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Review: 'STERLING ROSWELL'S CALL OF THE COSMOS DUO'
'London, Vinyl Deptford, The Tea Bar, 17 July 2015'   


-  Genre: 'Indie'

Our Rating:
This was a rare sortie for me in to the depths of south East London. It's part of town I don't often go to much these days, unlike the late 80's and early 90's when I regularly saw all sorts of bands in the area. Still the last time I went to anything in this part of town I ended up naked and covered in gold paint(!) This show may have been a bit messy but nowhere near as messy as that!

Once I'd managed to find Vinyl Deptford up an alley off the main road, I was very glad of some nice beer from Whitstable and to find myself in a cool vinyl record shop with a small basement venue called The Tea-Bar. It's about the size of a double car garage with ceilings you can touch quite easily.

When I went down the stairs to see the main support act (whose name isn't on the gig invite and who on asking the singer what the band's name was he said it was really long and awkward so I really don't know what they were called). He'd promised to put it on the Facebook invite page but failed to do so. So if someone tells me who they were I will come back and add the correct band name. Otherwise they will remain the mystery support act.

As a mystery band they had managed to bring enough friends to fill the room nicely for the very loud, slightly spaced indie rock they were playing. The first song I caught with the chorus of "What you Say's" was pretty full on and angry. Get Together had a bit more love in it and the guitar really fizzed as they song built into cycles of almost psychedelic abandon. It had a good feel to it and some pounding drumming.

From where I was at the back, I couldn't tell how many people were playing but I think it was 3.Either way, the best song I heard was After The Deluge. It was built around some ostrich guitar noise mangling fused with rumbling bass and solid drumming. It was great and the freak out bits worked really well. They finished with a slow building song which didn't work but whoever they are they have decent potential to build on the following they already have and are also very young so they have some time to get their thing together.

After the break it was time for the first show by Sterling Roswell's new band. Only one member was missing from this show so it was a duo rather than a trio as Sterling was joined by Kevin Hayes on drums who is currently best known as the drummer in Steve Diggle & The Revolution Of Sound and is not to be confused with Robert Cray's drummer of the same name.Which is why he sometimes calls himself Strangely Haze these days.

They are playing a few warm up shows before they play at the Convenanza festival in Carcassonne at the end of September.

So of course they are not both playing drums. Kevin manned the traps and Sterling was on guitar and machines and effects as well as vocals. One of the machines was emitting tones before the start of the set to get us ready for lift off as it's tape loop went round and round and then with a couple of instructions to Kev from Sterling they were ready.

As they hadn't played with each other for at least 5 year and had no rehearsals, this was a bit of a leap in the dark as Kev's drums came crashing in and Sterling launched his guitar into the stratosphere for Radar Eyes played at what was deafening volume in this small room; repeating riffs nailing most of us to the walls or the spot as the intensity of the maelstrom of sound hit us all.

They then whipped up a full on Bo Diddley beat for Cameron's Brain which is sometimes also known as Donovan's Brain but in these troubled times the invective in the lyrics is spat into Cameron's eyes in the hope of turning him into a decent human being. That beat mauled our minds and fried us with reverb saturated space guitar that was the perfect invocation for some political sanity.

Our own sanity was tested by the acid fried tones of The Call Of The Cosmos as Kev's drums disintegrated under his pummelling. He was playing his ride cymbal upside down resting on his drum kit as it had leapt off his cymbal stand, but this didn't faze him at all and he just kept on whipping up a percussive storm capable of launching us out past Pluto and off to the far galaxies of our warped imaginations.

Venus Honey Dew (I think) was the song where the sound man strolled onto the stage to adjust the mixer pinned to the wall. That just seemed to up the reverb and distortion to another level.

Nobody Loves The Hulk went totally free form narcotic noise nihilism like they were jacking up on steroids to build the muscles to rip their clothes with. Only it was more like our minds were warping with the bending of the notes and Sterling's vocals. Then came the western mind collapse of Chamber Music it was more like asylum music as we climbed the walls of our by now tripped out brains at the colossal sound this pair were making.

They closed the set with Golden Hair. It felt like a trip to the asteroid belt as if we were about to sign up for a front row seat on an Asteroid speeding through space and just as the song really started to progress Kev's drums started to disintegrate. Rather than stop he just stood up and followed the drums around the stage as the sheer power of the vibrations they had created made them slowly move around. It was great to watch and it certainly added an extra dimension of intensity to this sonic assault they had been mounting for however long they had played. By this point, normal notions of time seemed superfluous to the madness of this incredible noise.

I look forward to seeing them perform with the third ex Spaceman soon and if you can catch them in Holland or France they are well worth the effort. Who knows: maybe next time Kev's drum kit will survive the whole set in one piece!
  author: simonovitch

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