Perth Music

Wednesday 14th November, 2007
The Foundry, Cannington
Regurgitator
New Pants
I Heart Hiroshima

The Foundry isn’t my favourite live music venue with all of the pillars that block just about every angle of the stage and the bar that takes up half of the entire venue space, but tonight they were host to a fantastic gig that had just about everything. It was great to see Regurgitator back on the live stage after releasing their sixth album, Love & Paranoia and they brought two great bands along to join the fun.

I Heart Hiroshima were on nice and early to a smallish crowd but showed plenty of enthusiasm within their poppy songs. The band definitely have a unique sound with a drummer singer, two guitarists and no bass and this can sometimes confuse the audience with a sound that they are not used to. Drummer Susie Patten kept up the friendly banter between songs but the crowd just seemed like they just weren’t ready for the sounds of I Heart Hiroshima besides their valiant efforts.

Next up were Chinese rock/pop/disco band New Pants, and just their presence on stage increased the crowd interest ten-fold. It only took one or two songs for the dance floor to start to get filled and for smiles to appear on many faces. While the band is a threesome with no drummer, each song they played had a solid drum beat thanks to sampling done by all members. Sometimes it was hard to understand exactly what was being said during or in between songs but when you could, it was a lot of fun (a couple of examples are lead singer Peng Lei asking the crowd “You Like China?” and the band and audience singing in unison “D-I-S-C-O” over and over).

The band everybody was revved up to see were on next and it had seemed like a lifetime ago The Gurge had last played in Perth. As they came on stage to a thunderous reception, Ben Ely proudly announced that this was the first time the band had ever played at a Westfield shopping center and that it was great to see everybody at the gig after finishing their shopping. Ben, Quan, Peter and newcomer on keyboards Seja Vogel launched directly into new single Blood & Spunk and they sounded just as they did ten years ago. A few other new songs were played including Romance Of The Damned, a duet with Vogel that, with synchronized dance moves, just stopped short of being cheezy. A whole lot of older songs were also played as well including I Sucked A Lot Of Cock To Get Where I Am, FSO, Track 1, Everyday Formula, Song Formerly Known As, a rocking version of I Will Lick Your Asshole, Modern Life, I Wanna Be A Nudist, Hullabaloo, The Drop, Black Bugs (that started to lead into Sweet Child O Mine), The Drop and crowd favourite Kung Foo Sing. The night may have sounded like the eighties and felt like the nineties but one thing was for sure: after a night like tonight everybody went home with a smile on their face.

For more info on Regurgitator visit www.regurgitator.net
For more info on New Pants visit www.myspace.com/beijingnewpants
For more info on I Heart Hiroshima visit www.ihearthiroshima.com

Love & Paranoia is out now.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 11:48 am and is filed under Gig Reviews, Touring, 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.