ULU August, 2007

This feels like a bit of a trip back to my teens tonight. It promises to be a night of heavy riffs, spine shattering drums and ear bleeding vocals. Hell, I might even mosh! I am here at the dreadful ULU venue in London tonight to catch Sparta, This City, and possibly the worst named band ever, Cat the Dog. But it is a very exciting prospect as all three bands are breathless on record and promise the same live, with high octane chords and dizzying speed, just as metal really should be.

This City open up the show and break into a pulsating sweat almost from the first note. Every band member absorbs the sound they are themselves creating and feeds it straight back into their instrument with a tremendous fervour. The singer, Chris, is clenching onto his mic as if it’s his final chance of clinging onto his sanity, frequently wrapping the cable round and round his fist like a loose noose in anticipation of the strain. At times, he is vocally reminiscent of Cedric Bixler-Zavala (At The Drive In), but within the tighter confines of a more structured and concise collection of sounds. The guitars are very sharp and focused with the rhythm section thundering along in what is a refreshingly tight but passionate performance.

The songs are very user-friendly and instant with great hooks and melodies, while the band delivers them with a menace that you would normally associate with bands who have just escaped years of enforced childhood in a shithole, rather than one from the more free-thinking surroundings of Brighton. Ultimately, This City is a very good young band with so much promise to capitalise on, with the sound owing more to their American contemporaries than those in the UK; they stand out here and are very likely to be warmly welcomed over there.

Ok, so I personally think that Cat the Dog is a terrible name for a band, and to be honest, the first song did little to make me think that it wasn’t actually appropriate for the music coming through the PA. However, all of a sudden another singer called Chris pulls his red hooded top over his head and suddenly remembered who and where he was. The band transformed from shoe-gazing boredom into a thrilling, hectic and utterly engaging live act. They manage to inject the best parts of every genre of rock into each song and come out still sounding fresh and unique. There is a real feeling of a raw unpolished gem of a band here, with great value placed on delivering the heart of the songs through emotion rather than technical perfection. Most of the songs are grungy, but new grunge rather than the copycat crap that most other bands excrete on us nowadays. The band have discovered the key to great rock songs and unlike their peers, have stuck to the simple principle of short and sharp songs, and particularly in the live performance setting. This may be why the idiotic security supervisor at the venue stopped photographers after only one song, claiming there had been three (standard gig photo rules, first three, no flash), but that is another story and I think more a sign of his stupidity. But back to the band, and they tear through an unusually diverse style of songs during their short set, reminding me of a great band from yesteryear who never quite made it, called Nojahoda.

The styles sweep through grunge, alt country, thrash to almost pop ballad at one stage, but thankfully they snarl and tear the stage up before they actually make the crowd and themselves sick. And finally we get to the end of the set, and how does it all end? Mid-song the singer just simply stops, raises his guitar high above his head and launches it at the drum kit and without so much as a sideways glance or thanks, he is gone, absolutely fucking brilliant, I loved that part more than any other live moment this year. The rest of the band just stop, all looking a little confused and follow almost upset that they didn’t get to finish, or it could be that they didn’t think of it first…

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Sparta are the big boys tonight. They ooze class and experience and stomping great rock tunes of the variety that break onto mainstream radio every now and then. Their latest album is crammed full of instant classics and they have a real conviction in their performance even before they have struck the first chord. They look like a bunch of nice guys you’d like to have a pint with down the pub, but with the odd cheap looking tattoo and the ferocity of the support acts, we know this is going to have to be brutally heavy and bloody good to warrant the headline. And sure enough, we are nothing but impressed from the second they explode into opening track, ‘Untreatable Disease’. The guys are intense and perfectly in tune with one another.

The main difference between these guys and the previous acts is experience. Sparta has played huge shows around the world and has also served their time in the shitholes of the live circuits around the US (and probably the rest of the world). What is really interesting about Sparta is that although they do very heavy very well, they actually do slightly quiet just as well. They almost feel more polished the heavier they get and when they quiet down a little on songs like ‘Erase it Again’ and the absolutely superb ‘Unstitch Your Mouth’, they stand there with an air of real sincerity and soul that you just can’t be realised in the heavier songs. The crowd are almost stalking the band in their devotion and I lost track of the number of people just gazing adoringly at their heroes and singing along to every word. The intensity of the show is made all the more hypnotic when they follow up the slower songs with more pounding tracks like ‘Taking Back Control’, creating a wave of highs and lows that compliment each other perfectly. The set is crammed full of an even mix of old and new, with the same youthful enthusiasm applied to all the songs (as if it is the first time they have ever played them). As they return for the obligatory encore they thunder into ‘Cut Your Ribbon’ and generate mass hysteria and crowd singalong. Final song, ‘Atlas’, ends with the singer, Jim, alone and perched on the edge of the stage leading the crowd in an acapella finale of the song, and then he is gone.

The crowd interaction has been poor throughout the evening, with Jim (Sparta) actually excusing this as a problem with accents. I suppose when the music is this good and delivered with such gusto it shouldn’t really matter. But I’m quite drawn to artists who want to connect personally with each and every individual, and am in awe of those who actually manage to achieve it. It brought back memories of my earliest metal gigs as a teen, and has given me a new enthusiasm to go and seek out some more modern metal to see exactly what the kids are moshing to nowadays. Next time I might even get in there and mosh with them…