Limbo@Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh
Thursday January 3rd 2008
Where they smuggled in the back way?
A trio, 2 teenage boys and a school-girl; Fergus on Korg, big specs, baggy cardy, mushroom-head-hair-do; Brodie on pop-eyed lead vocal, goth-fuzz-bass as patented by The Fall, cider-n-black indie disco t-shirt; Emily, aka The Bannister, on stand-up snare and floor-tom.
From Dunfermline, a hard-nut satellite town just across the Forth.
Out of this spews a cock-eyed DIY maelstrom of wonky mongoloid geekery without any of the novelty-act cutesiness which usually afflicts such stuff.
During the first song Fergus gets so worked up he knocks his Korg off its stand, more adolescent clumsy-clot lack of spatial awareness than punk rock frenzy.
On one song Emily reclines on the floor in front of her kit to play a second keyboard. It’s the only seat she gets all night.
On another, she finishes by reading from a paperback.
‘Get On Your Knees And Colour Me In’
The best bag of under-age noisenik racket this side of The Prats. One day they will rule the world.
Futuristic Retro Champions
6 piece; 3 boys; 3 girls. Singer Sita in prom night frock and blonde bob; trumpeter in vest and too-tight yellow kecks; female bassist who knows all the words but doesn’t have a mic; teeny gal keyboardist; geeky boy on synths n shouting; gangly guitarist Harry.
This is the place where beehive Britgirl chicken-in-a-basket bubblegum meets wonky, shouty, electro-saccharine. Sita’s classic little belter of a dance-hall voice counterpoints the adolescent roooaaarrr, anchoring the toybox of disparate parts lest they collapse in a heap.
Jenna is the bestest girly best-friends dance-floor anthem ever, and is perfect for end of term discos and art school hops. Hi! is puredeadBearsuitbytheway, bursting with Misty’s Big Adventure style backing vox.
Behind the good-time daftness, mind, especially on the Harry-vocalled Speak To Me, there’s an occasional dark-hearted love-lorn melancholy.
Even so, rarely has such such bippety-boppety onstage joie de vivre been witnessed since Girls At Our Best similarly OD’d on Space Dust and pushed everything to the max.
ends
Um, I would like to credit this to The List, January 2008, but I suspect no-one asked for it, nor was it probably ever offered. Largely I suspect because it was written when I got home drunk and under some boozy delusaion that I was writing for a fanzine circa 1986. I quite like it, though.
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