Gigs are boring aren’t they? Middle aged blokes with backpacks on throwing their arms around and singing all the words to the b-sides planted squarely in the middle of a throng of disaffected teens who aren’t sure whether to look like disaffected teens or really let loose and throw their bap and go nuts.
Such is the world we find ourselves in where everyone is too jaded to have a real good time before bands who aren’t sure if they’re supposed to be aloof or act like they’re your best friend on twitter.
Mercifully, most of that went out of the window last night when Mazes and Sub Pop’s Dum Dum Girls took to the stage in Manchester last night, providing, somewhat surprisingly, one of the most fun gigs of 2011.
The first band on-stage were Milk Maid who were brilliantly lousy. The band clung to the backbeat with all the verve and panache of a drunk clutching at a rug so they don’t fall off the face of the Earth. Their songs were impressively dumb, cooing lines like “she was an American girl!” and “I don’t know what went wrong” like they were the first people to conjure the listless love song.
And while this all may seem like a cuss, it really isn’t. If this band ever get good at what they do and, indeed, ever stop their one-finger playing, then they’ll lose entirely that brilliant charm of a garage band showing off their amateurish enthusiasm for making a marvellously pathetic racket.
Milk Maid bowed out, making way for Mazes who have a new LP out which is causing something of a stir to those that own ears and a sense of good times.
The band seem to have married something between Lindsay Buckingham’s ‘Holiday Road’, The Undertones at their most pop and the slacker agit-noise of Sonic Youth. Tracks like ‘Cenataph’, ‘Surf & Turf’ and ‘Bowie Knives’ stripped a layer of skin from inside the ear, while somehow managing to retain a catchier than cowpox brand of classic pop. While the American influence is clear, the British take on it seems to have almost invented a new genre of Bedsit Glam. Just what the doctor ordered.
The gangly fourpiece sloped away from the stage, grateful and warmly-received (leaving some to mutter ‘this feels like one of those gigs were you can say ‘I was there’ when they get really famous’) to pave the way for the frankly astonishing Dum Dum Girls.
The Dum Dums took to the barely-lit stage, dressed entirely in black with notable excellent choice in hosiery. And while most male critics find it impossible to comment on an all-girl group without passing judgement on their looks, this time ’round we’re… oh, who are we kidding? These ladies of the dead were smokin’ hot! Seriously. Like death pin-ups, they channelled the camp ghoulishness of Vampira and the purring lust of Catwoman and left the entire audience on the cusp of becoming dribbling creeps, already prepped to pen disturbing love-letters in their own blood.
All the while, the Dum Dums just stood there, monolith still, assaulting the room with a marriage of reverb and fuzz. Imagine the DIY Wall Of Sound of the Jesus And Mary Chain careering headlong into the terse, wiry snot-garage of The Cramps and you’re somewhere close to the astonishing racket served up and volleyed toward a crowd fast-becoming the worst kind of perverts you’re ever likely to see.
And amongst all this record-collector prick approved stuff, you find the rich harmonious pop of the Shangri-Las and C86 indie.
Behind those impenetrable glares, The Dum Dum Girls might just be the best pop-group in the universe, if pop went on a road trip in the dead of night with a trunk full of mascara and opiates.
And here endeth the latest, pathetic love-letter to The Dum Dum Girls.
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