Looking down at the list I've compiled for this, I went to just over thirty gigs in 2006. According to fansite Bright Light!, Mogwai managed a whopping 122 that year. They'd evidently hit the ground running: when I went to see them, exactly two weeks into the new year, they were already onto the seventh of these. Shows in Dublin and Belfast, one day off and then a sold-out five-night run at the ICA in London. The first four of these soirees had seen support from the mighty Part Chimp, Alexander Tucker, Gruff Rhys and Errors. 'Gwai forefathers Kevin Shields and Sonic Boom had popped in to watch them, as had, if rumours are to be believed, Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale.
I'd chosen to attend the last of these evenings at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts, choosing the specific night largely on the basis that Electric Wizard were the evening's support. As far as I can tell, this would have been the first time I'd seen them since they played upstairs at The Garage in 2000, before they'd even released the classic Dopethrone album. Since then, the band had effectively disintegrated, with Mark Greening and Tim Bagshaw departing to form Ramesses and guitarist/frontman Jus Oborn pulling together a brand new line-up to record 2004's We Live. While this was certainly not the last reshuffle in the Dorset doomsters' career, I believe this bunch were all still on the books that January. They had, perhaps, lost some of the ramshackle, edge-of-collapse dynamic that made Wizard Mk1 such a cult concern, but on the other hand there was a more powerful force to this incarnation, thanks to Liz Buckingham doubling the guitar attack and Justin Geaves out of Iron Monkey occupying the drumstool. I wouldn't have to wait too long to see them again.
Mogwai were ostensibly gearing up for the release of Mr Beast, their fifth studio album, which was due out in March. However, they only played a handful of tunes from it, most notably the suitably heavy Glasgow Mega-Snake, possibly the only piece of music ever named after an imaginary rollercoaster fashioned from a genetically modified serpent. Otherwise, the set was evidence that this relatively uncommercial bunch had actually amassed a bunch of properly massive choons, with people cheering the opening chords of their favourites. They couldn't, and indeed didn't, play everything, and setlists from the rest of the week shows that I missed out on Ithica 27ø9, Like Herod and Xmas Steps, but there could be no complaints about any gig which finished with Mogwai Fear Satan (their Ace Of Spades, sort of), the afore-mentioned Glasgow Mega-Snake and My Father My King, which gave a Jewish hymn a similar treatment to that serpent in the song before. I wouldn't have to wait too long to see them again.
But not before I'd gone to see Test Icicles at The Ocean Rooms. This lot were possibly seen by the wider world as a bit of a joke, with their emo haircuts and scrappy thrash and terrible band name, but I'd decided that their Number 46 smash Boa Vs Python had been my favourite song of 2005. Hey, what was it with all these snakes back then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82HW9k-q0U
Unfortunately, their live show only reinforced the idea that this lot were like the idiot younger brothers of Klaxons. Songs would stop and start and fall apart, the three members apparently more concerned with arsing about than actually playing their tunes. I've seen many terrible gigs before and since, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a band hold their audience in such contempt. Maybe it made a little more sense when they split shortly afterwards, as this definitely wasn't the work of people invested in their music in any way.
I'm not sure anybody expected these goons to go on to do anything much afterwards. Except Rory Attwell went on to become an in-demand producer. And Dev Hynes, as well as making a pretty decent fist of a solo career under the Lightspeed Champion and Blood Orange pseudonyms, has worked with the likes of Solange, FKA Twigs, Carly Rae Jepsen and even Mariah flipping Carey. Tragically, Sam Mehran took his own life in 2018.
Anyway, after the distinctly teenage trash of Test Icicles, it was time for some grown man music, specifically a weighty double-header of Corrosion Of Conformity and Clutch at the Concorde2. They probably should have brought a support band beginning with 'C' to complete the alliterative theme. Church Of Misery would have been perfect, but we'll be getting to them later. Instead, the excellent Stinking Lizaveta, who you may recall I'd caught with Dead Meadow in 2005, were on show-stealing opening duties.
