Went to see The Butterfly Explosion and God is an Astronaut last night.

Butterfly explosion were good. Sounded a lot like Alcest with plenty post-rock elements in there as well. I'll probably check out their album when it's released in January for the sake of it. They were enjoyable last night anyway. Nice mix of slow and fast stuff, of which the more up-tempo songs were the best. Their drummer was insane. I was impressed anyway.

God is an Astronaut were absolutely out of this world. I've seen them a few times over the last year, and they've never disappointed, but last night was just something else. Their monstrous live.

Setlist had (not in exact order):
The End of the Beginning
Shadows
Elysian Fields
Echoes
From Dust to the Beyond
Fragile
Forever Lost
Zodiac
Radau
All is Violent, All is Bright
Post Mortem
Snowfall
A Deafening Distance
Suicide By Star
Beyond the Dying Light
No Return

Highlights for me were End of the Beginning, Fragile, Zodiac and Suicide By Star. They stretched out the crescendo of Suicide By Star, ended up just being this long epic wall of sound. It was just like heavy waves thwacking you in the face over and over again, and coupled with the mental clusterfuck imagery on the projector it was just fucking spectacular. Best gig evar.

On Monday I saw Skindred at the Oxford O2 Academy. It was fit.

On Tuesday I saw esOterica at th Kings Cross Water Rats. It was also fit. Bit too short though.

And today I just saw my chums band Ted Maul at the London Borderline, with support from a surprisingly good band called The Defiled. Kinda for fans of AHC and Spineshank. Aside from the smelly moshers (Ted fans appear to ignore the existance of lynx) and one of them nearly knocking my tiny chum flying (I saved her cause I'm awesome) because he tried to take the pit up the stairs...good gig.

Saw Little Dragon, Karl Bartos and The Orb last weekend (in the interesting place, being old vodka factory hurr).

Little Dragon is Swedish live electronica (can't be bothered to check what exact genre it was) act with Swedish-Chinese vocalist girl and healthy amount of Chinese sounding bits. Quite nice stuff on bass, drums and ton of keyboards (played by the guy with totally epic santa-style beard). Not bad.

Since Karl Bartos is one of Kraftwerk dudes - about half of the set consisted Kraftwerk classics, and other half made of his own stuff sounded distinctly Kraftwerk-ish. So it was sort of paleo-futuristic event. And it was surprisingly cool and sounded fantastic, in its sequenced and vocodered glory. Very cool and stylish visualisations as well (often being old Kraftwerk vids slightly updated to the contemporary times).

The Orb, well, I expected it to be the highlight of the night - sadly, it was shit. Halfassed DJ set, mostly made of detroity sounding, dumb techno, not much of their trademark put-delay-on-radio-samples dub awesomeness. And even old classics (Little Fluffy Clouds, Towers of Dub and that one with insanely long title I never remember) sounded underwhelming. Boo.

Two impressions after that:

1. I'm hating people smoking cigs in the crowd more and more. ABSOLUTE INCONSIDERATE DICKS.
2. People playing music by clicking their mouse, fiddling two knobs and looking at their laptops look a bit like tits. Seriously, get some keyboards and try to look like you're doing something, it isn't hard. I mean I know it sounds that way because it's machine music but it would be cool to see stuff being bit more _live_.

Porcupine Tree and Katatonia

Katatonia were the warmup for PT, I've only heard a few songs from The Great Cold Distance, in my opinion they were quite uberboring, but hey, what do I know.

Up until the concert started I'd had low expectations for the concert as I was expecting boring slowy melancholicness all the time. But I was so so wrong. Steven owned the stage, his guitar/amp was uberloud and right in my face (I was directly in front of him), and he rocked the fuck out. It was fantastic, the most awesome part of the concert for me was Anesthetize. It was quite awesome with a relatively calm and long set as well, as I've only really been to 90% heavy concerts before. Can't wait till next time.

