Hunting for shows to go to in London, I couldn’t surf the internet for five minutes without wading waist-deep into the hype that surrounds Cajun Dance Party, who as far as I can tell, are only popular because they’re just fresh out of high school. With this many rave reviews I had to check them out. The final date of their UK tour was smack in the middle of my trip, so I made a note of it, not bothering to buy an £8 ticket.

I showed up at the venue in north-west London to see a sign advertising the show as sold out. I hung out for a while asking everyone if they had an extra ticket while my dad put off going to the bar next door to instead pester the bouncer. After the first band played a few people left and the bouncer went to talk to the promoter. When he came out he stamped our hands and wished us a Merry Christmas.

Jakobinarina are from Iceland. They’re fronted by a seventeen year-old Aryan boy and play watery music floating somewhere between ska, surf, and punk. I’ve never heard anything like it before, but every song sounded the same, with jagged surf guitar, busy APVH style synth, and an astounding wave of treble washing it all out, occasionally relenting as the drummer would ease up on the cymbals for some impressive Monks-style skins-only beats. They tried really hard, but even with some multimedia assistance they weren’t that good. Themes include optimistic teenage nihilism. Someone billed them as “The Sex Pistols meet Joy Division”, which I had to laugh at.

I wasn’t expecting much from the teenaged victims of the UK hype machine (which I may have just made up), but I was totally under whelmed. Cajun Dance Party are running with safety scissors; no matter how fast or with how much energy they play it (and they weren’t overly full of either), it’s still thin baroque indie-pop, completely dull and lacking any kind of edge. Their last song and encore picked up a little bit, but only with the help of a cover. Don’t believe the hype.

Disclaimer: the following is taken from notes of various scribblousness, taken in various states of sobriety, and as such, may not be totally reliable. I think that I at least have all the bands right, but various details may be mixed up.

Scrounging the internet a couple weeks before heading for the UK I found this free festival on my first weekend in London. I spent the morning of in Greenwich with my family doing very little, and around one (the festival allegedly started at eleven, but I doubt showing up that early would yield any decent music) found my way to a tube station. The underground is like the SkyTrain, had it been built over a hundred and fifty years, and planned out well with a good, easy to use system (although the collapse of the company in charge is front page news). Of course, when the tube first opened, Vancouver had a temporarily inflated population of 30 000 thanks to a gold rush.

The North Greenwich station is closer to airport than a traditional light rail station, where it is clearly spelled out how to get wherever you want. Why would someone need maps in an airport? Because it’s a subway station. Luckily, I blindly jumped on a train that was going straight to where I wanted to get.

The stations are filled with crappy buskers (with the exception of one guy playing really crazy reggae-ish stuff really loudly at Waterloo) and a lot of mass-transit-using kids sporting shirts of scoff-worthy bands that peaked in the nineties. Rancid, Offspring, and blink-182 are well represented.

The alley was nowhere near filled as Herra Hidro played. No one moved as the three-piece played something between the Futureheads and Alexisonfire, with obvious trad-rock influence. As they finished their occasionally interesting set it started to rain and I started hunting for food.

I got lost somehow, only to find myself back at the festival after blindly wandering through a string of tiny piss-stained alleys. No food was found.

Post War Years played some quirky dance-punk that was mostly dull. Their second song was actually decent; dance-noise along the lines of the Contortions, complete with crunching, dissonant synth.

The middle-aged jackass presenter (“John Kennedy of XFM!”) hypes up 35 Seconds as one of the best “indie” bands he’s heard. Do these guys know shit about indie? If you’re going to label yourself as indie* (and then enter battle of the bands to get noticed by major labels), you shouldn’t look like the shaved-head, WWF-loving, Nickelback-shirt-wearing sixth-grade douches that thought they were hot shit in 2002. Yes, not only do these people still exist in my high school, they play in festivals across the pond! Amidst the hype was a shitty band that sounded like watered down Linkin Park, a recipe with parallels in the disgusting festival washrooms (er, “toilets” as I was repeatedly informed).

*how does “indie” describe any style of music in the least? It doesn’t even mean independent any more, yet it’s still used as a label. As such, I assume that it must apply to the vaguely defined fashion that has flooded the alley… not to nü-metal fans trying to hop onto the next bus to money, fame, kicks, and chicks.

