Kittie

“I want you to feel pain” are the first words I can understand of Kittie’s set tonight. They’re actually the penultimate sentences as the feedback lowers for another onslaught of screams, riffs soaked in ectoplasm and headbanging, mainly from sweet (sic, sic, six!) looking 10-year-old boys complete with face paint and really pissed off expressions. Did no-one want to play trick or treat today? So they’re angry? (all together now) Hell yes! Everyone in this room seems angry. Even the talkers of Pigeon-American, Raging “mutha fucking” Speedhorn were mutha-fucking-angry, man. This only leaves the question ‘why are these people angry?’. It seems to me to be a combo of a few things clearly deduced from the washed out logos on Deftones tees and now silly-looking Slipknot tattoos (yes, I know, they did look silly to begin with). This is the eviller brand of 6-foot-under nu-metal, it’s perhaps a new subculture - cus a culture is what this is, with symbols and a selection of knowledge that you NEED to know, whether it’s names, numbers or hair colours, you’ve gotta know it to be here.. oh and you must wear black. I didn’t.

“We’ve got a video to this one”, and the word video says it all, before the polite “..so I wanna see all you fuckers jump…get your hands in the air!” and the pit becomes full of people who’re pulling poses look-a-likes for the as-seen-on-Mtv-generation. Or do I have it wrong and these gurning expressions whilst pulling floppy body-bops really do exist in all of us and the added limp wristedness is just an extra [copyright Slipknot circa 2000], it just needs to be unleashed by ‘real’ nu-metal. I blame the video to ‘Thriller’ meself.

If you’ve not worked it out yet, this is anger is more towards ‘the trendies’ for snatching away Limp Bizkit! This anger is also for Marilyn Manson becoming a household name through the power of Mtv!!! This is what happens when what you love is taken away from you, you need the next level, that something stronger, harder, faster, MORE! Something which ‘they’ reading Loaded and sniffing cocaine won’t get. Maybe they’ve all forgotten how they got into this world in the first place?

The singer (not "the good looking one" who seems to have been replaced this evening by some fat’n’hairy man) takes a swig from her beer and spits for the hundredth time this evening. A single strum. Then a pause that starts some abusive jeers. Circle pits form. Bodily fluids fall from the ceiling, dripping into the smelly cloud of leather, latex, make-up and trainers which contains fresh Reading sweat. Guys in leather jackets pouring with as much sweat as beer they’ve consumed force their way past me for the one they know from Mtv. The one they and everyone else knows is ‘Brackish’ and to be honest, it’s the only song which gets a decent round of applause from this Sold Out at a price of £8 a ticket at the Garage this evening. Perhaps there are moments in the new material, from the forthcoming album (mentioned 3 times in the set, what good marketeers they are!), where signs of innovation and tangible emotion shove themselves like a square block into a triangular hole as a few fractions of variation in the ward of women-having-a-babies (aka singing) and phat burping basslines in a drunken coma shouting in their sleep beneath 2 guitars making one layer of distorted 3-cord riffs in a way that'd make Green Day choke on their phlegm.

Then it ends. Oh no, then there’s another one or two as an encore and people leave, still looking angry. And now I am angry but just because this didn't live upto the hype. Maybe if I was wearing eyeliner I would see sense. Maybe if my ears were full of puss I’d be able to hear a single lyric which were grunted’n’growled into the mic this evening. Maybe. Maybe not.