Whale Rider, and some rock'n'roll
Well, for the first time since the Brunettes a few months back, the wife and I headed out with the express purpose of seeing some live music together. My mum was in town with her younger man, so with the younger generation tucked in, and in the elder generation ensconced in front of the telly, we headed off for one of our rare nights out.

We hit the films first, tossing up over whether to see Punch Drunk Love, or Whale Rider. The latter won. In fact, when we were talking about our last five movies we'd gone to see at the theatre (always a good one for the brain: can you remember the last five?), and we figured out that we'd seen more locally made films (Two Towers, Rain, Whale Rider) than foreign (The Hours -- good how I wish I'd skipped it, and, much much better, Bowling for Columbine).

So yes, enjoyed it. Not immensely, and I kept waiting for the tear-jerking moment (a la Rain) that people had alluded to here and there, but it never came. Interesting from the perspective that it somewhat fucks with traditional Maori gender politics (ie. a girl battling the male dominated system), and, really, there needs to be more of that sort of attitude in NZ.

Then off to the music: Rawer (say it, go on), Slavetrader and Xanadu at Indigo. The Shrugs were advertised on the poster, but the word was they'd broken up (later refuted over at nzmusic.com -- just lost their drummer apparently). Either way, we were pleased, as the first band, Rawer, were just kicking off their set as we walked in the door at 11pm. They played a 4 song noise set that played around with the whole HDU sonic assault aesthetic, which I wasn't really into on this particular evening, so the wife and I retreated to the comfy couches and caught up with a couple of NZMers (Blink & JJ). The wife discovered that JJ had turned 17 last week, and that -- horror! -- she was old enough to be his mother (technically). Something of an eye-opener.

Slavetrader came on and did their best Datsuns impersonation, which was at its best when the guitar player just let rip with his guitar playing. Other than that, they were mostly pretty crap.

And Xanadu, who I'd been all psyched up to see for ages, came on at 1am, and then promptly blew their synth amp up 10 seconds into their first song. It took about 15 minutes to sort that out (during which we got a rendition of Devo's mongoloid, performed by some random female punter from the crowd who just grabbed the mic and launched into it unaccompanied -- the bassist and drummer joined in, and, for me, it was nearly the high point of the night), and after an the interminable fucking about with leads and amps, they gave up the synth idea, and launched into their guitar set. Which was good (tight, punchy, nice riffs), but nothing outrageously special. I bought the EP though, so maybe some listening of that will give me a bit more insight into their sound. They may well have resurrected the synth later in the set, but we were too knackered to find out, and bailed out at about 1.45am.

# |

blog main page