I’m not sure if it was the fact that these bands played on a Thursday night, or that not enough people know who they are, but not many people turned out to see Crumb and Paselode play last Thursday at Bodega. Which is a shame, because Crumb were so bad that they were almost good, and Paselode were actually good. Crumb’s blatant absurdity was really an impressive feat. They played some of the most obvious heavy rock that I’ve heard in a while (think AC/DC and the worst side of KISS), and they do it with such ostensible seriousness and over-the-top stage moves that some in the audience seemed to be left wondering if they had just heard one of the most pathetic to average bands yet. But to take these guys seriously is to miss the irony. The over-weight stage moves of (Meatloaf meets Robert Plant) singer Carter Nixon are brilliantly bad (running on the spot and then taking his pulse, or pretending to give head to the Bass player’s microphone/dick), and the rest of the band get in on the act.
But the extent to which one can listen to these guys play is quite limited. There is nothing new or exciting when hearing them, and Nixon’s own final words to the small crowd (perhaps not ironically) summed up their own performance, “you guys have been adequate”.
Paselode on the other hand actually play good music, and they do it with some style. They seem to have the basic format of New Zealand cowboys playing heavy(ish) rock, but throw in some quite unexpected elements such as instrumental funk breaks and lounge/jazz keyboards.
For most of their hour-long set, Paselode produced really quite original funk infused (cowboy) rock and successfully combined innovative and exciting music with a relatively good stage presence. They were a very effective and cohesive musical unit, and despite the fact that for much of their set the only person dancing out of the small group of stragglers clustered around the semi-lit room was a lone bogan hunched over like a monkey, they were well worth seeing.
March 18th, Bar Bodega