Speaking of which, Anna once again took me to see Belle & Sebastian at The Dome, just like she had a little over a year earlier, but this time my evening was made by local support Brakes. This lot featured members of the Electric Soft Parade and British Sea Power, both bands I'd paid fairly scant attention to, so I'm pretty sure this would have been the first time we'd seen them, but they'd go on to become favourites for the rest of the decade. In the best possible, and least Test Icicles, way, they sounded like a bunch of mates having a laugh, with a musical pallette centred on US-style indie but veering off in all sorts of unexpected angles, from the throbbing banger All Night Disco Party, which was basically Clinic remixed by LCD Soundsystem, to seconds-long tunes like Cheney and Comma Comma Comma Full Stop. I don't recall whether they played their Mary Chain cover Sometimes Always that night, but I'm pretty sure they did the country classic Jackson. Perhaps best of all, though, was Heard About Your Band, a note-perfect eighty-second takedown of the sort of "coked-up arsehole" they'd come across on the Brighton music scene.
They certainly weren't talking about Charlottefield, who I caught a couple of weeks later in their natural environment of the Freebutt, in the company of noisy Derby tykes Fixit Kid and, in the headline slot, Leeds underground mainstays Bilge Pump. And there were no breadhead wannabes in attendance a couple of days later, when Swedish crustpunk legends Skitsystem played the Engine Room - though, according to an email I sent Jimmy that night, the turnout was disappointing, which seems odd for such a well-rgarded band.
No such problems for a mighty Rise Above label tour at the Concorde2, with headliners and perennial faves Cathedral, my second encounter of the year with Electric Wizard, and more Swedes in the shape of no-frills trad metallers Grand Magus. I was back at the same venue the next day to see hometown heroes Johnny Truant slay it. Frontman Olly was in combative mood, continually asserting between songs that Truant were a metal band, and weren't about emo or haircuts, which, to be fair, was pretty obvious from the prog-tinged extremity of In The Library Of Horrific Events, the album they were then promoting - not to mention from the way bassist James had the whole Steve 'Arris mouth-the-words-while-machine-gunning-the-crowd routine down. This was also the gig where Olly came out with the deathless exhortation "Let's get our cocks out and start a warzone!", which became something of a running gag amongst like-minded souls in my vicinity.
Still teenagers, and with debut Nightmares not even in the shops yet, Architects supported and continued to impress. This lot, I thought, could be as big as Truant one day.
You wait ages to attend one multi-night residency in London... Exactly two months after Mogwai at the ICA, I'd been enticed up to Croydon by my good friend and Fall obsessive Lexy and her partner-in-crime Jo, to see MES and co play the third of four nights at the Cartoon. This semi-legendary venue was a great place to see The Fall, its small capacity meaning we had a great view as Mark was led to the stage James Brown-style by a couple of bodyguards, who I think took his coat and gloves while the band played an instrumental Dr Buck's Letter. Aside from opener proper Touch Sensitive, possibly the band's best-known tune thanks to its use in an a Vauxhall Corsa ad, the set was largely drawn from then-current album Fall Heads Roll, which admittedly included bangers like Clasp Hands and Blindness, but did mean that yer actual "hits" were absent - exactly as you'd expect from this most cantankerous of outfits, frankly.
Back at it on home turf the following night, it was time to go and see an assortment of punks from near and far. Openers End The Agony were one of the many bands that had emerged from the ashes of Cat On Form. At this stage, they was just Dan on guitar and Jamie on drums, sharing vocals. Incidentally, last time out I forgot that I'd seen Dan's solo thing Yelp Of Sords opening for La Quiete - thanks to Rich for flagging that up! Anyway, YOS wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, but End The Agony were a proper descent into despair, that kind of Noothgrush/Corrupted end-of-yer-tether howl into the abyss. The flyer described their thing as "excreting heart wrenching pain through the speakers", and that was about the size of it. That the same band spawned both End The Agony and Blood Red Shoes is frankly bewildering.
