Dub be good to me

[venta]

Blimey. 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 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 :)

Comments

[paste.livejournal.com]

oooh, hello! i've just added you cos someone said you post mp3s, i love people like you. then i noticed the abundance of nz tunes all over the place & was going to ask what/how/why... and oxford? but this post has answered the question for me.

hi, i'm sarah & i actually am from nz & weirdly enough i'm living in shropshire at the moment. i went to see salmonella dub in london on sunday & while they were pretty good, the venue was totaly rubbish. it was in the shepherds bush empire which is an old theatre with balconies. we were unfortunately sitting on one of hte balconies... sitting! it sucked big time, we had to dance in front of our seats where there wasn't much space to do anything but bend your knees occasionally. grrrr.

that said, i saw SD play in builth wells last year in a smaller venue & it was a much better show, much tighter & more intimate & so much more room for dancing! i'm with you in loving the bongos/sax man, he's my favourite by far.

ohhh, i'm rambling. i just wanted to say hi! if you're ever in need of some new nz tunes, i've got lots eh, just gimme a yell.

x.sarah

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aye up. Come on in.

I only actually post one mp3 a week, and it's mainly to encourage people to go and buy albums they might not know about :)

A friend of mine from university was a kiwi studying, and then working, over here for getting on for seven years. He introduced me to loads of big NZ bands, plus local bands from Wellington (where he grew up), and Dunedin (he went to Otago).

My only gripe is that it's really hard to find CDs over here, even of quite well-known NZ bands.

I'm always open to recommendations of new bands, though - particularly since I found a good mail order company (www.smokecds.com). (Or at least, I had but that page doesn't seem to want to load right now :( )

Shepherds Bush isn't too bad as a venue, really, but yeah - you want to be standing downstairs, not up in the circle!

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

It seems to work now, but your link is not quite right. Try this (http://www.smokecds.com/).