How could incendiary magazine have lived with the knowledge that we’d have missed the sight of Swedish men rolling around on the floor, making jokes about Swedish bomb shelters..
How could incendiary magazine have lived with the knowledge that we’d have missed the sight of Swedish men rolling around on the floor, making jokes about Swedish bomb shelters..
Appie Kim, Chronic Heist, Sub 71 Leiden 23/05/07.
Sub 071 is a tiny venue (to all intents and purposes it’s a velvet-draped store room) situated in a communal living space somewhere in Leiden. Sounds fun, huh? However don’t let that put you off, because it looks like it’s going to play host to some cracking nights if the gig I’m about to describe to you is any indication of future events. Oh, I should point out too that you get a vegan meal and the beer is a euro a pop.
Onto the gig…
Once we shuffled inside the "performance space" we were confronted by a young man, "Laagrrluv" whose Errol Flynn-like appearance was compromised (in the opinion of some of our female companions) by his refusal to take his trousers out of his socks. His set comprised three atonal, repetitive rants which dealt with subjects like the unwholesomeness of city life. That these tracks – and the intense performance – held the key to some kind of personal catharsis on the singer’s behalf was made obvious to the audience, who got pretty wrapped up in the whole thing. In fact, whilst he was singing, we could just about forget the sock offence. Very interesting indeed.
Time for a break and some air (store rooms can get bloody stuffy I can tell you) before Appie Kim, (two-fifths of the late, great de Nieuwe Vrolijkheid) took the stage. We started with a poem, which was a touch surreal, but this somehow worked within the new sunnier atmosphere that the band is busy creating. Appie Kim’s music is a lot softer, very poppy and much less confrontational than dNV’s (though we did get a dNV song thrown in). Still, for those worried that this means there will be no "bite", rest assured that Appie Kim have created a set full of quite brilliant edgy pop awash with great hooks and riffs (Sail was particularly good), and no, you still wouldn’t want to get in a scrap with singer Natasha van Waardenburg. We had more poems, a change of instruments, soft laments and of course some thumping, life-affirming guitar pop. Watch out for this lot, they have all the potential to be brilliant.
At this point we thought about shooting off; store rooms can be very stuffy indeed and the night was warm… but hey, it just goes to show that sometimes it’s better to stick things out. How could Incendiary magazine have lived with the knowledge that we’d have missed the sight of Swedish men rolling around on the floor, making jokes about Swedish bomb shelters, of Swedish and Dutch Christian squats (the inadvisability of), of squirting water hidden in a microphone at the Swedish PM, and the idiocy of the Swedish media.
Chronic Heist, go and see them if you get the chance. A completely deranged (and I mean deranged) wedding band who sometimes sound like A Can of Bees-era Soft Boys, or a pop Trout Mask Beefheart. The bit where the singer decided it was better to sing utterly out of key at the top of his voice whilst hammering a keyboard was quite brilliant, though I can appreciate it might not sound like that. Oh and that’s not all. They have a song, Librarian, has the following lyrics."Hey, librarian, what’s new? Any modern obstacles to do? Any phones off hooks or dirty tricks? You’ve been charmed by a yoke that speaks your tongue The doll that squeals The roar of puppets The skein that talks to you…"
After that, I was dead meat. I also parted with my hard earned cash to buy some 7" singles of other Swedish underground bands, one of which, a band called Formogenhet have released a 33rpm 7" disc with 11 (yes, 11) songs, one of which (according to my new Swedish friends) is a "brilliant song about the singer’s personal war with pollen"
Later we managed to all the both bands to a slightly seedy bikers bar, where, to the surprise of the leather-clad regulars, an impromptu disco began involving as it did, Swedish pogo-ing, games of all pile on, and Megadeth. Ah the scenes in the pub… it is best described as an utterly silly but very suitable ending to a fabulous evening. However you can’t really trust me to have an objective viewpoint on this, now can you?
Words: Richard Foster
http://www.myspace.com/chronicheist
http://www.myspace.com/appiekim