Busy weekend

Wow, that was a busy couple of days. Some numbers first: No. of bands watched:8, Gigs Attended:3, Pints drunk:1. Hurray!

You will now find on the website, a review of one of the gigs, and photos from the other two gigs.

Highlights of the things I saw:

• The Epstein playing NYC Blues and No Lies to round off their set
• Thomas Truax with his weird hypnotising glasses in the dark (photos to come on the flickr account)

oh shit…

I’ve just noticed that none of the photos in my gallery are showing up in the pop up windows right now. I’m not too sure what’s gone wrong, but it’s 3:48 am and I need some sleep.

A temporary solution will come in the morning, but potentially the galleries could be out of service for a while

UPDATE: I am slowly converting the galleries. There are about 150 sets of gig photographs on here, so it’s going to take a while, but the most recent gigs will be the first ones to be fixed like this

Choosing something different

There’s a list of a few bands whose gigs I would always go to. No matter how many times I have seen them before, they would be at the top of the list if there were any clashes. One of these was Youthmovies. However tonight, due to a promise made to Baby Gravy after I missed another show because of the terrible public transport system, I ended up at the Port Mahon, while Youthmovies played 10 minutes down the road.

And what a good decision that was. If I had stuck to my old routine, I would have missed watching Los Campesinos! Even when the power went near the end of their set, they were great fun to watch. The tracks I had heard had seemed a bit twee, but live they were powerful and highly entertaining, truly deserving the hype they are getting around the WWW right now.

Final Fantasy

It’s half two in the morning, and I really should be in bed. But instead I’m still up, listening to the a live bootleg of Final Fantasy. His album He Poos Clouds has probably been the album I’ve returned to most this year, and I can’t believe I haven’t written anything about his music yet. Rarely does listening to any musician makes me want to pick up musical instruments again, but the ease with which Owen Pallett plays the violin, and plays around with it, using loops and so on, has actually made me want to drag my viola out, but I’ll need years more of practice to play anything that sounds half decent.

Pallett can use the most simple and plain backing, and together with his vocals, make any of his songs sound beautiful. And what’s more, he jokes around too, see his cover of Mariah Carey’s Fantasy. Maybe I’ll just listen to his albums again for that final push to pick up the viola again.