…Sting like The Blonde Majority.

Biggest regret of the weekend was missing Le Galaxie open Butterfly Explosion’s highly-anticipated only Irish headliner of 2007 in Crawdaddy on Saturday. I was stuck in taxi-traffic from the Quays to Wexford Street and missed their set. Everyone I spoke to was blown away…get yourself to their next show, a Christmas extravaganza also in Crawd, with the similarly excellent Betamax Format on December 15th.
Instead I arrived in time for second support, The Blonde Majority, renamed since their days as Fair Verona.

When I saw Fair Verona in The Hub supporting Mocrac back in the bowels of ‘06 their set was cut short after four songs due to technical difficulties. Saturday’s performance had me wishing for the same.
Usually on watching a gig, the musical intention becomes clear after a few songs. Every band wants to drive home a lasting impression, a manifesto of sorts, outlining aims and aspirations to win your vote whether it’s via signature vocals, instrumental flare, zany stage-craft or lyrical dexterity. In this respect, The Blonde Majority seems confused: there’s a snippet of each quality inherent in the band but not enough to gel into a finished package. We were all geared up for a great night: Le Galaxie wowed the crowd before and everyone wanted to foot-tap and head-nod but TBM’s tunes were bland and the vitality of their precessors ebbed away by the third song. Their stage presence consisted of guitarist Aoife bunny-hop-twirling with her back to the crowd while bassist Karla occasionally mustered tentative steps across the stage from time-to-time. Considering huge reserves of new Irish talent all vy to cover new ground and find unique styles in order to diffrentiate and create a name for themselves, it feels harsh to describe this group as an instantly forgettable power-pop outfit equipped with sleek instruments, big hair and MOR lyrics but the band will need to find a wow-factor to really set them apart. The Blonde Majority seem to think that ability to play and sing grants the right to get on stage and that is where I see a problem: without a killer signature to captivate, they become filler. I’d love to see these girls succeed: Ireland is in desperate need of more females on stage, our gender is heavily outweighed in proving talented enough to command audiences’ attention and respect. With twee pop acts smothering the charts thanks to fashion taking precedence over talent, too-pretty girls in mini skirts raise hackles and have their work cut out to prove they have what it takes to make us think again and rock our socks off. Butterfly Explosion’s cult following of shoegazers stood motionless and unimpressed, their eyes riveted to the stage with nothing other than sex appeal. A friend murmured that they reminded him of Sleater-Kinney while the band cite their influences as The Strokes and Sonic Youth, yet there’s little semblence of riot-grrrl rawness or anthemic power-chords in The Blonde Majority, whose favourite number appeared to be We Got Fire. No ladies, you have a tealight. Find intellectual petrol, burn the plans and start again. Mind that long hair now….

Butterfly Explosion opened with their signature instrumental Carpark, darkly mesmerising, gearing us all into an expectant delirium of wonders to come. It seems unfair to be so effusive with praise in comparision to the harshness of Blonde Majority’s review but the bands were worlds apart on stage. Removed from BM’s generic guitar/bass/drums format, vocals are a lesser priority for Butterfly Explosion, who prefer to accentuate rhythmic harmonies, their drum’n'bass section almost gentle in comparision to twined guitars of Gazz and John, which creates a noisy maelstrom of sound to set the pulse racing in time to reverbating currents of keys and synth from inspiral frontwoman Sorcha Brennan.
As drumsmith Peter Savage’s last show with his band who’ve progressed to fluttering heights since their early inception in 2004, each beat hammered home their ‘06 EP Turn The Sky’s blistering tracks Sophia and Chemistry with extra depth and bittersweet finality. Certainly a taut celebration of Peter’s tenure mingled with sadness and tension on stage but as a makers of melancholodies, this served deeper emotion with Turn In You, Dream, *Untitled* and Automatic (demos of these new songs are available on the Butterflies’ Bebo), new material which BX have chosen to move forward into the next stage of their career, viewing this first home headliner of 2007 and final show of Peter’s as the end of a hugely busy year and the beginning of Chapter One, a new instalment of their career, positive, motivated and full of hope.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Music, Photography, Unsigned Bands, gigs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.