Live!

After the resounding silence and total lack of cooperation from my last post, here's a change of theme - a review:

HK Live! (Saturday 2nd September at the Fringe Club Gallery)

I don't want to use the cliche of intimate to describe the venue, but I might have to. You know the kind of place where the stage is only about a foot high and the only way for the band to get on and off is to push straight through the crowd. But the Fringe Club Gallery is a very civilized form of intimate venue: clean cool air, pictures from the current exhibition up on the bare-brick walls, and clean. Actually clean. No sticky mess of beer and chewing gum on the floor, no graffiti in the toilets, not even a dropped cigarette butt in sight. Having said that, it's not at all soul-less and over-sanitized. The audience were appreciative and energetic without being over-the-top crazy (well, we're all a bit older now) and the sound system was not too bad given the size of the place. Still, enough about the venue - how about the bands? There were two supporting acts on tonight, the first of which were the Shotgun She-Ras - a Hong Kong local, all-female, country and western outfit, with great hair and dubious Southern accents.
They were obviously having fun during their set, despite some struggles with the sound; the drummer gave her all from under her 10-gallon hat, the guitar and bass maintained just the right detached cool expressions and the lead-singer was a joy to watch as she grimaced and rolled her eyes in concentration at the mike, and then turned to the other band members smiling broadly. We started to doubt the authenticity of the girls' Southern roots after the lead-singer asked the techies to turn up her vocals in a broad Northern (England) accent but the She-Ras have some good songs and interesting ideas. They won a lot of support from the crowd with the obvious local references in "Mr Chan", a homage to the taxi-driver they met on the way to the gig, and their cover song was well-received. Perhaps a little more practice and tightening up is in order, along with some more confidence to match their outfits and golden bee-hive hairdos. And how about some other instruments in the mix for a little more variety?

Next up after a 10 minute break were The Lovesong, who seemed to be the most popular band of the evening. Described somewhere as a "spoken-word indie-rock" group, they could be better termed a shouted-word nu-metal outfit. There's no doubt that they're technically proficient and good at what they do: they'll keep the kids happy with their mix of driving beats, angry-sounding-even-when-not lyrics and almost electronic lead-guitar tones over fuzzed-out rapid power chords; there were definite hints of early Rage Against the Machine in there. But perhaps the vocals and song-writing need a little more depth.

Last up: Johnny Hi-Fi, all the way from New York at the start of a 6-day Asian tour. They are described in many terms: multi-ethnic, do-it-yourself, Asia's (or America's, depending on who you listen to) answer to Coldplay. But basically they were composed, confident, tight and just a little bit samey.
They opened with pure Radiohead chord sequences and ended with something very reminiscent of the best Placebo (who they'll be supporting at the Beijing Pop Festival in a few days) passing through Mandarin melodic indie rock-ballads on the way. It seemed the too-cool lead singer would never even break a sweat, but even he succumbed eventually as they cruised through their final numbers and one encore. They can put on a good show but to stand-up to their Coldplay tag they need to make a little more use of the other members and again, some other instruments wouldn't hurt at all. None of the bands on tonight seemed to have heard of acoustic guitars, or instruments with keyboards.

So it seems the keywords for this evening were good music, nice venue, and let's not forget "variety", as in let's have a little bit more of it and you could all go far.