Live Music with Liz Crosthwaite
Liz Crosthwaite • Published 3 Mar 2011 18:00
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Dread Ye Nought
IT all got very Celtic at Sub89 on Sunday night. There were fiddles, whistles, and even sightings of squeezeboxes.
I only caught the final songs from Will Tun And The Wasters, but with their richly rough vocals and irrepressible stage presence, it was good preparation for what was to come. This wasn't going to be an eclectic night in terms of sounds, but it sure was going to be fun.
Dragging some of the last vestiges of weekend energy out of the sadly less than capacity crowd, local band Smokey Bastard deliver their folk punk tunes - which bring to mind something along the lines of Sham 69 and Flogging Molly having fisticuffs while Rancid place bets - in a cheerily shambolic fashion. They also sing songs about pirates, and one inspired by our dear hometown, with a 'wasteland' refrain, so extra points to them. Their set leaves people on a high, more buzzed up than anyone had a right to expect on a Sunday night.
...Which may be why Canadian polka punks, The Dreadnoughts, with their intentionally antagonistic style and clear insecurity over the size of the crowd, grate a little. Their music, full bodied, street punk, with hints of Gogol Bordello and The Pogues, calls for roaring singalongs and carefree jigs, but their stage banter just raises hackles. Not because of its try-hard, psuedo-offensiveness, but because for the amount of time they spend prattling on irritably about how unappreciative the audience are, they could be playing three more songs!
They have the tunes, the sea shanties and the ability to whip up a wall of death mosh out of only a couple of hundred people, but maybe The Dreadnoughts should make an attempt to reconcile their paradoxical desires. On the one hand, they appear to want to be revered as edgy folk punk standard-bearers by fawning audiences, while on the other, they seem to revel in being heckled by a crowd that they've goaded into hostility, in a cliched, worn-out homage to punk rock circa 1976. They've got energy in bucketloads, but those chips on their shoulders are just weighing them down.
This article appeared in Reading Chronicle 03 Mar 11
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