Setlist:
The Incident

Start of Something Beautiful
Russia on Ice (shorter version)
Anesthetize (I came.)
Lazarus
Black Dahlia
Normal
Way out of Here (awesomeness)
The Sound of Muzak
Trains

Katatonia were the warmup for PT, I've only heard a few songs from The Great Cold Distance, in my opinion they were quite uberboring, but hey, what do I know.

No, you're right they're uberboring.

Eyehategod. Amazing, super cool guys, total originals. Got to hang out with them backstage afterward, the singer thought i was his drug dealer and the bassist recognized me from a show in New Orleans two months ago.

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Eagles of Death Metal.

That guy is nuts. He's such a loser, but in such an awesome way that he's great.

Necrodeath. Apparently these guys are somewhat big in Italy, but they played a tiny club in Helsinki, I'd estimate the attendance at about 50... I wasn't familiar with them before, but damn, that was some awesome old-school metal!

I should buy some of their cd's, anybody know which one to start from?

Riverside. Pretty good, technical difficulties messed up their entrance but the gig was decent. They played all of ADHD (which was awesome) but I had the impression that the older stuff they played didn't do much for them, they look kind of bored.

NoMeansNo two nights in a row just a few weeks ago.

Verdict: fucking awesome

[swervedriver]

Aucun: some Italian instrumental post-metal electronica threesome. Reminded me of Russian Circles to some extent, but they're relying a little too much on their fancy keyboard sounds and over-the-top guitar effects for my tastes. Not bad though.

Il Teatro Degli Orrori (translated: the theater of horrors): I don't know, I think their genre is Italian experimental avant-garde post-punk fusion ( ). I don't like the vocals which consist of 80% a-tonal Italian blabbering and 20% actual singing. The music isn't that bad, but by the end of the concert I had figured it out. They write normal punk songs, REPLACE silent pauses at random intervals and at some point throw in a riff in a different time signature. Trying too hard to be different I guess, and somewhat failing at being good-different.


edit- Next week Riverside is playing in Milan. Entry fee 10 euros... so I think I'll give them a whirl.

Arch Enemy.
They were absolutely AMAZING LIVE, Played every song note for not on time tight as all hell. Multiple guitar harmonies to backing effects (explosions and such) Drum solo aswell.
They played as if they were recording for a live show it was that good.

[swervedriver]

Riverside

I went in knowing only one song really (The Same River) and the Lunatic Soul thing from Mariusz, but holy crap was I blown away! The place wasn't full (maybe 100 people there) but they managed to create a really cool atmosphere. Progressive music isn't big in Italy, I think I was among the (relatively few) younger people in the crowd as well. Riverside played very tight, about a 2-hour set including The Same River (lol, lucky me) and their latest album Anno Domini High Definition in its entirety. I was very impressed and definitely turned me into a fan. If I hadn't spent 25 euros on a Lunatic Soul longsleeve and didn't have to pay toll for the road back home I would've picked up an album right there.

Two bad things though: they didn't have an opening act for this gig, so some girl (I think one of the bar-girls) played a few songs by herself; laptop with music and she'd be singing/playing keys or violin. Her singing was very nasal and pretty bad; uninteresting vocal melodies, and when she shut up to play violin (an instrumental song, apparently) I wished she'd be singing. Her pronunciation was also very bad: I suppose a common theme in her songs was love, but she kept singing about her 'fillings'. Fortunately she buggered off after about 20 minutes. Another bad thing was the venue, being a club. 6 euros for a beer, damn.

But all that aside, Riverside were near perfect, well-worth the 10 euro entry fee (lol). No regrets at all.

Oceansize, for like the 6th time. They played quite alright... Forgot to do some of my favourites but we got some songs that might end up on the next album instead.

Breed 77 in Southampton just now, for the squillionth time, they played a song they haven't played for about 12 years, their singer cracked his head open getting a bit over excited on stage (but shrugged it off lmao) so I left him half a soothing Toblerone in the dressing room while he showers off the blood