YOU'RE IN NATION: Trail o'dead vs NME @ Astoria

Due to not knowing the gig started at 6:30, I managed to miss the first two bands, but I was informed I would have hated them. One was dreadful and not for me being mr.anti this whole thrash, trash, irony-splattered, forgetting to employ a producer and focussing more on pouting than singing their lyrics about being cool, regardless of whether the lyrics actually make any sense. Song structure and depth? Pah, that’s totally, like, uncool, schweetie. Anyway, the other were apparently a dodgy band trying to hang the 80’s sound on a grunge shell without any disorientation or subtlety. A good start to the evening then…

Clinic wander onstage dressed trousers in their socks, with bells on, all in white. Yes, as morris dancers which is um, interesting, I guess. Straight into their jumble of angles with a love/hateable voice. The bass is kinda like hip-hop beats that have been dragged down into a land of goblins and wildebeests until all the zealous funk has been rubbed with mud and pebble-dashed by uncool vibes. Weird keyboard sounds leap in and out, tripling the illusions of this band just being a few people onstage playing songs. He carries on singing, never really sure what he’s going on about, but he’s doing it all the same. The crowd however is motionless. Clinic do have a sound that’s easy to dance along to regardless if you know the songs or not. Maybe they are emotionless? Maybe it’s too cool to be into something that isn’t hyped on the frontpage of the very zine that has put on tonight’s show? I just don’t know. The crowds lack of reaction but wails of applause does begin to annoy me and I start to loose concentration, even during the current singles insatiable jitteriness and wails of NO! Maybe it’s the Astoria’s sound but I feel totally detached from the whole experience of being at a gig, to be entertained but it’s probably because everyone else is acting so comatosed.

Clinic’s set ends and they reluctantly mutter a ”thanks” on leaving. People are applauding but not a single word is uttered about them at the bar packed with imbeciles, possessed by the ghosts of who they used to be but only for five minutes of a day a week. I hear names being dropped. I feel encased by carcasses kept on their feet by the skins of dead cows and layers of make-up covering their ego-capsule of cigarette smoke mixed with sweat’n’cum from fucking their way to the top. Is this the top? The toilets reek of puke. Bold men stand at the bar with their arms folded, lips sealed, imagining their public perspective of importance is valued by all of the people around them. Maybe it is. I just don’t understand why…

…and you will know us by the trail of dead haha. I love that name, they love that name. The crowd loves them. They rock out. People jump around, but only in the first 4 rows. A few attempt to sing along as they stand in rows like sardines, complete with natural oils, about to eject them from the tin. Layers and layers of beautiful noise dances along with the few people who’ve made space at the side of the crowd to drunkenly enjoy the band they’ve paid a princely sum to see. Claps are heard when the noises stop but these things who all work-eat-shit-sleep don’t seem emotionally fulfilled or perpetuated to a new world of child-like sublime surreality that the trail o’dead are all about. Instead, the second the band mention ”this ones being filmed for our next video, wave at the camera’s up there” there is a sudden eruption of emotion to look cool in a moving freeze frame of the moment. Again, all of these things stole my attention and detached me from enduring a journey of love as the band eject their hate (and guitars to lucky crowd members to fight bouncers for). The new songs sounded strangely more upbeat. The first album songs still sounded raw and confused a lot of people, I could tell. The tracks from ’Madonna’ were all adored – but of course they would, people have it next to their copies of Starsailor and The Hives.

The hype castrated the emotion from this evening. There is blame to be placed and there is a culture to enter and attack until people can feel this is for real… now, what was I saying about dead things and tree’s and no-one hearing the noise?? This subject is all confused.