Dub be good to me
Oct. 5th, 2005 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaBlimey. With the exception of BAYD on Friday, I've done nowt but whinge on here for a week or so. Returning now to the usual channel with a gig review.
Oh, and as people keep reminding me, there hasn't been a photo competition on here for ages. Yes, I know that. One coming soon, promise.
Last Thursday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zandev asked me who I was going down to the Zodiac to see. Salmonella Dub, I said. That didn't help, did it ? A New Zealand reggae band, I explained.
It wasn't until I said that out loud that I realised what a preposterous concept it was. A reggae band. From New Zealand.
Salmonella Dub were one of my great finds when I was out there in 2003, found simply by walking into a friendly-looking independent record shop and demanding recommendations for local bands. Incidentally, this is a great tactic even in the UK. It's a non-starter in your HMVs and Virgins, but find a proper record shop with a real person behind the counter and they'll probably be delighted to plug their top favourites. The bloke who runs Folk Devils in Whitby looks up to see me and says "Oh, it's you. Buy this." these days. But I digress.
I was too late to catch most of the support acts, but arrived just as YT came on stage. YT turned out to be strangely mismatched bloke doing rather ill-advised dub-style rap over a backing track. On the plus side, he did surprise me, as I've never heard phrases like "the Blackbird Leys lovin' family" uttered onstage before. His whole stage act seemed somewhat amateurish, and I would have expected him to be fourth down the bill. Still, he good a good reception so maybe I was just missing something.
If I take a SpamAssassin approach to reviewing bands, and award points for various different positive things, then Salmonella Dub come out pretty highly. You get points for a singing drummer (no reason, I just like it), points for multiple vocalists, points for non-standard instruments (sax, trumpet, trombone), points for people who swap instruments (or, in one notable case, play the saxophone and the bongos at the same time), points for multiple drummers. They get points for their Radio4-like approach to percussion - that is, if you're not doing anything with your hands right now, pick up some maraccas or something (incidentally, I mean Radio4 the band, not the BBC people). And they get points for being so damn varied.
I know basically bugger-all about reggae or dub, and thus am a bit lacking in vocaublary to describe them effectively. They do gentle tracks with slow, mellow brass sections and more upbeat instrumental numbers whose short, sharp blasts from trumpet and sax act more like percussion. Sometimes the lyrics tumble out like a fast rap, and some of the songs get carried away on their two-man drum lines to become more like dance music. Just when you think they've got to be out of surprises, the keyboard player picks up an acoustic guitar and they bring out a dead-straight reggae track.
And all to an LCD projection backdrop of weird video montages, short film clips and bits of NZ scenery.
I've seen a lot of bands at the Zodiac, and I've never felt the floor bounce like that; people were dancing like bastards. What with Salmonella Dub belonging on the other side of the world, they don't get over here much. But I'd very much recommend going to see them if you get the chance.
I was about to go crazy and experiment with this tagging lark, since it'd actually be quite useful to, say, see all gig reviews at a go. But that apparently means swapping to S2, and most of the S2 styles look really ugly. Guess I'll be writing my own then. I'll see you in a few weeks when I've re-emerged from the masses of documentation. And if the journal stays looking like this... well, I guess it beat me :)
Oh, and as people keep reminding me, there hasn't been a photo competition on here for ages. Yes, I know that. One coming soon, promise.
Last Thursday
zandev asked me who I was going down to the Zodiac to see. Salmonella Dub, I said. That didn't help, did it ? A New Zealand reggae band, I explained.It wasn't until I said that out loud that I realised what a preposterous concept it was. A reggae band. From New Zealand.
Salmonella Dub were one of my great finds when I was out there in 2003, found simply by walking into a friendly-looking independent record shop and demanding recommendations for local bands. Incidentally, this is a great tactic even in the UK. It's a non-starter in your HMVs and Virgins, but find a proper record shop with a real person behind the counter and they'll probably be delighted to plug their top favourites. The bloke who runs Folk Devils in Whitby looks up to see me and says "Oh, it's you. Buy this." these days. But I digress.
I was too late to catch most of the support acts, but arrived just as YT came on stage. YT turned out to be strangely mismatched bloke doing rather ill-advised dub-style rap over a backing track. On the plus side, he did surprise me, as I've never heard phrases like "the Blackbird Leys lovin' family" uttered onstage before. His whole stage act seemed somewhat amateurish, and I would have expected him to be fourth down the bill. Still, he good a good reception so maybe I was just missing something.
If I take a SpamAssassin approach to reviewing bands, and award points for various different positive things, then Salmonella Dub come out pretty highly. You get points for a singing drummer (no reason, I just like it), points for multiple vocalists, points for non-standard instruments (sax, trumpet, trombone), points for people who swap instruments (or, in one notable case, play the saxophone and the bongos at the same time), points for multiple drummers. They get points for their Radio4-like approach to percussion - that is, if you're not doing anything with your hands right now, pick up some maraccas or something (incidentally, I mean Radio4 the band, not the BBC people). And they get points for being so damn varied.
I know basically bugger-all about reggae or dub, and thus am a bit lacking in vocaublary to describe them effectively. They do gentle tracks with slow, mellow brass sections and more upbeat instrumental numbers whose short, sharp blasts from trumpet and sax act more like percussion. Sometimes the lyrics tumble out like a fast rap, and some of the songs get carried away on their two-man drum lines to become more like dance music. Just when you think they've got to be out of surprises, the keyboard player picks up an acoustic guitar and they bring out a dead-straight reggae track.
And all to an LCD projection backdrop of weird video montages, short film clips and bits of NZ scenery.
I've seen a lot of bands at the Zodiac, and I've never felt the floor bounce like that; people were dancing like bastards. What with Salmonella Dub belonging on the other side of the world, they don't get over here much. But I'd very much recommend going to see them if you get the chance.
I was about to go crazy and experiment with this tagging lark, since it'd actually be quite useful to, say, see all gig reviews at a go. But that apparently means swapping to S2, and most of the S2 styles look really ugly. Guess I'll be writing my own then. I'll see you in a few weeks when I've re-emerged from the masses of documentation. And if the journal stays looking like this... well, I guess it beat me :)
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-06 12:12 pm (UTC)Dub be good to me.
Ooh, ooh - the title's in the quote. I can get this one.