In The Event Of Neo Tokyo, Sheffield Corporation
It’s a Tuesday night, I’m tired, it’s cold outside and to top it all off I miss the goddam bus as I leave for the Boardwalk. If a petrol tanker had careered off the road, flattening me and crashing into my house and setting the whole close on fire with mile high flames, it really wouldn’t have surprised me. Well, I would have been dead, therefore rendered unable to show surprise, but you know what I’m getting at.
And so I arrived at the Boardwalk to find I’d forgotten my cash card and I was going to have to borrow some money off a mate to get in, leaving me completely beer-less over the course of the night. Could it get any worse? Well, yes actually, but first, my good friends in NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH took to the stage and launched into a brand new NOFX-style intro that cut itself way too short and deserves to be turned into a full length song. Still, it was business as usual for the ‘Watch as they roared through 20 minutes of stupidly fast 4ft Fingers style pop punk, interspersed with their hit and miss (usually hit, thankfully) mid-song banter (sample : “Tache Noir are on in a bit. They’re name is apparently the black hole state which your brain enters just as you die … well, they sound like they’re gonna be a barrel of laughs then!”). The problem I have with Neighbourhood Watch is that all their songs sound the same! Luckily, they make up for having the same chorus melody on at least 3 songs by being more fun than a night in Funland with Mr and Mrs Fun on National Fun Day, but they are and can be better than they are tonight. (6)
And then began the slide. Next up were local metal five some MUTILATED TO PERFECTION. Now, when your band takes to the stage and the first thing the audience is greeted with is a vocalist wearing a black leather trenchcoat, an Emperor jumper and with the hair on the left side of his head completely shaved off, it’s hardly likely to instil confidence in your musical tastes or abilities. Still, MTP tried their best, and unfortunately, their best was pretty damn horrible. The words ‘stage’ and ‘presence’ have clearly never been uttered in the same sentence around the band, unless of course the words ‘You are completely lacking in…’ come before them. Terrible screaming, ridiculous ‘Death Metal’ song titles and a tendency to seem like they are playing completely different songs at the same time don’t help matters in the slightest, and when your (albeit very talented) lead guitarist seems to be stood there showing everyone how good he is at playing elaborate solos that don’t fit in with the song structure in any way, you might as well not bother. Still, I was reliably informed that they were thoroughly nice guys, but then I’m not reviewing their personalities! Sorry guys. (1)
However, I was soon begging for the relatively safe musical tastes of MTP when TACHE NOIR stepped up to the plate. I’ll get the positives out of the way first before I get onto the negatives (and boy, are there negatives). OK, hang on while I just scrape the bottom of the barrel. Right, so they’re very animated and they’re clearly very talented musicians of some sort, but, well, that’s about it. Oh, and they did surprise me by showing that it is actually possible to play musical instruments when your heads are THAT far up your arses. So then, the negatives. Well, where do I begin? First of all, they played on a stage completely devoid of any lighting, bar a single dull red spotlight. Whether this was to make them look, you know, ‘mysterious maaaaaan’, or whether they are just really really ugly, we’ll never know. Then, there’s the fact that the music was so unbelievably pretentious that following the gig, the compilers of the Oxford English dictionary contacted the band to see if they could possibly supply a photo to place next to the word ‘Pretentious’ in the next edition of their esteemed lexicon, in order to make the definition of the word infinitely clear to anybody learning the language from scratch. Well, what was wrong with the music, I hear you cry? Well, imagine the Blood Brothers all getting together and agreeing to slow their sound down so much that it was just mid paced tripe, then recruiting the worlds worst Morrissey impersonator to front the group but not actually sing, just screech incoherently into the microphone, and then all writing five songs, putting the names into a hat and each individual member picking out one scrap of paper. The band members would then play that song and that song only throughout the set and completely disregard any thoughts to melody, structure or, for that matter, the safety of their audience. Just imagine it, if you dare. I mean, I’m all for experimentation, but there’s a FUCKING LINE. Unfortunately, Tache Noir ran so far over that line that they came completely 360 and arrived right back at the line again. The likes of Antioch Arrow and other pioneers of the curious sub-genre often known as Spazzcore will be turning in their graves. And if they’re not dead, they may well have committed suicide after Tache Noir’s set. I know it was a struggle for me not to. (0.25)
After that aural onslaught, I was then treated to the soft pop rock of headliners IN THE EVENT OF NEO TOKYO, who took to the stage with acoustic guitars and proceeded to calm the whole place down with a few beautiful renditions of Johnny Cash songs before closing on a huge campfire style singalong…….What am I talking about, of course they fucking didn’t. What Neo Tokyo proceeded to do was play a lot of songs that may or may not have been entitled (according to what they sounded like and the exact lyrics enclosed within) DA Dadda da da da DA DA cAAAAAACAAAA achaaa CAAAA dadadada. Still, don’t quote me on that kids. While Tache Noir took the memory of the seminal Heroin label and trampled it into the ground with their sorry excuse for music, Neo Tokyo went so far beyond conventional music that they became both entertaining and, like a car crash at the side of the motorway, completely fascinating. With pretension levels up to 11, they set up a fuzzy portable TV on top of one of the cabs and installed a projector with pictures of the band wearing nothing but underpants and gurning in a faceless toilet cubicle. No, I am actually being serious here folks, it was that ‘ceeeraaaazyyyy’. They then proceeded to unleash their noise upon the crowd which included a stupid fucking sequencer/synthesisers/whatever which left me with a cracking headache and a brief interlude where the drummer vacated his podium and began to dance like an epileptic at an all night rave in the middle of the stage, stopping at one point to pull his dangerously tight trousers out of his arse crack. Yet again, im being very serious. Still, like I said, while essentially playing the same brand of ‘music’ as Tache Noir, Neo Tokyo succeeded were their counterparts failed by a) being slightly, and only very slightly, more inclined to use the occasional melody or killer bit of guitar noodling b) instead of looking like they were spazzing out to be ‘cool’ and ‘alternative’, looking like they were doing it because they damn well wanted to and no one was going to stop them and c) being so damn outlandish that it was impossible to tear your eyes away. (3.5)
Still, if push came to shove, it would take a lot of chloroform, a roll of duct tape and a shotgun pointed at my face to not only pay for but then proceed to sit through the entirety of a similar gig. It’s not often I’d rather have been at home watching Eastenders than at a gig, but this was the damn closest I’ve ever come. If anyone would like to reimburse me with the 3 hours that were cruelly and mercilessly stolen from me last night, get in touch. Thanks.
Ross
Oh, and this gig was at the Boardwalk.
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