A weird bunch of shows today; a couple that I was really looking forward to didn’t quite live up to expectations… but one most certainly did meet expectations.
Far exceeded them, actually.
Vampillia were – to be quite frank – fucking amazing. Support band Fourteen Nights at Sea were brilliant – all hipster power chords and drones that carried me like a wave (their first post-introduction song saw the bass player play the same two notes for six minutes, in which I found great joy), but the Japanese “brutal orchestra” lived up to their name: superb strings, operatic vocals, and lashings of funk, punk, metal, grind, and guttural growls from a frontman who roamed through the audience regularly.
Amazing.
- Sweep Under Rug
- The Sounds of Silent
- Excavate
- Vampillia
- Ronny Chieng – You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About
The really weird part, though? A guy on the fence near me tapped me on the shoulder during Vampillia’s warm-up. “Do I know you?” he asked. I struggled, but couldn’t help him. Suddenly, he remembered: “Aren’t you that guy in the The City Messenger? The one who sees all those shows?”
So, yeah. There’s that.