:: Tuesday, August 05, 2008

JACKSON FIREBIRD + KYTES OF OMAR + THE BARON
LIVE @ PRODUCERS BAR / Friday August 1st 2008

I was SO gonna blow this whole weekend off. I had it all planned, or more accurately didn't. No plans, no nothing, two nights and two days of absolutely shitfuckall! YEAAAS! It would've been awesome! It would've been all time! Years from now, you'll be telling your grandkids "this was the ONE that Spoz took off!" and nobody would ever believe you, because Spoz NEVER takes a weekend off! I mean shit, the last time I "got away from it all" was back sometime in February 2007 and that was only because I had a chronic case of the flu; and even THEN I still faked one up (and few of you EVEN noticed), why? because Spoz NEVER takes a week off! Spoz is insane! Spoz is a machine! Spoz cannot be killed by conventional weapons! FUUUUCK! You don't realise how insane it IS to pull this shit off every week for years on end! All these live photos, videos, sorting, filing, tweaking, uploading, coding, writing for hours on end and well into the night. This is a fulltime fucking job and for what I ask you!? WHAT!? being recognised on the street as "that Spoz idiot"!? chased by all those lynch mobs? all those death threats!? WHAT THE FUCK AM I THINKING!? I should've given this shit up yeaars ago! Forget taking a week off, I should just take off! screw you guys I'm outta here! But then I realise you'd have nothing to read each week, and I'd have nothing to write each week, and I rather like it when you have something to read, even if most of you schlubs are borderline illiterates who just come here to nick all my photos for your myspace and facebook profiles; it's ok! I enjoy what little time we share! I may be gnawing my arm off and barking insane up the walls to get away from all you freaks but I really DO love each and every one of you *cough* so um.. yeah.. guess I'm here for another week huh?



Yup, clearly I'm more than overdue for a nervous breakdown by now: something along the lines of me gibbering incoherently in the Ed Castle beergardens, smoking trees of weed, bugging out to weirdarse psychedelic shit 'til I'm utterly incapable of stringing two sentences together (aaaah don't we all?) but since I did that two months ago already, fuckit! tonight I thought i'd just "wing it" instead with this dribbling selection of evolutionary throwbacks at Producers Bar. Why? coz they were the first crapweasels to spam SMS me today, that's why! YEAAAAS! :)



THE BARON (****) myspace ::
First act for the night is rocking it from the Cro-Magnon end of the scale (or for those of you playing from the bottom end of the bell curve: think that bearded twat on the far right of the "Ascent of Man" evolutionary chart and you'd be bang on the money). Upright, evolved, handy with stone tools, proficient with fire, weirdly naked on stage without their lead singer tonight? Yup, that's The Baron! Tonight they're performing an instrumental set as their aforementioned lead singer thought he'd bugger off for a holiday at the last minute (bastard! way to make me jealous!) leaving us with 3/4 of The Baron instead; or more accurately "The Bar" as that's what the rest of this band will surely be hitting hard after this set tonight.. *cough* However, far be it for them to be lesser than the sum of their parts, The Baron as a three piece instrumental act are surprisingly all the better for it. As without a singer flapping his arms about, shrieking, acting it up like a douchebag (ie: see any other funk metal act or especially Lee Cowan from Tony Font Show) the attention turns to all the subtle nuances of the guitar, bass and drums instead and instantly the IQ levels all rise by a few points in the finer appreciation of it.. aaaaaah! :)







The Baron. By taking all the words out've this set they've left us truly speechless to the grand symphony of meat that they've conjured up in its place. Buzzing, chugging, ripe with virtuoso guitars, noodling bass interludes, punctuated drum. They're the stadium rocking sounds of 80's Pink Floyd, the below the belt booty grooves of 70's Shaft, the punching grunt of Soundgarden and Audioslave, the occassional cover of Led Zeppelin and just a hint of Neil Young bugging the fuck out to a black & white movie soundtrack. The Baron. Ripe with burning animal carcasses, primal with maned and matted fur, yet deftly articulate with sparking flint and raised clubs: they're the perfect opening act for tonight's downward spiral down the evolutionary scale..