Between bands the DJ put on some Monks, which got some people dancing until Gary screams “I HATE YOU BABY!” at which point the majority of movement is brought to an awkward halt.

The People’s Revolutionary Choir opened up with a song that sounds like a rip-off of Cran’s “We’re Going to Make It” with large doses of late-nineties U2 thrown in. The biggest raindrops I’ve ever seen shower the alley, pulling all manner of alcohol container down the street in the inches of water that have completely soaked my canvas shoes, along with every ratty t-shirt and trendy haircut in attendance. While most of the crowd hug the crowded walls of the alley, The PRC shows off that they’ve written two songs; U2 featuring Cran, and U2 featuring the Sex Pistols. No one cares though, because the rain makes their widescreen arena-rock so damn triumphant, especially when the sun peaks out to something out of some ex-hippie’s reservoirs of religious experiences collected at Grateful Dead concerts. A bunch of people take their shirts off and start pogo-ing while everyone else watches with steady indifference as the band plays mediocre song after mediocre song. The singer yells “Good night!” well before five. Maybe he was talking to Australia?

The alley is filling up, probably just a couple hundred short of the 1600 person “capacity,” and the supermarket down the street is having a sale on beer (six 440mL cans for £2), and the rain has pushed all the empties into the gutter and into a nice pile. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, devoid of the familiar “atmosphere” you’d find at a similar Vancouver event.

For a three-piece, Sunset Cinema Club are remarkably full. Maybe efficient is a better word, since the PPC was definitely fuller, but took twice as many people to do it. These guys are the rawest and fastest of anyone so far, and make me wish people cared a bit, and would give movement a try (it would hurt to be knocked down to the pavement, but how much worse would that be than a concrete floor?). The only exception is the same 14-year-old girls who weren’t down with the Monks. I guess no one wanted to spill their beer. To the contrary, I drank mine too fast to even taste it, lest I miss out on full mobility.

The singer/bassist is totally piss-drunk, and announces it to the now packed alley, screaming “looks like the Queen’s coronation here”, despite like 95% of the crowd not having ever been alive for one. He keeps shouting at the crowd for the rest of the set. “This one’s… Fuck it! You don’t know it!” He then chucks his half-full beer into the crowd and shows what classy drinks the previous bands had been nursing on stage.

Between songs, only the second person asks me how tall I am. I give an honest answer. The last song starts. Their “sunset” is pretty ska, and a bunch of underage drinkers start skanking badly. SSC runs into an encore that’s predictable stop-start rock. It’s fantastic after how shitty some of the other bands were.

[At this point my notes become a barely legible scrawl, sporadic and incomplete. Please forgive gaps.]

There’s an ambulance parked behind the stage. Aren’t there more useful places to be? Places where they could save lives or something? No less than three fire trucks barrelled down Charing Cross as bands were playing; maybe the ambulance could follow them instead of idling in an alley?

Bolt Action Five has five members and four drum-machines. They sound like the Polysics on downers (which still amounts to a lot of energy), and without some of the hardcore influence, but a hell of a lot dancier. Half the members could waltz onto stage at the local high school production of Robin Hood without looking out of place. My initial indifference gets me accused of being blasé by Laurel (who earlier had asked me how tall I was, and whose friend had even earlier given me beer). Their set gets better as it goes, channelling the spirits of Super Nintendo and Gary Numan (who is playing London this month too). A kid goes crowd surfing for thirty seconds before heading face-first for the ground as the audience finally reveals that the blood flowing through their veins means they’re alive. Bolt Action Five is the third band to (unconsciously?) hint at My Sharona in a song.

A cute girl sound-checks a/her bass and the emcee introduces We Start Fires. They’re pretty generic, but they’re pretty girls, so no one cares. All the instruments play basically the same thing, and there’s a song along the lines of Computer. The crowd eats it up.

The entirety of my notes on Future of the Left: “Screamy. loud. UNIMPRESSED” The last D takes up a full three lines.

Before Help She Can’t Swim (miraculously unpunctuated), a kid goes on stage to play air guitar to Pretty Vacant, to which too few people sing along to. Later on there’s going to be more air guitaring to a “mystery song.” The gap between bands is horrible, apparently because one band (Tiger Force, I think) cancelled or were stuck in traffic or something. When they finally play it’s the best set yet. Punk dance-punk with occasional tastes of early Damned, loaded with hooks.

