By Ross Pike
It’s a wonderful balmy evening in old London town; the winter finally appears to have sloped off in its soggy shoes and taken its frost-bitten arse away for a few months, so it seems like the only sensible thing to do is to go to my home away from home – Corsica Studios – for a night of rock cosmology with the mythic Lumerians and electro bandits K-X-P.
First though, it’s Girl Band. Who aren’t girls but in fact, a youthful indie rock outfit from Dublin with plenty of yowl and twang. Singer Dara Keily grips his mike stand like a dosed up Ian Curtis but generally things progress without incident until the dance-noise-circularity of their closing number - Blawan’s ‘Why They Hide Their Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage’. The song goes round and round mangling the word ‘garage’ a million times before resolving itself in a spiky tear up of feedback and then they’re off making way for Lumerians. The Californian quintet are in London ahead of the official release of their new record The High Frontier, although there are copies for sale tonight, which promises to continue the band’s luminescent approach to the well worn tropes of psychedelic rock, certainly if tonight’s immersive show is anything to go by.
The band miss their scheduled 9pm start time, the rock n’ roll bastards, but when they do manage to set the controls their show is physically low impact – kind of like running underwater – this is head bobbing rather than arse-shaking music; doubly so when you add the hypnotic effect of their oil lamp visuals. Out front is Luis Vasquez, their demented version of Monkee Davy Jones, battering away on percussion like a lysergic hype man while bassist Marc Melzer handles the majority of the vocals and the rest of the band fail to look beyond the frontiers of their instruments but it must be said Lumerians are a far more enticing prospect live than on record with the fusion of the visuals and the undulating mix of watery electronics and rough hewn psych forming a total package. They even have a weather referencing song from their new record; ‘Wintersong’, to help justify my first paragraph. They end their set with a wordless chant atop mountains of fuzz but you get the feeling they were only just hitting their stride and could and maybe should, have played on.
Finns K-X-P arrive after a seemingly interminable wait to terrorise and confound the audience in their tatty robes and studded leather looking and sounding like Kraftwerk if the Germans had been druids instead of man-machines. There’s a cold, euphoric trance going on here as frontman Timo Kaukolampi leans back, punching the air exhorting no-one in particular to get with it. The robes make K-X-P look a bit like Sunn O))) too, with the volume definitely recalling the American doom metallers even if the sleazy electro throb isn’t exactly analogous. They’re an odd proposition but at least K-X-P are never boring precariously treading that thin line between stupidity and genius. With their set coming to an end I head back to the street to discover the sun has gone and it’s cold which at least confirms that the decision to spend a night with three wildly divergent bands was the right one.
