Kings of the Stone Age

And so it came to pass that I enjoyed Saturday night rock thrills courtesy of Night With No Name. I arrived at Rock City a bit later than anticipated, just in time to see first band Phoenix Down finishing up. So, there I was, soaking up the forthcoming Burning Brides album (a cheeky bit of promotion for their upcoming NWNN gig, Mr DJ!) and wondering how the hell Rock City manage to make their Pepsi taste so fucking awful, when on came one of the oddest bands I've seen in a long while, Dureforsog (there are a couple of umlauts in there somewhere). Even three days on, I'm still not entirely sure what I made of them. They're Danish fruitloops, and played a sort of elasticated and surrealist post-punk, the singer wandering around in a daze clutching a bunch of balloons and howling intermittently. It might just be that I've been listening to Q And Not U lately, but they're the only band that even vaguely sprang to mind. The prevailing emotion amongst the audience was, I think, bewilderment.

Headline act Cave In, an unusual band in themselves, were an altogether more comprehensible prospect. This, I think, was especially evident in the material showcased from forthcoming record (and major label debut) Antenna. Tracks like 'Anchor', 'Youth Overrided' and 'Penny Racer' show that they've come a long way since their hardcore screamo days, and it's not that hard to see why Dave Grohl likes them so much - these songs are fairly short, fairly straightforward, muscular and melodic, following on from the likes of 'Brain Candle' from last full-length album Jupiter. But, it has to be said, not all that impressive. Fellow newies 'Joy Opposites' and 'Inspire' (Stephen Brodsky was begged for this by an internet bootlegger at the front) are more wholesome, but, for sheer depth and density, 'Come Into Your Own', 'Dark Driving' (both from last year's Tides Of Tomorrow mini-LP) and last year's single 'Lost In The Air' are a class apart. These longer drawn-out affairs are when Cave In are at their most interesting, because it's here that they really play with fire, performing almost impossible pirhouettes between post-hardcore and prog, and consequently it's here that the threat of failure and collapse is most real. Sure, sometimes it doesn't work, and the call to suspend disbelief goes unheeded - but then you can't fault them for being ambitious and audacious. Fittingly, the encore of 'Big Riff' steals the show, alternately drifting and bulldozing like all their best material, loud enough to leave me to stagger outside with a buzzing static headache. There are perhaps only two other bands that I've heard in the last year or so who are performing the same inventive experiments on rock and who actually ROCK: Queens Of The Stone Age and Sparta.

(Spooky coincidence: bassist Caleb Scofield was wearing the same F-Minus T-shirt (green lettering with a green AK-47 underneath) as guitarist Aaron North from practically the last band I saw in Rock City's Disco II, The Icarus Line. And I was wearing the Icarus Line T-shirt I bought at that gig...)