Fight Like Apes last Friday in Whelans, then. Suppose I better talk about that. I was hoping to get a photo from the man who spent THE ENTIRE GIG bumping his camera into me or standing completely rigid when everyone else in the place was dancing. I expect that they'd be pretty good, seeing as he took pictures of the same people from the same angle for nearly an hour. I kept planning to ask him to stop, but of course I never plucked up the courage. In my head, it went like this.
Me: "Hey, how much did you pay in to this?"
Him: Either "13 euro" or "I was on the guestlist"
Me: Either "Me too, please stop bumping your camera into me" or "I paid 13 euro, please stop bumping your camera into me."
Anyway, this is the kind of aside that used to annoy me about other blogs. But I had to say it, in case any prospective photographers are planning on getting all elbows around me in venues without photographer pits in future. Please somebody think of the punters.
Grand Pocket Orchestra were the support. They were pretty good on the whole. It was my first time seeing them with their new guitarist (and my second time seeing them ever) and they're pretty different. I mean, their songs are the same, but a lot of their tweeness gets lost under Mr. Second Guitarist's Marshall stack guitaring. They're still great though. Their "slow" song, Little Messy, is not actually slow. The whole thing is just breakneck twee rock (the rock bit is newish), and if the sound was A LITTLE better they would have killed it.
Then Fight Like Apes. This was the longest I've seen them play for, and most of the length consisted of SP-303 atmospherics and movie dialogue, and general messing around. I love messing around though. Fight Like Apes are in their groove at the moment. I remember reading some terrible music magazine like Q once, talking about the Rolling Stones going from strength to strength. I don't remember the context. But that's what it seems like for Fight Like Apes.
Phantom is all over them, even Herald AM are calling them gig of the week, anyone who cares about what's going on in Dublin knows that Fight Like Apes are what's going on in Dublin. They don't fuck around either. It doesn't matter where they are or who's there, they whack saucepans (which I assume Pockets now possibly known as Jamie also uses to cook his food, given the reasonable price of their gigs and CDs) and fall over and scream and pretend to be karate people and all kinds of things.
Do You Karate? has grown to rival Jake Summers as my favourite Fight Like Apes song, and though the new EP is marginally less good than the old EP, it's good to have more recorded stuff. The Mclusky cover fits so incredibly well into the rest of their stuff. It's good to be at a gig where a lot of other people are into it. I keep having premonitions that in twenty years saying"I saw Fight Like Apes in Dublin before their first album came out... three times and maybe more" will be like saying "I saw Joy Division in the Hacienda" or "I bought crack off Jay Z before he was a rapper".
Hopefully. It was a very good gig. I do hope they can write more great songs, and put out a fantastic album. Which I will buy, even though I have the first EP, the second EP, the first and second EP and the 7", because maybe if Jamie gets enough money to buy an SP404 he'll put his SP303 on eBay and I can buy it and pretend to be Panda Bear.
This review has been pretty flitty. There's another one from HWCH around as well though, so check out my more organised thoughts there. This one wasn't quite as good. Sorry. I hate being a cunt. But it wasn't. It was still very good though.
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