The Old Blue Last Hit by Furious Punk Noise
4 stars
I hiked up to Shoreditch last week to catch one of my favourite bands at the moment, Girls in Synthesis, as they played one of the ‘Fifty Fest’ shows to promote the new music on the bill for Brighton’s The Great Escape Festival.
Before GiS came The Cool Greenhouse, who offered up low-key Talking Heads-esque tunes, complete with synthy sounds. While the band played tightly together, their music seemed to need maturing, but you could easily tell they were looking at the start of something good, just needing a few more years maturing before that emerges.
Having seen GiS once before I set the bar extremely high for what I expected - mainly furious political messages set to absolute uproar. GiS managed to blow all assumptions of what I was going to see out the water. As their set started bassist John Linger asked to have the lights off, plunging us into semi-darkness with a spotlight throwing up Linger and guitarist Jim Cubitt’s shadows across the stage. They didn’t stay there for long though and soon were both in the audience accompanied by their mics as drummer Nicole Pinto provided a heavy beat to the chaos.
‘Tainted’, the band’s take on Trump, set off the band and crowd alike into a frenzy, pumping pure angry punk energy through the room, irresistible to ignore. It was refreshing to see a band not glued to their mics, or the stage even, and who were very happy to relinquish control of both in a set that was victorious in assaulting as many senses as possible. Linger managed to fight back onto the stage in time for ‘Howling’, a fuzzy, swooning interlude in the set, before jumping back into their new song ‘Arterial Movements’. For GiS classics ‘The Mound and ‘We Might Not Make Tomorrow’, the audience swarmed over the band, casting them aside from their mics and leaving them struggling to play their own songs.
Overall it was explosive, abrasive, aggressive and any other –ive adjectives you can think of. After their set I stayed to recover before the tube home, and managed to catch Do Nothing, a funky, punky band hailing from Nottingham. Frontman Chris Bailey seemed to take the lead here, often distracting us from the actual music, which wasn’t dissimilar again from Talking Heads mixed this time with LCD Soundsystem. Bailey seemed to put on an act which came across as a deadbeat, obnoxious salesman, certainly an interesting stage persona for any band. Do Nothing’s bops weren’t terrible, but after the attack from GiS they just didn’t quite sound as good as they should have.
