Thursday, March 29, 2007

Hot Fusion

Went to an interesting gig last night - The Rapture / Gnarls Barkley at the St James.

Not sure why they put them on together - they are quite different although both are a fusion of styles.

The Rapture were my main reason for forking out for a ticket, and they were pretty good. I'd call them indie rock/dance music fusion (ok, if any genre fascists are reading this they will no doubt tell me the correct name). The style is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Prodigy. None of the showmanship of Keith though - four New York collegey looking kids.. I'm going to start looking out some remixes of their stuff - I think that's a gap in my collection and would go down well on the dancefloor - I think their songs would work better for dancing at 8min length..

Gnarls Barkley combined being slick and enthusiastic. They started with the Pink Floyd song "We don't need no Education" - I assume they were at Bliss incognito and pinched the idea from Helix! Generally, they aren't my #1 choice of stuff, but pretty slick and entertaining.

Early (7:45) start was wierd though - I'm kinda used to gigs as being a late evening thing - I suppose they're doing it cos it's a schoolnight. Not sure how many tickets they sold, but the place didn't look full. It's an interesting experiment promoting three midweek gigs by majorish international bands on weeknights. In Auckland.

2 comments:

Joel said...

Hey Rich, Got a few Rapture remixes myself. It's the kind of stuff I like to mix (indie electro dance).

One genre name people have been throwing around a bit is New Rave, but apparently NME just made that up for dance based indie rock.

Do you know if Helix played the Eric Prydz version of "Another Brick In The Wall" or was it another one?

Rich said...

I got a promo email from Cyberdog (UK rave clothing and shiny stuff supplier - maker of pink & green pants) the other day with that very word:
"Well as I predicted last year, the big look this spring is Nu-Rave. It's everywhere! And just as you would expect, Cyberdog is leading the way. This time of year is all about rebirth, and that includes the Rave culture of the late 80's and early 90's that led to me being discovered in my crashed space ship in Camden"

Not sure which mix Helix was playing??