The Dead Famous Live In London!!

Hello one and all!

Welcome back and after a short holiday break from writing, I’m back! Let get straight onto business;

Last year, I discovered a new band called The Dead Famous. Straight away, I knew I was onto something big – their drummer, Dan Heatherton, had previously been in Elliot Minor (a great band!) and their lead singer, James Matthews, was formally in Go:Audio (again, another great band!). So they had experience in making music: they weren’t musical ‘noobs’ you could say. Quite early on after forming, they released ‘superstar’ to great success but sadly haven’t released anything else since then other than the occasional YouTube video.

This is where it gets interesting though… Last week they announced a small, one-off gig for the next Monday. Somehow, I managed to get my hands on tickets to the event and quite simply, it was great! It was in a cosy upstairs room in a pub called paradise in Kensal Green, London.

It was being filmed for an MTV show called Plain Jane (being broadcast in October) and the lads were going to play a short but energetic four song set for us. They stormed through the first two songs with ease before announcing that the third song was to be their new and upcoming single ‘Hide your Halo’! This was the first time anyone had known what song the single was going to be so it was very exciting stuff! It was a very impressive song – I’m glad they chose it as in my humble opinion, it has that special ‘zing’ that a debut single needs – you know what I’m on about? Well anyway, they then moved onto the infamous ‘Superstar’ which the crowd loved and nearly everyone in the tiny upper room seemed to be singing along to; It was great to be a part of! Overall, the evening was great fun and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves!

I recommend checking out some of The Dead Famous’ songs at the YouTube page here as they really are a great band with a lot of talent!

In the next instalment of Cein’s Music Corner, I have an exclusive interview with Glasgow rockers ‘Arches’ – so stay tuned!

Cein.

Wireless Festival 2012

Hello all and welcome to the first official post of the blog! Today I’ll be reporting back on all of the mayhem that is Wireless Festival’s dance day! I’ll basically be going through each of the acts I saw on the day and telling you all about them! This is a basic format of what I will do for all future gigs but if you don’t like it and have some constructive criticism for me I would be more than happy to hear all and any feedback (positive feedback is great too!).

I’m also going to do a ‘C’ or ‘Cein’ Factor for each band to show you what they were like. This is going to be out of five. So a top notch band would be CCCCC while a not so good band would be C. Understand? I hope so…

PLEASE NOTE: This is my opinion and doesn’t in any way relate to the official opinion of anyone else. So please please don’t be offended – you have been warned.

Anyway, on with the show! Myself and a friend arrived at Hyde Park where the festival takes place very early on in the day – too early in fact as we were left waiting around for an hour and a half until the first act went onstage! However, we managed to find ourselves at the very front of the ‘Pepsi Max’ or ‘Second’ stage.

The first act on was Childish Gambino. Average. A bit less than average to be honest. They had enthusiasm but the song quality just wasn’t there unfortunately. I’m going to rate them C as there was potential but they seemed to be lacking some key features a good band needs – good music.

After Childish Gambino, came the bass heavy set of Modestep! I had expectations but they blew them out of the water! They managed, in a 30min set, to play 5/6 of their good quality songs and many covers and remix’s spanning The Prodigy, Chase and Status, Skrillex, Doctor P and DJ Fresh. It was a very impressive set indeed! Throughout their set, their keyboardist kept throwing out t-shirts to the crowd which gave me the impression they actually love their fans and will do anything to please them – even giving out free stuff! I’m going to rate Modestep CCC as from an audience perspective, I was blown away and would definitely recommend seeing them. If you’re going to Reading Festival this year, they’re playing the Dance tent on the Saturday so go give them a watch!

The next set… Well… Words can’t really describe how dreadful Santigold’s performance was. No… Maybe that is being a bit overly harsh, fans of *that kind of music* would enjoy her but she seemed out of place on that stage. Throughout her set their was a failed stage invasion, men dressed up as horses being whipped and multiple dress changes by Santigold herself. If anything, it was rather humorous to watch. For Santigold, unfortunately she’s earns herself a NO C rating as I didn’t like any of her set.

Next was the almighty Feed Me! Now I had quite low expectations as I’d only heard one or two songs but he literally blew me away. I was gobsmacked. Yes, I said it. Gobsmacked. His set layout consisted of this giant teeth layout. Basically, imagine panels that are layed out and connected to each other in the image of a mouth so that the panels look like teeth. Ah, theres no way I can explain this to you – so let me show you. Please have a watch of this video.. The best part in the set was his encore of ‘Trapdoor’ – the crowd was so intense! I’m going to rate this set CCCC as it truly was an unforgettable experience – Feed Me is also at Reading Festival, playing on the Saturday with Modestep so I urge you to go along and see him!

