dea Lesson No.1: April 2013

Tuesday, April 30

CUCKOO DOESN’T GET TOUGHER THAN THIS




There are quite a few decent looking gigs happening in Cardiff on Friday 3 May, so we (that’s Lesson No.1, The Joy Collective and F.Y.B.) would be really honoured and junk if you came to see ours, in Undertone. It will be the heaviest of the lot without a doubt. (I did go and see Congo Natty, who are playing in Clwb Ifor on Friday, a few years ago and was deafened by AN A CAPELLA SECTION! But that is a club night, not a gig, and you can go to it after our gig finishes. I may even do so myself.)


HEY COLOSSUS the London-based headliners tonight, have been going a puzzlingly long time without playing in Cardiff – about ten years in fact. Now I think about it, their debut LP – ‘...Hates You’, released on the Jonson Family label in 2004 – arrived in my world, with its amazing side-long closing track ‘A Witch Is Born’, at nearly the exact time I started putting on gigs. It seems that I am neglectful and also suck! They did play in terrible Newport venue the Meze Lounge a few years back, as part of a month of free gigs, but I’m not sure many people went.


Anyway, over several albums and singles, some long out of print but mostly obtainable, this group have rarely put a foot wrong, their music lifting liberally from doom/sludge metal, 90s noiserock, Krautrock, psychedelia and drone to name but a few. They make no apologies for enjoying ‘a joke’, with record titles including ‘Eurogrumble’ and ‘Witchfinder General Hospital’, but this should never imply that they take the business of melting minds anything but MEGA-seriously. Their new one calls itself ‘Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo’ and it can be burly (‘Hot Grave’) and intricately, metronomically Germanic (‘How To Tell Time With Jesus’). I think there are six people in the band at present and, excitingly for me at least, their latest drummer is Tim Cedar, who used to be in Part Chimp and Ligament, and who takes his name from the tree trunks he uses instead of puny sticks.


HOGSLAYER feature members of two bands we have put on in the past: Shaped By Fate and Zonderhoof. SBF’s chaotic good-end-of-metalcore aggro, and ZH’s technically-inclined sludge edifices, are both represented in Hogslayer’s music: Paul, the former band’s ex-vocalist, is a right old injection of personality. When I saw the band the other week Paul had to run the gruesome gauntlet of two pissed men dressed as ‘comedy Mexicans’, from what I assume was a stag party, who kept dropping their trousers in front of the band. This was handled, so to speak, with admirable patience. I do hope they don’t come back.


Every time I’ve written a little blurb for THE DEATH OF HER MONEY in the last couple of years it’s mentioned how they have new songs from an upcoming third album, ones which will have the intensity and heaviness of the old ones, but in a different and more subtle way. Now, though, they’ve actually recorded it!! So they just need to do all the other stuff you do to an album before it’s released. Anyway, if you’ve caught the band supporting BEAK> and Hark in the last few months, you should expect shoegazey shenanigans and clean singing and that, also that it will be high quality gear. This gig will also be a kind of preview of their late May tour with the mighty ÅRABROT, which comes to Cardiff on Wed 29 May – check it.


Doors 8pm, should be done by 11, only a scrotally wrinkled fiver payable on the door. The poster was done by the horrendously talented Gareth from Homoh, aka THE DEAD HAND. See you at the stacks!