Turn Off The Sun / Wilder/ (silver) souvenirs @ The Flapper, Saturday 30th October 2010

Sam from Wilder...giving it some welly

Whooooo Halloween. Spooky. Time to spike your ‘candy’ with LSD and watch the kiddiewinks trip their little socks off. Not that I’d do such a thing of course. Tonight The Flapper resembled the set of a particularly fucked up zombie movie. Oozing wounds, deathly make up, limbs hanging limply...so, just a normal Flapper crowd then really. Boom boom.

(silver) souvenirs kicked things off with a nicely chilled semi acoustic set (the result of an absent drummer...no doubt he’d had his brain eaten by one of the undead). Clearly this ain’t what they sound like normally but their anthemic material actually suited the acoustic treatment pretty well, giving the lead singer’s voice more of a chance to shine than on the meatier drum driven tracks I’ve listened to online. Still, you can’t beat a bit of drum can you...well actually you can but...oh never mind.

Next up Wilder, coming straightoutta Brizzle (that’s Bristol if you’re not down wiv der kidz like me) are another of those delicious twitchy indie bands happily munching away on the whole pop sandwich, embracing everything from the Smiths to...er...Haircut 100. Hell, it works for me. They kicked of the set with Girls vs Boys, a rallying call to dem yoot chock full of simple synths, cow bells and naggingly insistent choppy guitars. With shades of Vampire Weekend in there it’s a cracking track, prompting at least one or two of the zombies to twitch along...although that might just have been a nasty attack of the maggots. Another undoubted set highlight was the pairing of TBT, which twists and turns into a sort of glam version of Krautrock (and is that a Smiths riff in there too?), swiftly followed by recent single, the vocodertastic slice of awesome that is Skyful Of Rainbows. Full marks for the best use of the word ‘Wooooooohhh’ since The Kaiser Chiefs predicted a riot. Hubba.


Hey hey we're the monks...see...Turn Off The Sun in da hood

Finally tonight, the suitably named (given the fact that the bloody clocks are changing tonight so it gets dark just after lunch...grrrrr) Turn Off The Sun. They’re a local (local to Birmingham anyway...not local if you’re reading this in Albania) band with an indie rock vibe. Tonight they’d made a real effort to scare the bejesus out of us all by dressing up as...monks. Yes, monks. The most terrifying creatures known to man. Aggghhhhh!!! Happily they didn’t treat us to a half hour long Gregorian chant (that would’ve been truly terrifying) preferring instead to deliver what professional reviewers would no doubt call a “high octane set of rock classics”. Hmmm, that sounds quite good, I’ll stick with that. Pick of the set was ‘Lay That Ghost To Rest’, kicking off with an ‘Eton Rifles’ style guitar riff and pounding drums it’s the sort of full on track that Foo Fighters would be proud to call their own. If that gets your juices flowing Turn Off the Sun could well be habit forming...habits...monks...geddit? Yes, you’re right. Not funny.