Then the Pepsi Max headliners came on. Their time had come. THE Knife Party! If you didn’t know, Knife Party is a side project by Gareth and Rob from Pendulum and their music is great (well, I think so…). They played every song of theirs I know of. Their set was so diverse and varied is was incredible – crowd favourites were ‘Internet Friends’, where the infamous lyrics ‘You Blocked me on Facebook and now you’re going to die’ were shouted by all in attendance, Knife Party’s remix of Porter Robinson’s ‘Unison’ also went down extremely well as well as the encore of ‘Destroy Them With Lazors’. In all honest truth, this has got to be one of the most brilliant sets I’ve ever seen from anyone and that’s saying quite a lot. So for this, I’m giving Knife Party CCCCC as they thoroughly deserve it.

After Knife Party ended, we hurried over to the Main Stage where Deadmau5 had already started his headline set. Unfortunately, because we had missed five or so minutes, we couldn’t get anywhere near the front but we finally found an area not too far back where the atmosphere was chilled. His set has these massive cubes floating around the stage with projections on them as well as one central even bigger cube in which Deadmau5 himself resides during his set. During the set, Sofi (a guest singer) came out to perform a couple of songs for the crowd. Joel (Deadmau5’s real name) had no idea she was going to do this and was so shocked he came down from his cube and came to see her! He even took off his infamous head – it was one of those ‘I was there’ moments. One of my favourite songs was ‘Complicated’ but my highlight had to ‘Strobe’. For anyone that knows me well, I even did my infamous ‘Out Of Space’ dance to it (if you haven’t seen this dance, ask me to show it to you!). It’s such a calm song to dance to and one of my favourite all time ‘choons’. I’m going to give Deadmau5 CCCC as I think his performance was great, however I personally found that Knife Party were the better act and outshone Deadmau5 by quite some way.

So, that was the day. It was incredible and thoroughly worth the money (hehe, I joke – I actually won the tickets in a competition!). Now I’d like to share with you another opinion of the day from my friend who came with me, Daniel. Here’s what Daniel had to say say about Wireless (WARNING: there is swearing in the following paragraph):

“There are many ways in which I could describe Friday at Wireless Festival 2012, but I think that FUCKING IMMENSE is the best way to describe it. Seriously though, the day was incredible and I can safely say that it is THE BEST gig I’ve ever been to!! This year was the second time I’ve been to Wireless, last year being headlined by the amazing Chemical Brothers with support by The Streets, Alex Metric and CHASE AND FUCKING STATUS. However, the headliner this year who immediately won me over was none other than Deadmau5. From when we arrived at Hyde Park we decided to stay at the Pepsi Max Stage (which in my opinion had the best acts). The day started with the…unique Childish Gambino. He was then followed by the pleasant surprise that was Modestep’s incredible 30 min set, in which they managed to remix The Prodigy’s ‘Out of Space’ and Cee-lo Green’s ‘Fuck You’ as well as cover songs by Skrillex and Doctor P. I can tell from their set that they are going to be BIG. After that we had to stand there and allow our eyes to burn from witnessing the monstrosity that was Santigold. I’m not going to go into any details; all I’m going to say was that it involved a horse and rope. After that the Pepsi Max Stage only got better as we were soon treated with a set from Feed Me. Although I only knew a few of his songs, I was still impressed by his performance, especially of his song ‘Trapdoor’ featuring Hadouken. And then…Knife Party. One of the most anticipated acts of the day completely exceeded ALL expectations and the crowd was absolutely mental!! I also have reason to believe that it was probably their biggest set, considering that they played pretty much ALL of their songs, including a rare performance of their remix of Porter Robinson’s ‘Unison’. Then by the time we arrived at the Main Stage to see deadmau5 we were already completely knackered, so we picked a spot quite far away from the main crowd and chilled as we allowed the mau5 to end a perfect day. Hats off to you, Barclaycard, for pulling off another sick festival – high hopes for next year!!”

That’s all from me for now folks, please leave a comment and tell me what you think! Next time, I’ll be focusing on what the best albums have been from the year so far!

Until next time,
Cein.

To get things started…

Hello! And welcome to my blog!

Many of you will know of my previous blog which, well, fell apart over time and unfortunately I have had to abandon it. However I’m back! And better than ever!

So, some of you may be thinking ‘what’s this blog going to be about?’. Well, put bluntly… Music. I’ll do my best to introduce you to new bands and new music! I’ll also be sharing my experiences from going to gigs with you, so that you can feel like you were almost there!

I also plan on having many guest writers do segments for this blog so keep an eye on who could be writing here soon!

I think that’s all for now, I just wanted to say hi to you all and introduce the blog. Also, I’m fortunate enough to be going to Wireless Festival in Hyde Park on Friday so will tell you all about it on Saturday! Keep an eye out!

Until then,
Cein.