Up next were The Plague Sermon, at this point one of my favourite local bands and an outfit I'd see at least four more times in 2006, including at what should have been the Brighton debut of The Gilamonsters (a debacle you can read more about in a chapter posted about six years back). The evening was completed by Zann and Burial Year, both bands you could probably decribe as chaotic hardcore or something similar. The former hailed from Germany, while the latter, from San Francisco, prompted the flyer to advise attendees "bring heavy duty pants kids you'll be shitting metal claws." I'm afraid I can't recall any evidence of this taking place, or indeed whether anybody got their cocks out and started a warzone.
The Plague Sermon were back at it a mere ten days later at The Engine Room, in the company of Taint and In Conference With Jackals, the latter featuring at least one member of London instrumental metal types Capricorns. Taint were, by this point, already more than a decade into their existence, though after a bunch of demos and splits they'd only fairly recently released their ace debut, The Ruin Of Nova Roma. With a certain level of proggy intricacy allied to more steamrollering heaviness, they were sort of the UK's equivalent to Mastodon, and frontman Jimbob was also responsible for some of the best artwork in the scene at the time. You can check out his continuing visual genius here: https://jimbobisaac.com/
As previously hinted, I had another appointment to keep with Mogwai. With Mr Beast now "in the racks", they'd lined up a proper UK tour to follow that ICA residency, so I headed back to Southampton and my very old stomping ground of the University. I actually got to town at lunchtime and spent the day hanging out, catching up with old mates at my old work, Wayne and Tom who were now working in Fopp, Clare, Greg from Daughters Courageous and some of the punk/STE crew. I even made it to our old local, Goblets. Twice. And at the gig itself, I bumped into Steph and (I think) Simon; I might be wrong, but I think that, although we're still in occasional touch via Facebook, that was the last time I actually hung out with those guys.
Anway, Mogwai were great again. They came out wearing matching green tracksuits and played a load more of Mr Beast than in January, along with faves Hunted By A Freak and Mogwai Fear Satan; less-played oldies Stanley Kubrick and Yes I Am A Long Way From Home also made an appearance. I don't remember where I slept that night, though it was probably James's place.
Boris were already legends in the doom scene at this point; in fact, their latest album Pink, which incorporated more shoegaze and dreampop stylings and seemed to bring them to wider attention, meant they were probably already being deemed past their best by the absolute diehards. Whatever, dudes: I dug Pink and was happy to see them for the first time at The Engine Room, which you'll have noticed was becoming my favourite venue in town.
Another band who've sometimes been treated with mistrust by the scene that spawned them, Fucked Up made their Brighton debut a few days later. Arguably just as important to me in the long run was my first encounter with show openers Fall Of Efrafa. This Brighton band played raging crust, but (at this stage) with the unlikely addition of a cellist. The end result was already, at this early point in their existence, quite remarkable, and Efrafa would deservedly receive international kudos over the next three years.
Competing with the headliners for sweariness, Rainy Day Fuck Parade were up next, and what a bloody delightful barrage of noise they made, too. Fucked Up seemed to take a little while to warm up on this occasion, though their Black Flag/Poison Idea-indebted hardcore did catch fire after a while. Mind you, apparently when they played Southampton for old chums Almost The STE the following night, there were some murmurings about "the stand-offish hipster crowd" in Brighton, so maybe that was part of the issue! I do remember frontman Father Damian/Pink Eyes telling a story about coming over to Eastbourne (from Canada!) as a teenager and being really excited about getting the train over to Brighton and hitting the record shops, which was pretty sweet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXOqWfSfAus
Having been wowed by Low back at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2002, it was great to catch up with them again at Hove's Old Market, in the company of Steve, Lisa and (I think) Hayley. For me, they were just past their sweet spot, the run of albums that took in Secret Name, Things We Lost In The Fire and Trust, but then-current album The Great Destroyer was no slouch, so there were no complaints when they played about half of it, particularly when evergreen classics Sunflower and (That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace were also on the menu.
