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Igbeth Aturday - The Social Graphs

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Here’s what we saw and did at Gigbeth on Saturday. Here’s just a review of the gigs, we’ll collect a more overall review for tomorrow probably.

Starting to struggle after two solid days, and wanting to see some of the late stuff, we skipped a planned visit to the world of Mr Derry (4pm, what bands play at 4pm?)- and headed straight to catch Shady Bard at the Sanctuary at 8pm. We got there, paid £3.60(!) for a can of Red Stripe, to find Misty’s Big Adventure on stage - who weren’t meant to be on until 8.50.

They weren’t really their exuberant selves, possibly knackered with all the work around the new album, but had drawn by far the biggest crowd we’d yet seen. They revealed hitherto unnoticed (at least to me) shades of Belle and Sebastian, and “The Wising Up song” is sounding extremely like “I Have Confidence in Confidence” from The Sound of Music. Grandmaster Gareth would make a fine Maria next time you are making a reality TV show. They are summed up thus:

With the gig finishing early we decided to catch a touch of Aimee Strange who were in the Dragon Bar, they were slick but uninteresting EMO pop, but were the first band of the festival to put a foot on the monitors to facilitate rocking out. Smart. Nizlopi were making mouth noises at the Moseley Folk stage, so we headed straight for the Rainbow.

The venue was packed, the first time there’d been anything like that at Gigbeth this year, and we only saw the end of Cutting Pink With Knives - enough to see that I’d like to see more tho’. Capsule have pulled together another storming line-up - The Plight (hairy sweary from Leeds) show everyone else how it’s done in the foot-up-on-monitor stakes. The bass player almost sinks into his when he decides one foot isn’t rock enough. The Plight in graph form:

The Plight rocked, but everyone is blown away by the sheer power and charisma of Beestung Lips (above) - they have a curl-haired chipmonk rock-god, they have the sound and the screaming, they have adequate amounts of cowbell. I’d heard good things before, but they are close to jumping to the head of any queue there might be for the title of mynewfavouriteband. They deserve a pie-chart:

Antelope are from Washington, they are seemingly unable to decide who sings or who plays what, they take a while to warm up, but they are angular and tunefully discordant. The crowd want more, but they’ve already put their jackets back on. We liked them, so we explain them in graphical form:

More Gigbeth musings later I’m sure. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:33 pm by bounder and is filed under Birmingham, Digbeth, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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