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Well...they're playing late night free gigs at the Barbican, and they are Menlo Park.
They were absolutely unbelievably fantastic. And pretty indescribable. Sort of cajun country pub-rock punk gothic opera ish?!? One of the descriptions that occurred to me last night was steampunk, which is a literary genre rather than a musical one, but is very fitting. (Victorian sci-fi a la Verne and Wells)
I think the thought was inspired by Chris Taylor's frock-coat maybe. And what a frontman. Charisma, humour, energy....*sigh.*
Trust me, you've seen nothing until you've seen someone wearing a suit of fairy lights. Which they then have to strip out of at the end of the gig because the cables have become so tangled! And Chris's expression when he realised that his bottle of water may not mix too well with all that electricity was priceless.
Everyone should listen to some Menlo Park. Their lyrics are totally wonderful - in a darkly humorous and perverse way. "Well I'm heading up to San Quentin, to be somebody's bitch. We'll be cell mates, we'll be soul mates, you can hold me while I retch.""I'm a pig for the pain, there's a problem with my brain" But the live 'experience' beats hell out of anything.
We went to the aftershow in Hoxton, which was full of cool Hoxtonites drinking absinthe. And we kept having 'movie feelings' - in the Barbican James pointed out that everyone looked like extras hamming up the part, and then in Hoxton everyone was just so ultra-cool that we again had the feeling of being in a movie. They were playing bizarre stuff like Cilla Black and late 70's disco: James decided we were in an Eighties movie, but I thought we were an Eighties movie about the Sixties.
And alarmingly, the guru appears to be an expert at leap-frogs.
They were absolutely unbelievably fantastic. And pretty indescribable. Sort of cajun country pub-rock punk gothic opera ish?!? One of the descriptions that occurred to me last night was steampunk, which is a literary genre rather than a musical one, but is very fitting. (Victorian sci-fi a la Verne and Wells)
I think the thought was inspired by Chris Taylor's frock-coat maybe. And what a frontman. Charisma, humour, energy....*sigh.*
Trust me, you've seen nothing until you've seen someone wearing a suit of fairy lights. Which they then have to strip out of at the end of the gig because the cables have become so tangled! And Chris's expression when he realised that his bottle of water may not mix too well with all that electricity was priceless.
Everyone should listen to some Menlo Park. Their lyrics are totally wonderful - in a darkly humorous and perverse way. "Well I'm heading up to San Quentin, to be somebody's bitch. We'll be cell mates, we'll be soul mates, you can hold me while I retch.""I'm a pig for the pain, there's a problem with my brain" But the live 'experience' beats hell out of anything.
We went to the aftershow in Hoxton, which was full of cool Hoxtonites drinking absinthe. And we kept having 'movie feelings' - in the Barbican James pointed out that everyone looked like extras hamming up the part, and then in Hoxton everyone was just so ultra-cool that we again had the feeling of being in a movie. They were playing bizarre stuff like Cilla Black and late 70's disco: James decided we were in an Eighties movie, but I thought we were an Eighties movie about the Sixties.
And alarmingly, the guru appears to be an expert at leap-frogs.
