Awesome Color

The Vile Imbeciles are a love or hate band whose mixture of death-jazz, prog and Goth-rock is so loud, grimy and frighteningly eclectic you’ll either be howling for joy or help. At least, that is what they’d like you to believe: live the overall feeling is a bit, well, meh.

On record their bizarrely aggressive attempt to shove every guitar genre into a bag and bash it round your head sometimes works; there are some well-played moments of gloomy post-rock or psychedelic freak-outs. On stage, however, these flashes of interesting experimentation peter out, leaving each song sounding like the last; like a mumble with the volume turned up. The lack of arresting songs disperses the already small crowd and draws the attention to a technical hitch (in which a hippy-looking drummer looks comically far too stressed) and the out of place jerky dancing, huge hair and elf-like pointy boots of the guitarist. There are couple of happy, whistling fans but after only 20 minutes or so the band stops and packs up. By which point there’s only a handful of people to watch them awkwardly walk off stage.

A bigger crowd appears for Awesome Color however. The drummer is evidently eager, setting up drum kit and battered symbols straight away and then waiting onstage for the rest of the band. The night proves to be a bit of a mate’s love-in; friends from Brooklyn, Detroit, and, erm, Lincoln all get shout outs from an evidently relaxed singer Derek Stanton.

The set kicks off with a pumped-up new song (as yet untitled, as still a work in progress) which is all urgent drumming cymbal crashes and primal guitars. Their brand of MC5-style garage and psych leanings works best live, raising them a head above the over-populated blues rock crowd. The joy is evident on their faces as they effortlessly play out their huge, punchy tracks and throughout the evening they can’t help referring to how happy they are to be there or to make a toast. By the end of the night we’ve toasted various friends, relatives and simply going out on a Monday. In between the convivial banter, the songs are mostly from their second album, Electric Aborigines, with the request for track ‘Outside Tonight’ met with the prefix “We’re going play some slow songs now, so maybe time for a smooch”. A few favourites are thrown in, including a good blast of ‘Free Man’. In contrast to the previous set of the evening, a broken guitar string is shrugged off and then incorporated into an impressive de-tuning set from Stanton that has the audience’s attention, despite being a bit long.

It makes an impressive finish, and is the only reason the crowd don’t ask for an encore.