Since moving to Brighton, we'd not made it to a festival for three years. It was high time to change this state of affairs, so a couple of weeks into May, me and Anna headed to the hallowed ground of Pontins in Camber Sands with Dan, Steve and Charlotte, for our first All Tomorrow's Parties since 2003. And also the messiest, ever.
Anna and I were so chuffed to be back there. Steve and Lottie were enjoying their first weekend away since the birth of their daughter. And Dan was an absolute monster. Within what feels like seconds of getting to our chalet, the beers were flowing and Dan was swinging me round the lawn outside by my ankles. Things didn't get any less lively when we ventured into the main building to watch the Country Teasers, who sounded something like The Fall playing, well, country and whose lyrics, which tended to satirise prejudice by writing from the point of view of the prejudiced, didn't shy away from racial slurs in a way which feels even more uncomfortable in 2020.
This ATP, the first of two weekends billed as "The United Sounds Of ATP", was curated by each evening's headliner. Friday was under the auspices of Seattle legends Mudhoney, and consisted mainly of a mixture of garage rock action and the occasional mellower solo artist. At some point, we ran into Will from Southampton faves Black Nielson, and Dan and I in particular proceeded to get pretty trashed. So I can't remember in what order we saw things, but in the course of the day we caught witty singer/songwriter David Dondero, classic LA punks The Flesh Eaters, Aussie rockers The Drones, Brit garage legend Holly Golightly and psych-rockin' Canadians Black Mountain.
I was really excited to see Mudhoney. They were one of the first bands I'd got into largely as a result of the influence of John Peel, some seventeen years previously, and have long held them in my heart as the ultimate embodiment of that crazy sound called grunge. Yes, even more than Candlebox or Bush! And yet, up until that ATP, I'd somehow never seen them play live before. So keen were Dan and I to get to the front beforehand, that we didn't wait for the others as promised and got ourselves a spot on the barrier. Really excited.
Looking at the setlist from that show now, I can't remember the exact point when I passed out. This wasn't a drastic medical emergency, just the effects of a long day's drinking. Pressed up at the barrier, I remained upright. Luckily, one of the security guards noticed this disreputable sort nodding off in the front row and proceeded to wake me by prodding my forehead repeatedly with his index finger. I'm eternally grateful to this man and his no-nonsense attitude towards long-haired fellows in drunken stupors, as his actions meant I didn't miss too much of what was a really great set.
The Saturday was curated by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with artier outfits like Hundred Eyes, Celebration and Magik Markers in the house. Surprisingly, I seemed to be able to cope OK despite the previous day's shenanigans. There may have been some cricket outside our chalet, using a french baguette as a bat. I suspect Saturday was also the day when Dan pointed out that one of the animals decorating the kids area near the smaller stage was a zebra in the slightly inappropriate outfit of a boob tube and miniskirt combo, accessorised with handbag and sunglasses. In the present day, a Google search reveals that this character seems to have been given a more suitable makeover, but to us she will always be Zena The Slutty Zebra.
The post-hardcore racket of The Blood Brothers made for an agreeably noisy diversion on this second stage, prompting me to impersonate the frenzied yelps of co-vocalist Johnny Whitney over and over again in the bar afterwards. Yep, drunk again. Brooklyn art-punks Liars played, and if I recall correctly their set was mostly stuff from then-new album Drum's Not Dead, which I hadn't heard, so I just kinda let it wash over me. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were great, though, and if part of me still wished we'd got in to see them at the Freebutt back in 2002 or whenever, it was still fantastic to see this weird little band headline a festival. They closed with the deathless Maps, appropriately written about Liars mainman Angus Andrew.
