well, it has been quite a musically diverse weekend to say the least.
i went to see the broad gig at hamer hall on friday night and have to confess i was pleasantly surprised (and not just because i was at the bar drinking shiraz next to chris lilley from "we can be heroes"). i was fully expecting to watch five chicks, five different musical styles, one playing after the other, some maybe good, most not really my taste...whatever....
but i was impressed! the four (relatively unknown) girls plus deb conway were all onstage together, they alternated playing their own styles (jazz, folk, country, and a bit of hippy deep forestish kind of folk) engaged in humourous light banter with each other between songs, harmonised together, and incorporated different instruments throughout the performance (accordian, banjo, drum, even recorder!). it was a great show (yes even the country chick!) and i can totally recommend laura jean (the hippy deep-forestish one who confessed to being a nerd..yeah! there's hope for me becoming a musician yet!), liz stringer (the other folk chick, sounded deep, husky and rough as guts when she spoke, could hardly believe it was the same voice when she sang), and alana stone (the jazz one who won me over with keyboards and definitely had the funniest between-song banter).
...and i must admit the acoustics at the art centre always tend to win me over, regardless of the artist... a tone-deaf banshee could wail there and probably sound fantastic.
In a slight change of scene, 24 hours later i found myself at the barley corn hotel in collingwood, watching alex's mates' band wardaemonic spew some kind of black substance from their mouths, whilst looking like zombies decked out in KISS makeup and making tortured guttural sounds that left me thinking that the lead singer better have good private health cover for all the throat nodule operations he's inevitably going to need later on in life.
here's the thing about metal (proper metal i mean, not big-hair 80's metal or that nu-metal shit of the late 90's), i actually really get into a lot of the music. i love the fast guitar and the orchestration. it's when the singers open their mouths that i get turned off. why do they do this?? i like to think that i'm quite broadminded with my music tastes (i'm pretty sure there was absolutely no-one from hamer hall at the barley and corn on sat), but i just can't get it! why have any kind of melodic sound if the vocals just destroy it?
on the plus side though, this gig was great for my metal education, as i never really had an idea of the difference between metal genres, in particular death and black metal (something that is essential to know for day to day life). turns out the only thing you really have to remember is black metal=screechy singing, death metal=cookie monster vocalisation*. wardaemonic appeared to fit somewhere between black and death metal, as there were a couple of screechy moments, but in general it was sounding more and more like cookie monster was behind the vocal mic. (as brooke so aptly remarked "is he actually singing words")
in the end we bailed at about 11pm and went to BITD, a place we were much more familiar, and brooke and i sang and danced and air-guitared our hearts out to gunners, KISS and def leppard till 3am. For those about to rock, we salute you!
*a term officially trademarked by dennis
