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The organisers have decided to call tonight's event "Mistake Show Vol.6" and opening act Elevation seem to have taken the title rather literally. They're still great, and Kyoko Koide still has one of the most musical screams out there but they are also barely able to complete a single song without something falling out of synchronisation. It's a below average show by their standards, but fortunately, for a band as good as Elevation, a below average show is still something to celebrate.
犬まがい are a less sophisticated but more vigorously bass-propelled take on the punk-noise blueprint. There's no guitar so they build everything from the rumble and thunder of the bass and drums, with the vocals forming the final part of the music's overall symphony of roars and thunderclaps. It's as repetitive as hell, but there's also a quite beautiful kind of innocence and simplicity in what they do and a chemistry visible on stage that keeps your eyes riveted regardless.
Accidents In Too Large Field are a badly dressed but otherwise decent rhythm distortion noise type thing with a crazy singing drummer and guitar strings that break like blades of grass beneath the lawnmower of Satoru Azakami's violent axemanship. There are a lot of bands like this around but they're never less than interesting and as an example of their genre they're hard to fault.
I don't know what genre Idea Of A Joke think they are but on the evidence of tonight's performance they are definitely a pop band of the highest order. How many hours a day vocalist Atsushi Morikawa spends practicing playing with his mic stand in front of a mirror I don't know but it's not enough to stop him dropping it a couple of times. Bassist Jun Taniguchi never stops smiling for even one moment and guitarist Yoshiyuki Yasumoto jumps around the stage like a lunatic in shorts. Cool it ain't, but fun is most definitely is. And the music? Pop pop, pop, it goes, like a revolver at a South American presidential inauguration. While it carries many of the surface trappings of punk and post-punk, at the heart of all these songs is a very conservative adherence to 60s garage chord sequences. Sneer if you must but this is a band who need to be massive and on the evidence of tonight, are well on their way.
Deracine are not a pop band, but they are still brilliant. Like 犬まがい there's no guitar, but the physical blam! blam! blam! of the bass and drums is balanced by a synthesiser wired up to a maze of effects switches. All the songs are about 30 seconds long and are as focussed, wired and totally fat free as music has any right to be. There are a whole load of people dancing, but there's also a sharp sense of humour running through a lot of their music that gives it a cerebral edge and a sense of three-dimensional completeness that other bands tonight lack. - Ian Martin, Feb.22.05.
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