Sunday turned out to be a rather weird day. We ran into Will's girlfriend early on; it turned out that she was now Will's ex-girlfriend, so we looked after her while watching Brighton's Bat For Lashes, soon to be something of a star but at this point still playing the opening slot on the smaller stage. Will's ex decided to head home after that, although this plan was somewhat delayed by her discovery that at some point in the previous 48 hours, someone had smashed her windscreen.
Devendra Banhart was in charge of this final day, which consequently had an entirely appropriate folkie comedown feel to it. There was space for the freaks, too, like Tarantula AD, whose work was described by Pitchfork as "combining classical instrumentation and techniques with elements of metal, flamenco, and various pan-global folk forms." I think there were costumes, too. On the other end of the scale, then-septuagenarian Dylan contemporary Ramblin' Jack Elliott was absolutely charming. I spent the majority of the day getting confused between Vetiver and Espers, conflating them in my head to a single band called Vespers, so I don't recall which of their sets was the backdrop to me pulling a massive whitie and having to go back to the chalet and sleep it off, thereby missing the other one. Sorry, Vespers.
At some point either before or after that, we caught another genuine '60s folk legend, Vashti Bunyan, on the main stage. I only really know that tune Just Another Diamond Day, and her stuff is generally just the wrong side of twee for my tastes, but for a Sunday afternoon comedown it was just fine. Vashti herself seemed charming in a classic upper-middle-class hippy/bohemian mum sort of way. At the start of her set, after a little bit of fiddling with instruments, she meekly apologised to the audience, saying something like, "I'm sorry, we'd normally have a soundcheck before doing this." Tom from You're Smiling Now But We'll All Turn Into Demons turned to me and said, "BOO FUCKING HOO."
I think other members of our party were into Devendra Banhart, but something about him's never quite gelled with me. Of course, by this point in proceedings it was entirely possible that my critical faculties had entirely deserted me. For all I know, he was brilliant.
I've a feeling we drove home via Worthing to check out the new independent record shop that Steve had opened called Random Rules. Mind you, that seems like a long way round, and I'm not sure he'd actually opened the shop yet at that point, so this might be our old friend the composite memory.
Ridiculously, I was at another festival within days of returning from Camber Sands, though in fairness it was one which required very little travel. 2006 saw the first edition of The Great Escape, and on paper it looked unmissable. Before my time in Brighton, though not before Anna's, there had been something called the Brighton Crawl, with 25 pretty hip bands playing across five venues at the behest of venerable local promoters Melting Vinyl. This looked like a scaled-up version, lasting for three days and with about three times as many bands and venues on each of them. Unfortunately, the practicalities of getting to see the bands you wanted to see meant that significantly more time was spent queueing or schlepping across town than actually watching gigs, which meant this would be the only year we went to the whole thing.
There was at least no such issue on the first night, as the magazine I write for had its own stage at the Concorde 2 and I was drafted in to review its opening night. Dirty Perfect, Humanzi and The Morning After Girls would not go on to any great success, their presence here indicating how much music of, for want of a better term, an indie nature was dominating even the rockier end of the music press in the post-Strokes/White Stripes marketplace. The Answer were much better, returning to something like first principles with totally unpretentious '70s rock. I was rather of proud of comparing the transition from these guys to headliners 65daysofstatic to the bit in 2001 where an ape throws a bone into the air and it turns into a spaceship; their use of electronica gave the post-rockers a much more sci-fi feel than, say, Mogwai or Explosions In The Sky, a direction in which they've continued to evolve right up to the present day.
The next couple of evenings were spent mainly not getting into the things we wanted to see. On the Friday, we caught Hot Club De Paris and This Et Al at The Pressure Point, and Scissors For Lefty and the Electric Soft Parade at the Freebutt; on Saturday, I've a feeling we caught De Rosa at the Komedia before ending up at the Ocean Rooms for the duration, in the company of Small Sins, DARTZ! and Clearlake. Essentially, we'd paid a festival price to go to a couple of gigs.
