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| Thinker Org, Stress, Herv, The Jimmy Cake |
| The Temple, 21 September, 2000
What ever modicum of dignity Dublin’s palsied “scene” ever clung too is long gone. At least in the old days the venues were slightly more salubrious than the Temple pub, Dorset St. I know the Funnel bar was full of Trinity students who had just discover drugs, and the Da club was full of beard strokers, but at least they were clean(ish) and the regulars, if you will, were all anaemic little ponce boys who posed the same threat as a bunch of Flock Of Seagulls fans gatecrashing your Bar Mitzvah. Not so the Temple pub, were shifty eyed locals compare shell suits and moustaches and get twitchy at the proliferation of badly dressed, foul smelling punks. The promise of potential violence in the air was like manna to me, Hector. Perhaps in the middle of the melee, I thought, I could finally twat that O’Connell git and get away with it. Eh? Not wholly unreasonable. So Dublin’s one time “scene” is replaced by this? A place that looks like the gaf yer granny had her eightieth. And the music was such even a doddering, senile octogenarian would have stormed out with cries of BOLLOCKS. Still. As a critic it is my job to endure these nights, and endure I did. Thinker Org take the stage. Or rather they sit at a table. It takes about five minutes of screeching for people to realise that they’ve actually started their set and that they haven’t just broken the mixing desk by mistake. If Thinker Orgs music had a face, it would be John Merricks or Patsy Palmers. For two handsome bastards, they make some well ugly muzak. Still, I feel slightly sorry for them. They are trying so hard to be hated, to be reviled, to be the Beckham of the electronic world, and fail at it so miserably. The crowd of tweedy, skinny young men stroke their chins and nod to the patently NON EXSISTANT rhythm. People will always like Thinker Org because they’re “weird”. They’re not weird, they’re two malformed idiots trying to tune a radio. Don’t worry boys, I’ll hate you if you need it that badly. So after that we had an age old argument reinforced: Is punk dead? No cry the great unwashed. Yes I say. You can stand on stage making as much three chord noise as you want waving it’s rancid, flaccid corpse around ala Weekend At Bernies, but you don’t fool me. Stress are punk in the classic sense. (I don’t need to explain that do I?) They said ” we’re stress and this is Abuse.” How right he was. It was half an hour of the same song played at various speeds form ridiculously fast to idiotically fast. Punk died a death when it disappeared up it’s own hole trying to be POLITICAL. Luckily there’s absolutely no way of telling if these chaps had any message for the assembled, because, well frankly, you could not understand a word the singer was saying. It sounded like River Phoenix coughing up his valediction on the Viper Room floor. Not entirely bad, though, it had to said, the kind of pointless fun you would get by beating a toddler at Go or beating O’Connell over the skull. I would suggest to Stress that they not give up their day jobs if they didn’t look so blatantly unemployable. So, geetar vs electronica? Why categorise when it’s all shite? Herv was up next. A live debut, by all accounts. He’s another handsome bastard who looks like he gets out lots and doesn’t spend all fucking day in front of a pc. I listened for the set, half an hour or three days, I cannot be sure. It went doodle de dee. Bonkity bleep. I think the word “Nurdling” has been waiting patiently on the side lines for the last few decades waiting for Herv to arrive, and now it can finally embrace the man. His nurdlings provide the backdrop, the score for everything pointless you may do today. Not wholly bad though, maybe a bit like listening to the inside of C3PO’s head. And finally, blessedly finally, The Jimmy Cake. Last time we had crossed paths I suggested they did some thing about the fact they have a silly seven members. Oh and they did do something. They added two more. NINE fucking members? Is this a band or a political party? Nine? For Christ sake. Four more members and we can finally proclaim O’Connell “the new Jesus”. But this aside, what was the music like? Well, it’s like to take every good element from anything you ever like, classical, jazz, soul, funk, pop, rooooocccckkkkk, noisecore, hardcore, bon jovi.. whatever, and completely wankify it. If they ever make a film where Motown gets over run and destroyed by a load of bucket wielding nerds, these boys should provide the soundtrack. The high point of their set was when they tried, vainly, badly, to resurrect some old Das Madman nonsense and edified beyond reproach everyone’s secretly harboured notion that they too were shite. And nine members? there’s some dirty wino living on my doorstep, I think he can play the tin whistle, how long before we find him, nibbling at the crust of the Jimmy Cake. Still. There’s more of them than there is of me. Suffice to say this: if the stats are true. one of them is gay. ©Hector Grey” |
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