’re a talented enough bunch, and some people I’ve talked to seem to really like the slightly quavering, soft vocals on show but I don’t get it. The vocals to me are very weak and undermine the rest of the music. The lead guitarist, very talented though he is, seems to think he’s in a metal band and keeps playing out of place solos and the music itself is nothing to write home about. I guess if you see them there’s every chance you could love them, just not if you’re anything like me.
6 out of 10
8 Point Turn then, well I guess the best surmise is that I don’t remember anything. They play ska punk reasonably well, they were certainly tighter than last time I saw them, but they just haven’t got any songs that are catchy enough to stick in your head or energetic enough to make you want to dance. They’d be fine if you were out of your head on alcohol, but unfortunately I was still semi-sober at this point of the night. Ska punk fans check out, but I can’t see the appeal.
6 out of 10
Nobody seemed really on form tonight, Omar’s Silver Lightship usually leave me giddy with excitement. This time I was merely quite pleased. The music was good but not as good as it could be (possibly due to a bloody finger accident that I failed to notice at the time somehow). The vocals were far too low in the mix but what I did hear of them was slightly underwhelming. It also says a lot that the best song was a cover, which is never a good thing. Hmmm… Looking at my opinions of tonight’s bands it’s consistent enough that I do half wonder if I wasn’t just imagining that everything was a bit pants. In Omar’s particular case it was good, but not great.
7 out of 10
The Raffle isn’t a band. It’s a raffle. With a few half decent prizes and quite a few more bad ones. But it was free and I won an Eight Point Turn t-shirt that didn’t fit me so that salvaged it some dignity.
2 out of 10
Robolint (or some of them at least) has been to the Reading Festival. I even heard that Chris hadn’t slept for four days, which goes some way to explaining why everyone looked like they were about to fall over. Between this and the constant stream of in-jokes from Reading that I only barely understood they weren’t as good as usual either. I think that was half of the problem with the gig in whole, Reading meant that there were a lot of in-jokes going round and nobody could really be arsed, it was all good fun but the music suffered as a result. Robolint fared better than most simply because they are more fun than they are music anyway but it was still a shame they didn’t play a few of their better songs.
7 out of 10
John Shoe is a hard one to score. On the one hand his performance tonight was of reasonably good but not great songs played reasonably well but hardly perfectly which would lend itself to suggest that it wasn’t a great set. You’d be right really. But on the other hand John Shoe is an absolute legend and one of the nicest people in history (right up there with Jesus in my opinion) and just seeing him in the crowd at a gig is rather a thrill, so seeing him on stage is rather fantastic by itself. You’re going to accuse me of prejudice aren’t you? You might be right; all I know is that there is something immensely enjoyable about watching John Shoe, even when he doesn’t play too well.
8 out of 10
Thousand Natural Shocks were last on tonight and were another example of music which is all well and good but really just too bland to be any good. It was hard to tell where one song ended and another began simply because they all sounded the same to me. Perhaps this is just another band that I don’t ‘get’ but if I don’t get it then it’s not much good to me is it? And this is my review so I give them…
6 out of 10
