MODERN COLOR, BUG BATH & OVERSIZE
Better - far better - than staying in to watch the football.
Norwich Arts Centre
It is a tough decision: stay at home and watch what promises to be a thoroughly uninspiring football match, likely to be lacking any entertainment value, or head down to the Arts Centre for three bands that will deliver different takes on shoegazey alt.rock? Actually, it is not a tough decision at all and so I am at NAC at 8PM for Salisbury’s OVERSIZE. It is their second visit to Norwich but it is the first time that I have witnessed the five-piece. The first thing that I notice is the disparate images: three of them could be refugees from an 80s thrash band, another has the ordinary-bloke-on-the-street shoegaze look, whilst the fifth is rocking the 2020s indie image. And that is kinda reflected in the music. Grungey, metallic, emotional, alternative rock. There is a clear debt to shoegaze but Sam McCauley’s excellent voice is both clearer and higher in the mix than that suggests and the band aren’t afraid to put on a show. To my mind, they have elements of the mighty mewithouYou and Oceansize about them – although the latter may just have been brought on by the similarity in names – whilst a friend suggests Quicksand and Rival Schools. Whatever, I very much like what I see and hear and will do my damnedest not to miss Oversize’s third visit to our fine city.
All the way from Reno, Nevada, BUG BATH’s biog mentions the likes of Archers of Loaf, Jimmy Eat World and Superdrag so it is fair to expect the sound to be based in American indie, alt.rock and emo. That biog also mentions southern/country-rockers Drive-By Truckers, a band I love but I can’t see how those influences will come together without creating a mess. Hah, well I got that dead wrong! On one song they manage to sound like the Truckers and Dead Kennedys jamming a latter-day Hawkwind song with J. Mascis laying down the solo and it is MAGNIFICENT. The rest of the set may not quite hit the same level but Bug Bath write decent songs and put on a show. My only real complaint is that they had no records or CDs on the merch stand.
Any band would have a tough job following that. LA’s MODERN COLOR make a good go of it. A raucous - and LOUD - start to the set, gives way to sharp, precise riffing, thunderous drums and, along with the other two bands tonight, rumbling and gorgeously dirty bass. Modern Color are harder, faster and heavier than either Bug Bath or Oversize but some of the subtlety in their recorded work is lost in the volume. They remind me a touch of the likes of Fugazi, Bitch Magnet - whose guitarist Jon Fine wrote the highly recommended memoir Your Band Sucks – What I Saw At Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) – or Jawbox.
All three bands tonight are thoroughly enjoyable. It is a shame that there aren’t more people in the Arts Centre to witness this anyone that chose to watch the footie instead made the wrong decision.
