(click to enlarge picture)I always find it awkward reviewing a gig where it’s just one bloke with a laptop. I saw enough laptop bands at In The City this year to almost put me off any for a while. Thankfully Gold Panda succeeds where others disappoint (see for example D/R/U/G/S). Yes, there’s still not much to look at – one bloke with a hoodie hunched over a laptop is pretty much the same as any other bloke in a hoodie hunched over a laptop and there’s no visuals or anything else to keep you distracted. But this was a cracking set with a musician not afraid to interrupt the churning flow of beats by spewing out ambient loops, or gloriously crushing everything down into disorienting white noise just to keep people on their toes. And he was LOUD. Loud in a “this is shaking all my internal organs together into one huge floppy mess”way. Loud in a very good way in other words. The bass sound was huge.Surprisingly for an electronica gig, it wasn’t just a bunch of sad beard-scratching blokes there either. There were girls there. Yeah, real girls! With boobies and everything! Granted, some of them had beards they could scratch too. But anyway, GIRLS! WITH BOOBIES!I drew a picture of the gig as I couldn’t take a decent photo. ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris wasn’t there as my picture suggests. But if he had been he would’ve been scratching his beard too, and you wouldn’t have been able to hear his whispering anyway. Speak up Bob!Have a listen to Gold Pand’a album “Lucky Shiner” here
Would you believe me if I told you that I was in the same room as someone who is still cooler than you even though he was wearing a Status Quo T-Shirt? Well, it's true.As it turned out, Drum Eyes guitarist Kai was only the second coolest person in the room, after Shige Ishihara, AKA DJ Scotch Egg. When Scotch Egg wasn’t marauding around the stage and into the audience playing his bass, or coaxing digital noise out of a laptop, he had a Gameboy playing psychedelic 8-bit samples.A mother-flipping GameboyTonight, Scotch Egg, Kai and drummer E-Da were augmented by a second drummer and keyboard/violin player to produce an almighty satisfying racket, and cement the fact that Drum Eyes have produced some of the most exciting music 2010 has had to offer. There were some songs played tonight. I’m not sure how many. It doesn’t matter. I certainly recognised 50-50 and Future Police from their debut album Gira Gira, a record of so many eclectic styles that even the most anally retentive pigeon-holer of music would probably struggle to slap a label on. They probably played some more of it too. Read a proper music blog if you want to know what. If you were one of the 3 readers of my old blog you’d know that I’m more concerned by the little things, like: Will the Toilet Guy be working at Ruby Lounge tonight? (He wasn’t, thankfully).In any case, from kraut-rock to pounding doom metal to prog flourishes to insane soundscapes, I don’t think there was a single person in the room not completely swept away by the beautiful noise (and be under no impression, a lot of people will dismiss this as ‘just noise’) this band were making. Not even the stuttering have-they-or-haven’t-they-finished ending of the set could take the shine off.The only thing missing from the night was that the bloke I’d seen earlier in Common, who looked like Naboo on heroin, wasn’t there. He looked like he’d do some hilariously shit dancing before collapsing in a crumpled heap in a corner, tears of frustration about the futility of his existence rolling down his ape-like cheeks. It would have been the the only thing that could possibly have made the night better and I would have liked to have seen that. Read a proper review of their music hereDrum Eyes Myspace
