Rocketball has apparently been going for about six months now. How did I not know about this; beer for a quid fifty and proper bowling for a penny a game?! How do these guys make money? Surely the bands can’t make any money? Not when there are four on the line-up. Regardless, I was up for it and also a great chance to see one of my new favourite local groups; Majority Vote.
Okay, so one band pulled out very last minute. So, last minute they even pulled out while they were in the venue!!! So, first up is a new band called Indigo.
INDIGO (9) sound old beyond their years. Totally faithful to that early 90’s psychedelic grunge a la Blind Melon mixed with Kyuss-lite stoner rock; Looking back on it, it totally belied their sound but their cover of Beastie Boys’ Fight For Your Right was 100% note perfect in every way and was a joy to watch. Every single member of this band was technically superb. There wasn’t really anything to fault with this band and you wouldn’t believe these eighteen year olds had only been together month. If I was a total bastard, I’d say look like a band and stop wearing matching beige chino short; but maybe it was the heat wave that made them do it.
Definitely a band to watch out for; though it does seem that a twenty minute set is their maximum right now as they don’t have any more songs. I’d have loved to have heard them play more…
…unlike BLACK ECHO (6), whose set feels like it ran on for hours. Now I’m sure if you asked someone else, they’d say they were fantastic but they melodic poppy, post-hardcore bands are ten-a-penny and the whole genre for me is starting to lag and needs a shot in the arm with something original. It’s definitely not my thing. It also felt like the in-between song banter lasted as long as the songs did. But… despite my misgivings and the band are technically talented and the fans/friends enjoy it. There is even an attempt at starting a pit. A few numbers towards the end of the set even impressed me; especially Luke on drums doing a sterling job.
MAJORITY VOTE (7.5) have played here a few times now and already have over fifties gigs to their name. Their amazing debut EP, Playtime’s Over has just been released and it did a magnificent job of fusing vintage pop punk of last 70’s such as The Runaways with post-grunge bands such as Paramore.
Here they open with that title track; even slotting in a few bars of Daphne and Celeste’s Ooh Stick You for shits. There are timing issues with the drums and it sounds like the engineer can’t balance the sound at all.
However, Sell Out is much rawer than the version on the EP but is still a well rendered slab of grunge-lite punk. The band dish out versions of their earliest songs and Visitors even has a an element of Offspring to it and despite this, a great song that has a Stooges like beat to it and a great cover of The Subways’ Rock ‘n Roll Queen, bad sound and out of tune guitars plague the set.
Clarity, the final song from their EP is their finest and most mature piece of song writing to date and here it ends the set and through the ramshackle noise there is a fine band underneath there who can really pen a great song and also two girls with just as much balls as the boys.
The crowd call out for more and as they throw themselves into Territorial Pissings, it’s like tuning never even mattered and I’m still looking forward to hearing the band play again at the Miner’s Festival next month.
Alternative Barnsley 