Ok, so I arrived to the gig late* and missed local boys, Runt Hornet, who by all accounts performed a fantastic set and wowed more than a few people their with a homemade one-string bass guitar, constructed from a drain pipe! Up next, and where I came in, was The Psychic Paramount - three guys from New York.
Now normally at this point you would expect me to compare a three piece rock band to Motorhead, Nirvana or perhaps even Greenday** But this was different. Very different. Walking into the Brickyard's concert area was like walking into a wall of solid sound. The force of the rhythm, the intensity of the blanga beat just drove the sound into your body. But it wasn't just noise. There was a rhythmic, near disco vibe to parts of the set that had your feet tapping and your head shaking. The music was trance like, hypnotic even. For me there was echoes of Hawkwind at the height of their Space Ritual period; but instead of a troupe of musicians, poets and naked dancers, there were just three guys, taking a whole building to a different galaxy. To quote one of the audience after Psychic Paramount had finished their set, "It was like a musical kick in the n**ts!". From New York go east We now move halfway across the world to a different continent and culture and meet World's End Girlfriend. The creation of Katsuhiko Maeda a self taught musician from Japan. On stage there's no band, no singers, just Katsuhiko hidden behind two Powerbooks with his guitar connected to an audio processor and thence to the computers and it's from this unlikely and lonely figure that a whole orchestra of sound erupts. The music World's End Girlfriend creates transports you to different time and place, this is a soundscape that has so many themes and ideas running through it that at times it's hard to grasp just what the music is doing, but always there's a feeling that is at once both comforting, familiar and at times dark and foreboding. The closest I could come to summing up the sound of World's End Girlfriend is it's like the best parts of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Variations, played all-at-once.
And like Psychic Paramount before this hypnotized the audience. How else could you explain a whole host of people sitting silent and still, staring at the backs of two Apple Powerbooks*** From solo to Mono If Psychic Paramount were loosely a space rock band and World's End Girlfriend was an orchestra then that must mean Mono are Dadaist collective living the post modern dream ... Well close(ish). They actually describe themselves as a 'post rock' band - Yeah; what ever ... Looking nothing too special**** as they stand on stage waiting to begin, they could almost be any modern four piece indie band found within the pages of NME, but that's where any similarity or indifference ends. Slowly building from quite ambience to thumping rock and back, Mono raised the bar of what one could and should expect from a modern rock band. With grand sweeping sounds that shouldn't be possible with the guitars and drums Mono have on stage; to howling feedback that's turned into musical thought, Mono take modern rock and ambient sounds by the scruff of the neck and tun them into some otaku-geek-boy who knows his place. This is hentai made music. This was different, this was good and the audience knew it too. This was an experience that had to be felt, it was more than your 'standard gig night', it was one of those rare nights when you know that something special has occurred - that you have seen the beginning of something that's very, very big ... * Caused by the very necessary distraction of having to ensure that a Nintedo DS would connect to a wireless network!
** Robbo's very small range of comparative rock clichés!
*** No it wasn't the latest Apple product launch!
**** Actually the sight of a four piece Japanese post rock band on any UK stage is always a special sight. | 