KYTES OF OMAR (****1/2) myspace ::
Which brings us neatly to the Neanderthal sounds of act two. By any other measure (or review you may've read just last week) you'd recognise this band by the face that stares back at you in the mirror the morning after one FUCK of an ugly night out. You'll recognise them well in the squinting, the grunting and the arse scratching. You'll recognise them in your inability to form complete sentences or to make eye contact. Hair all over their face, burst blood vessels in their eyes, unshaven, unsteady on their feet, storms brewing in their small intestines; followed by a feedback sustain, a rich smell and a mile wide grin? This is not just a running commentary on the prehistoric mannerisms of their lead singer Anthony; but a summation of us all, each and every one of us, in this room right now drinking ourselves retarded to this, so that we TOO will be right there with them come Saturday morning! Kytes Of Omar. They're a band that speaks to the very knuckle dragging 98th percentile chimpanzee in us all! In the chorus of gutteral shrieking, hooting, gnashing teeth and buzzing guitars. In that inescapable primal urge, four beers and counting, to raise your fire stick up on high and damn near sing along. Don't worry if you don't know the words, just yell the first thing that comes to mind; duuude you'll fit right in!












Kytes Of Omar are a mongrel breed in every sense of the word. And yet as broad and confusing as their influences may be: encompassing everything from the slacker buzz of The Strokes, the drunken swagger of Kings Of Leon, the belligerent yammering of The Pixies, the punching rock between Queens Of The Stone Age and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Radiohead sigh of defeat (to name just but a few clueless stabs in the dark in attempt to nail them to one pedigree); in their ability to cock one leg up and piss on them all, they're becoming all the stronger and all the more unique for it. The Kytes Of Omar. We're drunk as fuck, and we're loving it!



JACKSON FIREBIRD (*****) myspace ::
Which (now that we've all alcoholically regressed back up into the trees) makes for the perfect prelude to the simian sound of act three: Jackson Firebird. A band which by any other definition could be considered the ultimate Rock & Roll Falafel, Yiros or Döner Kebab. Experienced whilst sober they probably wouldn't amount to all that much, just like any other "Falafel". Just another two piece band. Just another Black Keys clone yammering out a whisky spitting ode to the rust belt blues. Pffffft.. what's so special about that!? bands like these are everywhere you go these days! Down every street corner, down the road from every pub, howling murder on your radio, flying out of car windows, twitching unconscious in the gutter as you walk on by, sheeeeiiit! you can even buy them in sixpacks now (40% more expensive ever since they increased the tax on RTDs.. bastards!). But then, the minute you're a few too many beers in and well on the way to circling the drain.. *BAM!* ..it's like the best fucking thing you've ever heard. It's like Jesus H Christ himself took a solid gold dump, lit it on fire, and served it to you on a plate with a side of fries. You renounce all other religions, creeds, cultures and memes and for the next 45 minutes you follow nothing but Jackson Firebird right into the burning fires of Hell itself. Such is the almightly power of the Rock & Roll Falafel. Shit drunk? duuude it's fucking awesome!














Of course that barely covers half the mad buzz of it. Blind drunk? they're 10ft tall, screaming and on fire down a hotel corridoor at 3AM. They're 50,000 chainsaws, miniguns cutting through inches of steel, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Death From Above 1979, Chemical Brother's "Dig Your Own Hole" and the monkey grinder howls of Bob Log III loud enough to split concrete. They're Shaggy from Scooby Doo (aka: Brendan) on guitar and Animal (aka: Dale) from The Muppets on drums hitting it harder than Jaret Leto hitting the floor to Edward Norton in Fight Club. They're a kick and snare attack using nothing but an upturned black bottle bin and a gaffered up metal tray while your brain blacks out to white noise. Shriek exciteably and pound both your fists into your chest! Climb the walls, piss on the ceiling, kill and fuck everything that moves! Wake up hours later stuck up a tree, naked, covered in bruises without a fucking clue how you got there! FUUCK! it don't nearly get as stupid or as ridiculously awesome as this!



