Some bands sing like they want to be your friends. They dance skittishly around the floor, thump the tiles with their hands, exhort the handful still slumped at the back to please stand up and join the fun. They mix the heartfelt, the joyous and the lonely in equal measure, and make you feel so glad, so absurdly fortunate, to be outside in alternative society once more, in the company of people who want to be your friends.
This is the first time I have been to a gig on a Monday in over seven years.
This is my heartland. My favourite club in Brighton: secreted away in a row of semi-detached houses, the bartender pretending to be grumpy while actually ruling the entire universe, the Railway Club at Seven Dials, home to many a child’s birthday celebration and emotional unravelling. This is my heartland: music that clatters and entices and shrieks and mourns, music that does not even attempt to hide the pain shooting through the singer’s eyes, the smell of stale bedsheets, the awkward hunger for connection. Instruments switch between band members, of course they do. Of course they do.
Music that recalls the heyday of the Pacific Northwest – so yes, we are talking Steve Fisk and Tobi Vail and Nikki McClure and Al Larsen and Calvin Johnson, the cassette years of K Records, when scenes were hand-stitched together out of photocopied sleeves and desperate love. Heartland territory.
I so wish I had friends like Lime Crush it is almost painful to admit.
They are frantic, funny, frenetic: 14 beautiful brutal odes dispatched in barely half an hour. Songs that trip over themselves in excitement to exist at all. I have the setlist. I have the vinyl – despite the fact I NEVER buy new vinyl these days. (This turns out to be a lie the moment something matters enough.) They took a photograph with me. They made me feel wanted, special – although truthfully the music alone would have achieved that.
Their clattering melodic wrangled beauty alone would have achieved that.
Some bands sing like they want to be your friends because no one wants to die alone. We all die alone, but no one wants to. No one wants to feel sealed off from the world. Everyone wishes they were in a band like this at least once in their lives. Very few are.
I never have been, for I have always disliked rehearsing and struggle to socialise in any remotely conventional conversational manner. But still: Lime Crush are a little bit Kleenex, a little bit Pounding Serfs, a little bit Maximum Rock’n’Roll back when it realised the revolution was already happening without permission. Austria and Belgium and a special place in your heart. God, I wish they were my friends too.
Fuck yes, I danced.
I am so happy to see Minor Dents play again: so tuneful and ecstatic and utterly immersed in the splendour of discovering new sounds, new corridors, new repetitions. Drawn deep into the pull of Kosmische Musik – you could term it Krautrock I suppose, but that somehow ignores the motorik insistence of those driving rhythms, the elegant simplicity of the two-note melodies, the quiet magnificence of Al Strachan moving between keyboard and muted trumpet as though both were extensions of the same dream.
So happy.
And I am so happy to see Dubais – or perhaps Karl Marx, no one knows for sure – once more. Nadia, ultimate dancing queen of the enchanted floor: a tap dance here, a lived-in vocal there, preening and summoning and carrying all of us alongside her inch by inch on this impassioned voyage through wonder of possibility. No one is left out, no one is excluded.
God damn, I am lucky to be here, to be witnessing this.
And The Legend! even played – first time in over a year. A barked excerpt of Ed Sheeran Is Shit here, a fumbled note or two on Al’s keyboard there, a Modern Lovers song somehow folded lovingly into another Modern Lovers song. Ragged, alive.
Nights like this happen only a handful of times in a lifetime. So special. So magic.
Thank you.