The following week saw me head back to Somerset to see the folks, before heading to London for the first Gilamonsters gig in three years, which I'm sure you all remember reading about six years ago. We played with the ...Demons and Among The Missing, and the latter's frontman Tim Holehouse told me that he was gonna be in Brighton the next day. I ended up in a crowd of less than ten people watching him "play a gig"/busk in the Pavilion Gardens that afternoon. DIY!
Mid-June found a return to business as usual, in the sense that I was stood in the Freebutt watching The Plague Sermon. Aaron was promoting a UK tour for Swedish band The Grizzly Twister; he'd also released an excellent split 7" of the two bands on his label Midmarch. The Plague Sermon were at their most atmospheric on this evening, with the stage lit only by a spotlight mounted on the drum kit and Aaron's mic hanging from the ceiling and swinging all over the place as he threw himself and his guitar about. The Grizzly Twister were no slouches either; with a sound described as "twisted blip-blip hardcore", they had two synths, no bass and a vibe which recalled Refused without falling into the trap of being soundalikes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOITKzsjbzU
A week later I was back at the Freebutt for a pretty decent all-locals bill. Jacob's Stories, another outfit who'd released a split 7" on Midmarch, opened up, solitary member Stuart Warwick doing that create-a-choir-out-of-looped-vocals thing a good while before it became ubiquitous, and with some pretty salty between-song banter to boot. Projections featured Steve out of Cat On Form, and were probably the most COF of the many post-COF bands with a bit of a Dischord/Revolution Summer vibe going on. Headlining were Architects, and I noted in my review that they had now gone beyond being a band playing a hometown show to their mates to become serious contenders. This lot, I thought (though not in print) could maybe headline the Concorde 2 one day.
It looks like this would end up being my last time in the Freebutt for a while, as this was around the time it closed down temporarily before opening up with a new layout and new owners a few months down the line. This was, therefore, the point at which the Engine Room became the venue that defined the next few years of Brighton gig-going for me and, I suspect, anyone else with an interest in noisy underground music. A case in point would be the double-header of Amanda Woodward and Aussitôt Mort that appears to be the next gig I attended. In support were our old chums End The Agony and Glasgow's Mesa Verde, whose set was decribed in my review as "messy". As if you couldn't guess from the latter's name, Amanda Woodward and Aussitôt Mort both hailed from France; Caen, to be precise. They also shared members, both released records on Level Plane and, well, didn't sound too dissimilar from one another, though I singled out Amanda Woodward out for praise in my review.
A pair of free tickets appeared at work, no doubt sent by the label, for a gig at the Concorde 2 by hot new MC Plan B. A good four years away from the ubiquity of his geezer-soul quadruple-platinum smash The Defamation Of Strickland Banks, yer man B was at this point mostly considered a hip hop artist, albeit as an acoustic guitar-toting, hardcore lyric-spitting novelty. Myself and Pete decided to make use of the tickets and, as I recall, ended up preferring support Example, himself four years away from pop-rap chart success and at this point more of a straight-up hip hop turn.
My next trip to the Engine Room was to see Send More Paramedics for the first time since Easter Sunday 2004. The evening was pretty crazy before we even got to the zombie thrashcore main event, with my first encounters with two very different outfits. Opening were Los Mendozas, a band of Mexican wrestling brothers in tight trunks and masks seeking vengeance for their slain father through the power of, well, Mexican wrestling-themed hardcore punk. Rumour has it they might have actually been four local idiots putting on silly accents, but either way their show, about five parts comedy to one part actual music, was a blast.
