GiggingNI.com
Animal Disco
With Not Squares; A Plastic Rose;
As club nights go, Animal Disco has been one of the most intriguing of recent years. Saturday was the 1st birthday of the Disco and suffice to say it was as quirky as was to be expected. There were vinyl stalls, glorious buns for sale and some fine, fine music. With seven bands on display Gigging NI have decided to select the highlights of the fun packed night.
Yes Cadets brought their uptempo electro rock stylings to the Spring & Airbrake with a typically energetic performance. The high pitched vocals of Alan Haslam may not be everyone's cup of tea (and can be a little too Panama Kingsesque at times) but if you can get over that hill, there are treats to be had. "Charm Offensive" is one of the best tracks I've heard in a while, with a sugary coating that cannot fail to put a smile on your face. Slower tracks may not be the forte of Yes Cadets but they pull them off with aplomb. There were gems within the set : now the only thing is to keep the quality of a performance consistently high. A good show indeed.
Funeral Suits are the lovechildren of The Stills and Phoenix. Interested? You should be. It wasn't a perfect performance from the Dublin band but it was certainly something different. With an emphasis on synths and funky rhythms it's a good sound that distracts from the instrument swapping and fashion disasters occurring on stage. "Stars and Spaceships" embodied this sound perfectly: the vocals were rather mumbled but from time to time it sounded pretty damn good. The band took risks musically which occasionally fell flat on their face but most of the time worked. However the most bizarre moment of the night happened in the last song of the set, with Michael singing like a cat. Unexpected is quite an understatement.
Most local scenesters must have felt a few tears welling up as A Plastic Rose have become Radio 1 darlings. They grow up so fast, bless, one night they're playing in a dingy bar and the next they're playing in Leeds and Reading. As per usual it was a solid performance from the lads: the one reservation I had was that Ian's vocals were lost in the mix in my (not very knowledgeable) opinion. For a band that revolves around the twin vocal assault of Messrs Norman and McHugh it puts a dampener on things. Aside from that things were on track: the guitars were surprisingly tight and Troy on bass seems to be more confident than ever. New material such as "Two Step" sounds pretty promising but the track of the set hands down had to be "Kids Don't Behave Like This", a song that musically explodes after a tentative build up on stage as well as showing off the frontman skills of Gerry Norman, encouraging the crowd to clap along.
Not Squares have been hyped and hyped over the past few months, but their performance at the Animal Disco was simply magical. Combining the best bits of LCD Soundsystem and Krafkwerk into a package that features more cowbell than you can shake a tambourine at the band have everybody dancing, from the diehards on the dancefloor to the tired guys in the seats. The drumming, for want of a better word, was quite simply epic. It was so energetic and lively that you couldn't help but take note. Keyboard riffs that bounce all over the place and effects laden vocals complete a sound that's a sure fire hit. "Yeah" seems to be one of those tracks that everybody knows these days (just like Oppenheimer's "Breakfast In New York" a year or so ago) so when it was finally played, the audience get even more excited. An experience to behold, more than a performance.
