yesterday i went to see a friends' friends' band...nobody in our group really knew what they sounded like and what was to be expected. well, nobody would have expected
this.
the mentioned band was called
maria's radio, apparently a group of friends from school from a surburban area of berlin. this sounds cliche-ish, but they were in fact very good. one singer wore a chapeau clappe and long hair, looking like he just jumped out of one of the latest
replay commercials, the other one wore a furry coat, appearing to be a bit more rebellious. the bass player was a cute, very small girl and the second guitar player the afforementioned friends' friend. (i didn't see the drummer). their music had a kind of psychedelic sixties appeal, they even had long blues-ish guitar parts. definitely a band with the potential to release a record!
it's sad the bad things have to be the highlight of this blog, but i just have to write about the band that preceded
maria's radio:
robotron were suggested as support act by the guitarist of
maria's radio, so i was told, and wondering about what had gotten into him was just one of the many things we wondered about last night.
robotron had two people on stage, a guitar player in normal jeans and t-shirt, with the usual indie kid hair-do and, most importantly, a sane behaviour.
his counterpart on vocals was the exact opposite. this guy wore a brown mechanic's overall, a green scarf and bicycle helmet, and extremly big sunglasses. nothing wrong with that, people in recent tv reports about the latest band from nyc look exactly the same. neither did the fact that he took off the helmet to reveal a mullet with shaved parts in it shock me, not at all the fact that under his overall he wore a dirty old singlet with
robotron written on it, plus fishnet stockings with an extremely short glittering mini skirt. i actually do respect that, having the guts to perform like this, in a small bar in front of very few people who were all square in the "we-are-fucking-cool"-way of thinking.
the thing that bothered me, and seemingly everybody else, was that their music was just so bad! every song consisted of guitar sounds, which, would they have been played with a "band", would actually have shown talent. but here we had those guitar sounds alone, without any consistency or change in rhythm, very sporadically accompanied by one or two hits on an electronical drum device (the singer, apparently, had no sense of rhythm). he started his performance with screaming loudly: "aaaaaah". and it was not like he tried to make this fit the melody or rhythm of the music, he simply, monotonously screamed. lyrics, when there were any, were impossible to understand. but i do recall they did a cover version of
the kinks' you really got me.
a clever idea it was, actually, to offer figs to make the audience come closer to the stage, but how stupid it was to throw it at them later.
the whole show lasted about 45 minutes and i can't tell how many song they played, because each and every single on of them really sounded exactly the same.
robotron and
maria's radio were like different poles last night and it actually is a shame that the second band was very good, but the first one will be subject of a story i can tell for the rest of my life.