Next up were, well, Gallows. Yet to release their Orchestra Of Wolves debut (officially, at least; I picked up a copy at the merch stand that night), or to enjoy their swift elevation to magazine front covers and international hype, they were an absolutely monstrous bolt from the blue on that August night. The music alone would have threatened to take the roof off, with the post-hardcore fury of someone like Swing Kids or JR Ewing a valid comparison, but Frank Carter was one of the most striking frontmen I'd ever seen. Despite being essentially a skinny kid, he radiated venom and misanthropy, his shirtless-with-braces look and sense of imminent threat putting me in mind of Tim Roth in Made In England (a comparison I saw someone else make not long afterwards, so it wasn't just me). He looked constantly on the point of violence towards either himself or the audience, and from where I was stood it didn't look like a put-on. If they resented being the filling in a novelty thrash sandwich... well, it didn't look like Frank needed any encouraging to be resentful. It's no wonder the rock world would shortly get behind this most volatile sensation, though it still feels weird that such a visceral UK hardcore band would end up on Warner Bros.
A week or so later, the Hobgoblin was hosting four bands who definitely wouldn't end up on a major label, starting with excellent Nottingham thrashers Army Of Flying Robots. It felt like the ground floor stage at the Hobgoblin could be on either side of the room each time you went there, but on this occasion it was against the windows, so we could see an old drunk guy headbanging along outside. Sadly, history has not recorded whether AOFR played their best-titled song, The Goths Brought Revels And I Felt Cheated. Germany's Perth Express were up next, their take on hardcore both crusty and doomy. Given that it was 2006, the Haram that played this show were not the more recent hardcore band with that name, though confusingly they were just as American; compared to everyone else on the bill, they were more alt-rock than hardcore, which at least made for a breather before headliners Kaospilot brought the Nordic noir with some splendidly dark and raging screamo.
The start of the next week brought a special show at the Engine Room to celebrate Aaron from Midmarch and The Plague Sermon's birthday. Local types Jacob's Stories, Charlottefield and, obvs, The Plague Sermon held down the latter part of the evening, while its earlier stages brought Lakes and Like Hurricane from Kent and, from Portsmouth, the excellent Attack! Vipers!, a band featuring members of Jets Vs Sharks and Seven Arrows In Your Bastard Heart who'd prove enduring favourites of mine.
I'd be back at the Engine Room watching hardcore bands again before long, but not before seeing Nick Oliveri (Kyuss/Queens Of The Stone Age/The Dwarves etc) and Blag Dahlia (mainly The Dwarves) doing an acoustic thing at the Pressure Point as The Uncontrollable. But yeah, a coouple of days after that it was back to the ER to check out swedish crust types Flyktplan. Fall Of Efrafa also played, along with Whole In The Head, an absolutely raging d-beat/thrash band from Southampton featuring my buddy Jamie Festo alongside Nath from Haywire and dudes from No Substance and the Chineapple Punx. They had two logos, one a spikey punk one and the other in the Motorhead font, which would have endeared them to me even if they weren't a paint-stripping assault of SoutHCoast noise.
I seem to have a month-long gap between gigs at this point, which may or may not have had anything to do with me starting a new job, helping set up a new store in Eastbourne as Assistant Manager. When I did get back into it, it was to see Kylesa at, yes, the Engine Room. At one point, Gallows were listed as support, and I was looking forward to seeing them again, but it turned out they cancelled in favour of a higher profile support in London on the same night, the ruddy sellouts. Their replacements, and I think we can all say with hindsight that it was very much a like-for-like swap, were Whole In The Head making an entirely welcome (and speedy) return. I'm reasonably sure this was when Adam first told me that Jamie's former Minute Manifesto bandmate Lobster was badly ill with cancer, which understandably put something of a dampener on proceedings. I did enjoy Kylesa though; they'd recently released the excellent Time Will Fuse Its Worth, one of my favourite albums of that year and an absolute belter that smashed together psychedelia, crust, sludge and post-rock in a manner which could have been purpose-built to float my boat.
More multi-national melancholy was on the cards a couple of weeks later at the same venue, with Church Of Misery and Sourvein in the house. The latter offered a boozy sludge assault, while the headliners were comparatively graceful in their more Sabbath-centric doom. While these are both killer bands, the evening possibly has more significance as the first time I chatted to an awesome metalhead called Ben, with whom I'd hang out at many a gig for the next few years, and who would introduce me to a bunch of other fine characters from the fringes of the local scene.