More people play air guitar (read: rip their shirts off and jump around, occasionally strumming) to Pretty Vacant, which is the mystery song. Wait, what?

I know shit about hip hop. I haven’t memorized Straight Outta Compton and the closest thing to a hip hop show I’ve been to is wishing I had money to see The Roots each time they come though Vancouver. Two white guys come out with a laptop attached to a drum machine, and really nice facial hair. It’s Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip. Dan is on the left with the electronics and side-burns; Pip is on Dan’s left with the mic and beard. They recently scored a UK indie novelty hip hop (enough qualifiers?) hit with the ridiculously preachy but oh-so-catchy “Thou Shalt Always Kill.” It makes sense. Pip’s lyrics are smart and memorable, and Dan le Sac’s glitchy beats got kids dancing even before his first breakdown. Amongst the forty-five minute set they pull out at least six really catchy songs, sporting political absolutism a-plenty (“Thou shalt not buy Coca-Cola products. Thou shalt not buy Nestle products”) including a spoken word interlude that got the now packed alley cheering for said politics. I doubt more than two kids’ll cry out for Coke to take responsibility for their actions in South America and then do anything about it, but the fact that they’re successfully saying it is (a very little) something. A nice touch is Scroobius’ expert use of props, including the periodic table of elements.

Blueprints of Tomorow [sic] managed to get their demo passed along to me for review, although by the time I got it I had heard enough about it that I could have memorized it. The CD starts with Supernatural Reality, which was “originally written for a school rap competition in grade 10 which I got 3rd place for.” Honestly, I’m surprised that a sixteen year old possesses this level of literacy. Included here are excerpts from the lyrics, as presented in the “enhanced” content.

“hassled for my lyrical content
critics are so syrical [sic]
thats what caused my criminal insanity profanity obsanity [sic]“

“take the clay mold
my solidiers [sic] in my image cause grimage [sic] is coming to get
you.”

“that just don’t back down or frown on loosing [sic] cities facing
pity”

“motivating inspirating [sic] get so aggravated distraded [sic] faded
made to look old”

While the singer ascends the staircase to take his rightful thrown as the king of words and the champion of literacy, the guitarist chugs out shapeless chords at irregular intervals and plays with his pedal, producing several equally absurd sounds before settling on a wall of distortion for a passionless guitar solo.

Meow Mix is a mountain of badly played guitar, while a sexually ambiguous voice tries to sound erotic while crying. As disturbing at the description.

My favourite song is Poverty is Everywhere. If you ignore the music (which is a rehash of the last two songs with different guitar effects), the song is nothing short of genius. The singer perfectly reproduces the innocence and moral absolutes present in an eleven-year-old’s essay on poverty. Through unsupported attacks on safe-injection sites, capitalism, welfare, and the foster care system without making any actual points, Blueprints of Tomorow [sic] gets a solid “Satisfactory” for the poetry unit in Mrs. Juker’s grade 4 class.

Along with the barely literate press package (which I thoroughly enjoyed), this CD is a horrific testament to eugenics. This could be one of the all-time greatest pieces of art to emerge from Chilliwack, but I suspect that stealing the lyrics from the unclaimed print-outs at the local middle school was done much less purposefully and literally than I imagine.

Weirdly, the CD includes lyrics for another song that seems just as bad, but I guess they forgot to include it or record it or something. A profound loss.

B+ / F

One of the creators of The Brains Never Stop, Miss Coles continues her streak of beautiful zines with this “year by year documentation of letters, pastes, postcards, stamps, friends, zines, mailboxes, and the post service*. *the band”. While the zine is beautiful in and of itself, it’s not just the aesthetics that please. Melanie’s writing is clever and funny, although not overtly so. You could race through this in just a couple minutes but it would seem to be a disjointed art zine. However, it’s so much more. When time is put into reading and “figuring it out” it’s brilliant.

While most of the zine is comprised of envelopes and their stories, we also get pieces on balloon mail, ways to send free mail (none of which the zine encourages), and Postcardx.net. Melanie put a lot of work in this zine and it was well worth it. – the result is a full-colour 32-page zine radiating wonder.