Crud
D.Monic
Lilygun
Bull And Gate, London
Saturday October 27 2007

Saturday night in Kentish Town, and, as is traditional around these parts, the back room of the Bull And Gate is full of an unrepentant rock 'n' roll racket.

To be a bit more precise, tonight it's full of three different rock 'n' roll rackets, and the first of these comes from Lilygun. Playing with a muso-ish confidence, it's clear that here's a band which places top value on professionalism, musicianship, and suchlike solid virtues. Which is all very fine, but unfortunately the music is entirely conventional drivetime AOR, and not even the band's assurance and casually impressive skills on the planks 'n' drums can make up for the fact that the resulting sound is hardly the stuff of breathless excitement. The vocalist, her hair extensions aswirl, has an easygoing charm and a voice as powerful as it is meticulously controlled (she can peel a mean lick off a hollow-body electric, too), but the songs themselves are like an endless parade of mid-nineties Skunk Anansie album tracks: powerful in that teetering-on-the-edge-of-power-balladry manner, but always orthodox, and always, under that essential but ultimately spurious veneer of alternativeness, nice. Good background music for a pre-dinner spliff, maybe, but not the sort of stuff that's going to get the party started.

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The rock 'n' roll compass is unceremoniously wrenched in another direction now, as D.Monic shunt us into the cartoon-horror zone. They're no slouches themselves when it comes to plank-spanking prowess, but instead of a pleasant cruise into drivetime conventionality, we're launched, with a merry cry of 'Huuuurrrggghh!' into the world of no-shit metal mayhem. The odd thing about D.Monic is that although they dress up like they've been pulled through a Halloween party backwards, and although they screech and holler like Cradle Of Filth with the collywobbles, somewhere in the mish-mash of thrash and bash it's possible to hear some straight-up old school anthemic metal. It's as if the band couldn't decide whether they wanted to do Cradle Of Filth-style horrorshow freaking, or Metallica-style lighters-in-the-air anthems - so they do a bit of both. It almost works, but most of the time it just sounds like 'orrible noise to me. The vocalist, tarted up in a novelty horror shirt and PVC strides, his skin encrusted with zombie cosmetics, like Michael Jackson on a bad face day, leers and gurns at the fans down the front. Thus challenged, they leer and gurn right back. The bassist throws extravagant shapes, and the whole package somehow holds together even as the disparate influences try to haul it apart. Frankly, I'm glad when they finish, but if rampant metalnoize is your bag, D.Monic have a whole sack of the stuff for you.

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I recall, when I reviewed the recent album by Crud, I was rather lukewarm about it. To me, it sounded like the members of the band had been listening to a bit of Psalm 69 period Ministry - no, make that a lot of Psalm 69 period Ministry - and had decided to do some of that good ol' sample 'n' riff gubbins themselves. Which was fine, but for the fact that Ministry had already nailed the definitive version.

On stage, however, the mighty Crud machine rumbles far more effectively, and asserts far more of an individual identity. Notwithstanding the fact that they start with the opening sample from 'Jesus Built My Hot Rod' (just in case we hadn't spotted the band's primary influence), Crud waste no time in establishing their own credentials - as an almost surreal rock 'n' roll revue. The show is soundtracked by shuddering slabs of guitar, which collide with gonzoid vocals in a pot of simmering sleazoid soup. It's all low-slung rhythms and threatening thunder. Not sophisticated stuff, for sure, but that's hardly the point. Crud would probably shrug and say that sophistication is for goddamn pantywaists. Maybe that hot rod sample wasn't so gratuitous after all, for if Crud were a motor vehicle, they'd be a '70s muscle car - all brute force and noise. The guitar blasts like a drainpipe exhaust, while the basslines feature plenty of open-string action, for that down-home V8 thunder.

But it's the visuals that make the show. Controlling the stage like a low life Hunter S. Thompson (who wasn't exactly high life himself, of course), lead vocalist Vin E. strides through the mayhem in a comedy hat with devil horns attatched, and yet somehow retains an authoritative cool. Co-vocalist Danielle Arsenault, wearing minimalist fishnet and not much else, is the queen of the Crudsville cathouse. Some impromptu onstage antics by a posse of horror nurses (who had actually come with D.Monic, but were instantly converted to the Crud cause) are seamlessly incorporated into the show, and the whole thing ends up as such a gloriously gung-ho celebration of degenerate rock 'n' roll that I half expect Sherriff Rosco P. Coltrane to appear in the doorway and make a bust. Well, Jesus might have built the Hot Rod, but the Crud gang have hot wired it and they're out there pulling doughnuts on the freeway.

Essential Links: Crud: MySpace D.Monic: Website | MySpace Lilygun: Website | MySpace   For more photos from this gig, find the bands by name here.