12:53AM - Act four, Mona Lisa Overdrive, take one look at all the monkeys, gibbons, baboons and marmosets fornicating and flinging poo at each other in a howling mess in front of stage, take one look at their well dressed, educated and civilised selves, briefly consider the dry cleaning bill, then high tail it the fuck out've there; moments before Producers Bar shudders momentarily in and out of our plane of existence and collapses into a "Poltergeist" style singularity.. *whoaaaa* Yup, in hindsight they probably dodged a bullet there (whilst those of us more paranoid would almost suspect they were behind it all... hmmmm). Indeed how any of us idiots got out of here alive is beyond us and centuries of accumilated science, but wow.. what a night huh! :)



3:22AM - Yeah. I probably could explain what happened between the preceding moment and this following moment and why there appears to be a three hour gap in between (hey perhaps I could reenact it with puppets!). But since I have very little memory of what the FUCK happened (save for the foggiest recollection that I stepped foot in the Crown & Anchor and then my mind just went "blank"), you'll just have to accept the glaring continuity leap as I teleport myself here to the Bull & Bear on King William Street. Because clearly THAT happened. Oh and did I ever mention I have freaky magical powers and I bend space and time? well now I have..



3:27AM - I'm pretty much "flying blind" here: both literally and in the foggiest retelling of it. But if my utter lack of intelligence at this point serves me correctly, this would be Transmission: that scourge of late night dancefloor retardation, that quite like yours truly, appears to have achieved a state of quantum superposition in this city by being in all places all at once. Hmmm.. as one familiar with such a ubiquitous (inebriated) state of being, I believe copious amounts of alcohol may possibly be involved, that and the mistaken belief you can actually fly..



3:31AM - Here's the ONE smart reason you had for circling the drain here at this insane time of night. This is a Transmission DJ. They're indistinguishable from every other club DJ you'd ever meet out there; except for the fact that they're an "indie club DJ" and therefore have no fucking clue how to beatmatch, pitchmatch or scratch (and usually forgo the silly "crossfade" trick as well). Their only concern is to figure out how to get from Vampire Weekend to MGMT to The Wombats in three songs or less. Still on the plus side, everyone here is too drunk to care. Which is why being an indie club DJ is the best job in the world (and why I secretly hate you all :) )



3:46AM - And here's every reason why you'll be living in fear of visiting this place EVER again, in the offchance you end up as one of Spoz's Rant's infamous drunkarse "social pics".. YEAAAS!! (otherwise known as the ONLY reason you ever visit this site so you can steal all this shit every week for your own myspace and facebook profiles, and why I secretly hate you all too! :) ).



For instance: here's the ever infamous bartender Bec from the Ed Castle (aka: the serial scene killer) attempting to sneak herself into absolutely every single freaking photo that I take..





Here's me throwing my OWN drunkarse into every second shot and ruining it; because I'm waaaay too laughably drunk to know any better (and duuude, lets face it; who wouldn't?)




Here's all those photos that Sophie from Producers Bar will be requesting that I delete days later when she finally sees them (as she wonders to herself just WHY she had this bizarre arms race against Bec to see just how many insane photos she can get in Spoz's Rant in the first place..)



*cough* yup, that right there is a keeper!



Here's Azza wondering just how the fuck he ended up in this shitheap at such a ridiculously late hour (and just how many fire alarms he can trigger before he gets the fuck out've here..)



And here's many more ridiculously reasons why I'll henceforth abstain from drinking alcohol EVER again for as long as I live (and quite possibly go live in a cave somewhere..)



except we all know this is bullshit, since (a) I'm clearly insane..



(b) we all know I'm the living undead..



(c) I regenerate all my internal organs every 24-48 hours..



except for, (d) whatever liquid mush is left of my brain.. weeeee! :)



5:32AM - Yup, everytime I don't plan shit like this: shit like THIS fucking happens! As for how I managed to find me a taxi home, not subsequently scare that taxi driver the fuck away (the minute he saw me dribbling by the gutter), managed to navigate him to my front door, managed to navigate MYSELF to the front door after falling out of that taxi and not fall dead at the end of it, is best left up to your own insane imagination. Either way, duuuude? awesome! :)



They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. And yet here I am: sixty eight episodes in, one hundred and fifty bands down and I still haven't run out've shit to write!? Fuuuck.. who knew this town had so many tales to tell? :)

Previously on Spoz's Rant: White Rhino + Diplomat + Swords

:: Spoz 2:55 PM |
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