A week or so on, and back to the Engine Room to see ace San Francisco outfit Enablers in action. Opening up were locals -A+M, an unassuming duo playing acoustic guitar instrumentals, and The Quiller Memorandum, who hailed from Exeter, played epic post-rock, were presumably named after the 60s spy thriller, and apparently featured a member called Bob D'Mello.
In the present day, there's some chat about a new trend for bands to adopt spoken word styles rather than, y'know, singing. I'm thinking Black Country, New Road and Dry Cleaning, those sort of bands. Slint and The Fall tend to get namechecked as precursors, but commentators tend to ignore or be unaware of Enablers (and Joeyfat too, for that matter, though Kitty Empire did at least namecheck them in an Observer review of BC,NR). Unfortunately, on this occasion the sound mix rendered frontman Pete Simonelli largely inaudible, and while Enablers were just dandy musically, it did feel like an incomplete experience. Still, I'd get to see them - and indeed to follow in the footsteps of -A+M and The Quiller Memorandum by supporting them - later on.
There was less of a wait (three days) before visiting the Engine Room once again, this time for a storming line-up featuring Baroness, Torche, November Coming Fire and Bossk. The last of these were a then-new outfit from Kent playing largely instrumental post-metal, the kind of thing where you can only fit two tracks into an opening slot and your singer only comes on towards the end of the second one (I think this is what happened at this show - I saw both Bossk and a bunch of similar bands a fair bit in the second half of the '00s, so it's entirely possible I'm remembering a different show altogether). Anyway, Bossk had recently released their first EP, the cunningly-titled .1, and they'd go on to become a justly-revered outfit. We discussed NCF last time - I thought they'd split up by this point but clearly not! I'm sure they ruled, but it was the previous year's Freebutt show which has stayed in my memory.
After two Kentish outfits, a bunch of Floridians were always going to seem exotic, but the expectations for Torche's set were based on their roots in the cult band Floor, and their excellent self-titled debut which had come out the year before. By 2006, the stoner/doom scene had already started to suffer somewhat from bands regurgitating the same sounds, but Torche definitely had something else about them - their riffs were somehow huger and catchier, and they were capable of mixing up frankly poppy tunes with ultra-heavy sludge thickness. Over the years, they've continued to refine and explore this basic dichotomy, and I'll be writing about them a fair bit more in the future. Oh yeah, once again the vocal mix in the Engine Room was poor.
Baroness were something of a rarity, in that when I first saw one of their records at work - in this instance, their second EP, the cunningly-titled Second - I'd neither heard them nor even read about them anywhere. Pretty crazy to think that they're now one of the most highly-regarded bands on metal's artier side. Back then, they already had the makings of a band to follow Mastodon out of the sludge scene and into the mainstream, with Thin Lizzy-esque dual guitar licks and a certain inclination to prog in evidence, but they also retained an irrepressibly feral quality that felt as rooted in punk as metal.
Working in a new store, in a different town, with Christmas approaching meant that I didn't get out much for the rest of the year, missing gigs by Don Caballero and Genghis Tron amongst others. In fact, the only other show I definitely made it to that year was These Arms Are Snakes, at the Engine Room (where else?). Hey, what was it with all these snakes back then? This lot were pretty hip in the mid-'00s, featured a member of tech-noisecore godheads Botch and made a racket located on the rockier side of post-hardcore, somewhere in the vicinity of The Blood Brothers or At The Drive-In. Back in December '06, they were touring their not-exactly-seasonally-titled second album, Easter, and I dare say they were probably pretty great, though my memory is a little shot, probably due to the exhaustion of working in a new store, in a different town, with Christmas approaching...
So that's it for 2006. I haven't really researched 2007 yet, but I'm sure it will involve many more visits to the Engine Room, along with a new venue for All Tomorrow's Parties and, excitingly, a trip to New York...
