alt title: Put down the jugs and back away slowly

I guess I'll run out of stuff to say about the music pretty quickly since I have a habit of sticking to the same bands over and over, but hey, it's my blog & I'll write what I want to. Mainly I'd just like to try keeping track of the gigs I attend, in case I'm unjustly arrested for some hideous crime and need to provide an alibi.

Firstly, it's weird being in a packed bar watching a band with which I'm very familiar, but looking around and recognising not a soul. However, I was still in the Good Christchurch, and my hosts (Fran and Chris) provided some great entertainment. I'm not clear how the Good Christchurch delivered up the big (very blokey) bloke two rows from the front who bounced enthusiastically through the whole of the Brunettes' set, regularly shouting, and waving a couple of jugs over the heads of the (fortunately) much smaller girls in front. Apparently he was up from Dunedin, where I he'd possibly been to a gig the previous night as well. What a trouper.

I like the Brunettes live WAY more than recorded, and I also like their new stuff better than their old stuff. All the cute & perky shalalas (and seriously, there's a LOT of shalalaing going on) start grating if I let them, but their catalogue is now more diverse, and a touch subversive, which I LOVE. They are still all very cute. And perky. They're also one of very very few bands that can juggle instruments like crazy without having any major sound trouble.

For some reason Teenwolf are a band that looks great but I'd expect to be really crap - chubby bass player/singer, & a keyboardist that look likes she (literally) fell out of the B52's, BUT they are NOT CRAP AT ALL! In fact, they are VERY VERY AWESOME! I can't even really distinguish between songs, or even remember any distinguishing features aside from really catchy thunka thunka beats, tinny keyboard plinking that sounds like it could disintegrate at any minute and shouty nursery-rhyme singing. Also, Chelsea screamed quite a bit, with a look on her face like a slightly stunned pornstar. No, seriously, these guys are awesome. I don't know how they get away with it but they do.

I've never heard of Black Market Art, was expecting them to be bland screechy guitar-rock, but they're not. Folksy indie pop stuff that seems to be a weird mash of all sorts of different stuff - like, I keep going to say they're like split enz or the clean, or bressa creeting cake, but then the music changes & it's totally Not Like That At All, to the extent that probably anyone to which I made such a suggestion would look at me very strangely (granted, wouldn't be the first time). Their set was great, although at that point I didn't think the music would be my cuppa tea outside a live gig - however, I've just spent the last 15 minutes listening to the stuff on their myspace page, and they've really grown on me. They're really good and deserve to get lots of attention, k? Buy a t-shirt.

Actually, I was staggered by the number of bands my hosts mentioned regularly - by the sound of it there's this massive group of bands that are doing really well in Christchurch, but that I've never heard of. I don't wish to make any judgement call about PR, f'cking Aucklanders, or the nature of local communities and bands' aspirations, but I shall definitely be making more of an effort to find out about bands beyond flyers plastered down K Road.

On a final note, for the encore (which, thank god, involved them saying "that's the end of our set but instead of walking off and back on, we're just going to do the encore"), the Brunettes were joined by Teenwolf for a shambolic rendition of Born To Run that made me a little sorry that I hadn't paid any attention to the song when I first heard it, whenever that was.

The Brunettes, with Teenwolf and Black Market Art
Jetset Lounge
May 26, 2007.

Earworms: B.A.B.Y, Harry rhyming the band members' names during the intro to Holding Hands Feeding Ducks
Rating: One band, one sax, one trumpet, one clarinet, one glockenspeil, a rapper, a whistler, and giant handwaving guy two rows from the front.