Einstellung / Kyte / Dead Fish / IO / Windscale The Rainbow Digbeth Friday 7th March 2008

Tonight Kamikaze's! 444 club took a turn for the more experimental, kicking off with Windscale. Not so much a band, more of an atmosphere. There didn't appear to be anyone on stage...but there was music...drone rock sound patchworks that made you feel a bit off your box. I do like feeling a bit off my box. As the music faded it was time to say hello to IO (nice link eh?). It says on their My Space page that you can use a number of words to describe them...post, metal, math and rock. So I will. IO are a post metal math rock time bomb. Just as you're settling down to some ambient guitar noodling they whack 7 shades of shit out of their instruments. It's like a war up there. Flailing limbs, mortar fire, Jeremy Bowen in a flack jacket, that women with the eye patch...guitars were invented for this kind of stuff. I think I'm going all metal in my old age...

After tending to the dead and dying, rather appropriately, Dead Fish took to the stage. Of all the bands on the bill Dead Fish were more my normal fare. Some nice funky basslines, blissed out drumming and that psychy kind of guitar playing. Halfway through their impressive set it struck me. They are the Post Rock Stone Roses. One of the men what records bands in the cupboard(hello Ashley)...the bands aren't in the cupboard, he is...agreed with me. So there we go. There are touches of classic Talk Talk in there too and, on standout track, Snobs, a healthy dash of the mighty Foals. All in all, my kind of Dead Fish...

Flying in, stage left, Kyte were on next. Musically I'm drawn towards Sigur Ros, delicate, textured music that sounds like it's made in another world. Kyte have a dreamlike quality, it makes you drift off a little, which is no bad thing in this live fast, pay later, 86 flavours of bagal culture that we seem to have made for ourselves. I keep wanting to resist saying the word ethereal, but it's a pretty unbeatable way to sum them up and, after a full on week, they and their music did me the power of good.

If Kyte took me to far away places, Einstellung brought me back down to earth with a crash. Several crashes. And a bang. A thump. A ruddy great clout. I think we can safely say that they're loud...but with the sheer force of volume comes melody, quite complex in places. It's like being spun around in a food processor whilst the ghosts of Hawkwind and various Krautrock superstars do their best to burst your eardrums and melt your brain into miso soup with a variety of musical weaponary. Again, as with IO, the band sucks you into false senses of security before spitting you out in a flob of noise. Despite being a mincing indie electro boy at heart, bands like Einstellung and the awesome Beestung Lips are dragging me over to the dark side. And, you know what, I quite like it.

An eclectic, quiet/loud, metal, drone rock, Krautrock, ethereal night of plenty then. Now, where did I leave my brain?