Part One:

PARTYLINE / WET DOG / KASMS
Catch, London, April 2008

So I was out A BIT late a couple of Saturdays ago, though nothing to shout about really, taking up residence in an awkward spot just behind one of ‘speaker on a pole’ PA system jobs just to the side of the stage in a hot, packed, dark room, listening to mangled, poorly mixed guitar and drum treble-heavy blare and watching weird, exciting looking humans cavort and shriek, and drinking overpriced alcohol way too fast, and…. actually quite enjoying the experience for once.

Now, I’m increasingly making it gospel these days that if you find yourself idly throwing the word ‘hipster’ into conversation with any frequency, you probably ARE one (must I link to that spot-on Cat & Girl comic again? - I fear I must), so with that in mind, I’m doing my best to eradicate the word from my vocabulary altogether, save perhaps for it’s original, noble use in describing Cab Calloway-esque pre-Beatnik jazz scenesters. But to grit my teeth and give it one more outing, let it be said that, in the parlance of our times, the first thing that’s noticeable on this particular evening about Catch, a new-ish venue just off Old Street, is that it’s pushing an almost supernaturally high hipster count. Don’t worry if you were there - I’m sure YOU weren’t one of them. I mean, these are OTHER people we’re talking about, right? Not nice, normal people like you or I. But… y’know what I mean.

So the downstairs bit is the kind of bar that’s too loud and crowded and awkwardly arranged to possibly be a fun place to be under any circumstance I should imagine, but is perpetually packed out anyway, cos…. well, I don’t fucking know, maybe it’s ‘the place to be’ or something for a certain set, and it often seems that trendy East Londoners seem to choose their hangouts of choice in deliberate opposition to the relative pleasantness of the environment. But anyway, I’m not here to review bars, so ON WITH IT. The band-watching bit is up a spiral staircase, and it’s a long, dark, narrow room - a poor place for presenting any kind of live music in most respects, but it puts me in mind of innumerable shitty, marginal gig venues of yore, and is thus almost appealing in a ‘look ma – I’m in an underground music hellhole’ kind of way, though the weird comfort factor would doubtless fade if we’d arrive a bit later and got stuck in the back, with a choice of fixing our eyes on some guy’s greasy hair, a distant light-fitting or a drunk tripping over the merch table, as some vague roar happens about a mile away. But we’re early enough (at bloody nine forty-five or something) to get a bolthole at the front, so no worries there.

We arrive just in time to see the two girl / two boy Kasms setting up, and a better band to fit the surroundings would be hard to imagine. Before they get going, my friend and I decide they look like the kind of band that would turn up in a Jaime Hernandez story in Love & Rockets. The two guys switch between guitar and drums, stomping around enthusiastically and making a GREAT ol’ riff-noise of the dissonant, clanking Death Valley ’69 variety, the bassist I can’t really see or hear from where I’m standing (sorry), and the singer…. oh, my lord, the singer.

She’s a skinny girl, though she looks like rockets would bounce off her no problem. Her shoes are incongruously dressy. Her dress is…uh.. pretty tight. She seems, like, half in the real-everyday-people world, like somebody you might randomly meet at work and get a crush on, but with one foot in mad, psychosexual rock star world, dragging herself further across the threshold for all she’s worth, like the night-haunted wraith that just ate Karen O for breakfast or something. Her performance is total Nick Cave in the Birthday Party dementia – utterly premeditated theatricality, but no less hair-raising for that. It’s kinda thrilling. Sixty seconds into any given song and she’s writhing on the ground, legs in the air, twisting the mic cable into ungodly knots as the feedback howls, and if the song has the tenacity to break two and a half minutes, she’ll be charging headfirst into the waists of audience members, grabbing drinks from unsuspecting hands, kicking her heels into the floor, snarling like a dying dragon. And in the breaks between songs, she’s staring at her feet half the time, quiet as a mouse.

She’s dynamite. ‘Gosh’, we mutter to each other as the set concludes and the DJ strikes up some L7, and ‘heavens above’, and ‘wow’, and ‘she’s quite something’ and ‘…’ and ‘wow’ again. Such lusty testimonials are probably not quite what you’ve come to expect from Stereo Sanctity, but it must be said: if a straw poll of we three sensitive fellas is anything to go by, the lady-fancying contingent in tonight’s audience will not be remembering this band for their chord progressions.

Are we hopeless suckers? You be the judge:



The only merch they have on sale is a jar of homemade mood rings. Ladies and gentlemen: Kasms.

After all that, Wet Dog can’t help but be just a little disappointing. I’ve been busy telling everyone how great they are for the best part of a year since I last saw ‘em: really cracking band, doing righteous stuff in a distinctly Raincoats-esque vein, but tonight it’s not quite happening. The guitarist seems to have gained an odd new axe that looks like a Fender neck nailed to a piece of debris from a building site, but they also seem to have gained a new set of material that’s more abstract than the stuff I remember hearing previously, relying on painstaking stoppy/starty dynamics and wobbly high-end riffs, dashed through breathlessly with no room for rockin’ out, vocals sadly reduced to a few repetitive, wordless group yelps. It’s still pretty good stuff all things considered – I still really love each musician’s brilliantly perfecto unschooled musical style, the drummer particularly, but… somehow it’s not as fun as it should be? – tonight, at least.

Here’s some of a set they played at The Spitz last August, so again, see what you reckon:



Partyline, on the other hand, are almost by definition more fun than the sum of their parts. It seems that perpetually awesome frontwoman Alison Wolfe abandoned any plans for a respectable post-riot grrl type musicianly career when she ditched the rest of Bratmobile (great, great underrated band – check out their ‘Ladies, Women and Girls’ on Lookout for some of the best feminist punk rock fun the ‘90s had to offer) in order to form this appropriately named good times troupe in 2003, but I mean that in the best possible way.

Alison’s particular approach to vocalisin’ – basically a series of stream of consciousness personal/political rants delivered machine gun style over whatever music happens to be passing – anchors the origins of both bands firmly to the same source, but the other Bratmobilers’ dedication to crafting tight, hooky surf-punk is long gone, replaced with some gloriously immature flailing hardcore racket from Angela Melkthesian (guitar) and Some Random Dude (drums). It’s like at a certain point they all ceased to give a fuck whether or not Sleater Kinney gave them props, got caned on some unholy combination of sugar, coffee and over the counter stimulants and learned to play along to the first Minor Threat demo, rejoicing in the thought of how awesome the world would have been if h/c kids hadn’t turned out to be such a bunch of macho grumps, then wrote a bunch of songs telling everyone they don’t like to fuck off, and took it to the people.

Partyline are a total blast on stage – the girls can scarcely go a minute without cracking each other up with absurdist banter, and there’s joggin’, jumpin’, feedback and mid-song catastrophes aplenty. Each song comprises a ninety second spoken digression attempting to explain the lyrics, followed by about seventy seconds of incomprehensible high energy thrashing, and it seems like they only manage to make their way through, like, six songs before calling it a night, but that’s all TOTALLY GREAT, y’know. Alison scarcely seems to notice when the rest of the band slope off to get some drinks, and sits in the corner of the stage as she carries on telling us all about what party she’s registered to vote for and how she’s getting on living in New York and stuff, until someone thinks to unplug the mic and she wanders off to find her buddies. Man, what a fun band, what a great gig – I’m really glad I got myself together and made it out for it.

This footage of them playing in Australia in 2006 is gloriously representative:

Labels: Kasms, live reviews, Partyline, punk rock, Wet Dog