Tubelord w/Blakish @ Café Saki, Manchester 31/08/08

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So, with Johnny Foreigner and Cats In Paris having now both gone on to deliver on their making-me-massively-excited-about-the-universe promise by releasing utterly fantastic albums, I need something fresh and new to gibber about. So luckily Tubelord have emerged into my field of consciousness to take their place as this country’s leading upcoming band. ADD noise-pop of the highest order, I think I’ve probably listened to the songs on their myspace so many times that their disparate sections have taken on an almost hallucinogenic interchangeability in my brain- or maybe its just that their frontman looks kind of like the younger version of the evil wizard you sometimes see in flashback sequences. Before he actually turned evil.

They’re playing this night at Café Saki in Manchester, for some guys called Carefully Planned who have like 6 bands on the bill and Tubelord are on at midnight, alongside Big Scary Monsters labelmates Blakfish, themselves routinely excellent. It’s pretty cool. Think I’m probably the only one in the room in cords though. Of the support bands, Liverpool’s FightFightFight, a band I otherwise know nothing about, are easily the highlight- they’re not Tubelord but they do a pretty similar thing, I guess… a very enjoyable and pretty appropriate support act, really- would see again. Much less appropriate are Drive Like Me, whose frontman I’m going to make the wild accusation of probably having bought his big trendy glasses sans prescription from Urban Outfitters and who kind of comes across as how I imagine Mick Hucknall to have when you hear stories about him playing in a punk band- all Sam Duckworth clap-your-hands-people-of-the-world earnestness. Good for a laugh though.

The bass drum reads ‘Tubelord VS. Blakfish’, but you kind of get the impression that if this ‘vs’ meant actual, physical violence then Blakfish would win if anything too easily. Brutish, loud, and uncouth, screaming between songs and getting distracted by the weird Swedish (or something) video show that’s for some reason on the TV screen somewhere to the side of the stage, the one of their frontmen is a mean pirate dwarf who I’d like to imagine spends most of his time drinking neat rum and smashing the bottles over old people and the other one is some self-destructive skinny-boy dynamo who if he wasn’t playing a gig would probably be body-slamming the middle of a motorway or something to see what happens. Meanwhile, their bassist is wearing a ‘Pirate Bay’ t-shirt. Which is nice- its very refreshing to see a musician who actually *supports* illegal downloading, you know?

Blakfish are raw, barely-tamed power, well… that’s probably a misleading statement, they still have songs- good songs too, but they’re songs gone a bit feral. There’s something somehow much more *mystic* about Tubelord. Kind of something magical to their songs… tonight they are plagued by technical problems throughout, as lead young evil magician guy’s guitar keeps failing, but compared to when I last saw them- in a relatively subdued Winchester- the energy is amazing. Yeah… this is actually one of the most *passionate* gigs I’ve ever been to in Manchester (not in a shit way, in a sort of passionately *fun* way, er…)… maybe I’ve just not been going to the right shows but I’m usually the lone idiot bouncing his head around. Tonight both crowd and band are spectacularly spazzed out on the sheer bliss of this brilliant pop-noise-buzz. Yehhh.