venta

Hopefully the Live and Naked Photography Corporation will soon be able to provide a whole host of images of this WGW's bands.

Screaming Banshee Aircrew

I approached SBA with a certain degree of caution: last Whitby

davefish played a CD of theirs at me and I had one big gripe with it. Sadly, my gripe stands when hearing them live.

SBA are 100% showmen (and women), they're great visually. They have two vocalists (which is often a winner with me). They bounce around with enomrous energy, and are generally something I'd really expect to enjoy. But... to my ears, the female vocalist is consistently out of tune.

keris, who seems to know what she's talking about, suggests that the problem is that the singer is forcing her voice beyond what it does naturally, and that if she just chilled out a bit everything would be fine.

All the vocals seemed to get a bit lost in the middle of the set, and I wondered if the sound engineer was mucking about with the balance. Not being able to hear the words did detract from the set quite a lot, since a lot of the entertainment lies in the lyrics.

So, SBA are fun and I enjoyed them. But... but... Really. Sort the vocals out. And get a proper drummer.

Screaming Banshee Aircrew's site

Psychophile

OK, I'm prepared to put my head on the mixed metaphor and say that I like Psychophile. This has already got me sneered at a fair few times this weekend.

Please note, I don't claim they're particularly good :)

Watching Psychophile is a bit like watching a couple of drunk mates get up on stage at a party. One girl who sings, one bloke who sings a bit and plays a guitar a bit, and a whole lot of poppy, sampley backing tape.

They could be truly mediocre, but are saved by two things: one, Lucy has the most amazing, powerful, flexible voice and two, they don't seem to be taking it in the slightest bit seriously either.

I heartily enjoyed my dose of goth-pop fluff on Friday night.

Psychophile's site

Voltaire

I was outside in the foyer, chatting, when I heard the strange stirrings that indicate that a band is onstage. I wasn't even sure if Voltaire was a him or a them, but headed in to find out.

It turned out to be a him. Standing by himself, wearing a woolly jumper and holding an acoustic guitar. He was playing, and there was no backing track.

Despite this, after only a couple of minutes on stage he had a rapt crowd in front of him.

One of the topics which came up for debate in the pub on Sunday was whether it was more accurate to call him "a goth Bill Bailey" or "a goth Billy Bragg". Either way, he was very, very funny. Necrophilia has never been so entertaining.

And he can whip out impromptu Smiths parodies. Well, he claims to. Even if it was pre-thought-up, it still made me smile.

I went sufficiently wild and crazy to buy a CD of his, which I will report on later. A lot of the humour was provided by the chatter in between the songs, so I'm currently unsure whether just recordings of the songs alone will stand up to repeated listenings.

Voltaire's site

Gene Loves Jezebel

There seems to be some "confusion" about who owns the name Gene Loves Jezebel, and I believe there's two of them at present.

I think we saw this one, not this one. But I'm open to correction on this point.

I listened to half a half a dozen tracks of more, recognising a couple of them (Kiss Of Life and, er, something else) and failing to accurately place the sound. It was slick, it was polished, they're clearly competent musicians. It was, as sounds go, a little dated, but that's not usually something that bothers me.

So, all in all, it's something of a mystery why I completely lost interest and wandered off to find people to talk to instead. As I said of Alien Sex Fiend last Whitby: they're seminal, I'm pleased to have had the chance to hear them. And, er, that's about it, really.

Greenhaus

I don't think I've heard so many bad things about any one band on the UK goth scene as I have about Greenhaus. Sadly, I managed to miss them and thus have no opinion of my own.

Devilish Presley

I was quite optimistic about Devilish Presley. I'd heard a lot about them, and after all, you can hardly go wrong with a bit of goth-tinged rock'n'roll.

First bad sign: there's only two of them. One bass, one guitar. No drummer :(

Second bad sign: they don't seem to be terribly good musicians. Or singers.

Third bad sign: the lyrics aren't really that entertaining either.

In summary, they have the attitude, but they don't have the anything else. Which makes their attitude look a bit silly, really.

I stuck it out for a few songs, then decided there was probably some wet paint somewhere in the Spa I ought to be keeping an eye on. If you want to listen to this kind of stuff, go and check out Zombina and the Skeletones, they do it about three hundred times better. And with a live (or at least undead) drummer.

Devilish Presley's site

Queen Adreena

Queen Adreena take to the stage, and the first thing you hear is the scratchy, bruised sound of Katie-Jane's little-girl-on-heroin voice. Then the solid wall of guitars kicks in and her voice rises to a hysterical scream.

I've seen QA once before, and I remember them as very screamy, very loud, and very mad. On a second acquaintance, only one of these is actually true: they are (or at least, the frontman Katie-Jane is) very mad indeed. Apparently they've gone through a lot of bass players recently - hardly surprising when you consider that the job spec includes being able to dodge the chairs that the singer might chuck at you without warning. The guitarist puts up quite placidly with being pushed, hit, and chaired. I guess he's used to it.

But they're not that loud or that screamy. The singer's voice is beautiful, and the strangely androgynous voice of the guitarist twists round it seamlessly. Although the songs are hardly standard verse-chorus-verse events, they are melodic and inviting. The music is also much more complicated than I remember, and difficult to take in all at once at a live gig - I think they're a band to go on the check-out list.

The act closed again with Katie-Jane alone on stage, singing a strange, wandering, formless melody which I wondered if she might be improvising. The phrases were perfectly pitched and floated ethereally over the audience as she stood, forlorn, in the middle of the stage, the microphone cable wound round her neck. Then she ran from the stage, tattered dress and tangled hair flying.

This very much their image, but it'd unfair to discount the rest of the band as mere backing. They're actually rather more than that, and worth paying a bit of attention to.

Queen Adreena's site

In The Nursery

I was completely unfamiliar with ITN, and was vaguely expecting some form of extreme-industrial ambient-anglegrinder earbleeding noise. On reflection, it's been suggested that I was thinking of Nurse With Wound there.

Someone (who'd probably best remain nameless :) said of In The Nursery "

mrph and

zotz like them. Which means they're either really great or really dire".

They're really great.

I expect, if I'd heard ITN recorded first, I'd have been fairly uninterested in seeing them live. After all, the most you'd be able to hope for is that you'd get one person with a bank of keyboards/box o' twiddly knobs, and a singer or so. What I wouldn't have realised is that all the drumming is done live. At any one time there's up to three people playing the drums - and there are only four members of ITN.

Admmitedly, there is a guy with a bank of keyboards/box o' twiddly knobs, but he also sings a bit and plays a windsynth.

I suspect the music is what I mentally class as 'background' - notably, that you could buy an album, love it, play it regularly, and still be unable to name more than one or two tracks if you heard them. (This is not an insult: I'd class Sigur Rós as background, and they're very high in my estimation.) Apart from that, it has moments of being dancey and moments of being Massive Attack-style atmospheric, and had me mesmerised from start to finish.

I'm quite keen to investigate them further, so if anyone knowledgable would like to recommend an album to start on, please do.

In The Nursery's site