Another year, another Bandslam, another phase in the South African rock revival, another review from MALU VAN LEEUWEN …
ANOTHER Bandslam. Another five bands, another 1300 people, another six hours of exchanging sweat, smoke and beery conversation. Having your feet crunched by Arno Carstens as he pogos on your boots. Having to shout your bar order three octaves above Barney as he stirs the crowd into a rabid lather.
Another Bandslam, another review. What more is there to say about a formula that works? Except that, until now, it’s been a rawk extravaganza; any more of it and I’d be forced to say the South African music explosion honeymoon is over. At the moment it’s in that awkward curve of the rollercoaster: two hugely popular bands at the apex – Just Jinger and the Springbok Nude Girls – and all the struggling unknowns squatting beneath, waiting for the big ride to the top.
It’s a good thing Friday night is more generically adventurous; that the edges of the formula are becoming frayed. Still, nobody’s exactly pushing the envelope. Sure, No ID indulge in the luxury of risk and deliver a set that is almost exclusively instrumental. This is about ambience, texture and trance prog funk. They’re the first band up so the crowd is bemused. It stops being interesting when the crowd’s musical biological clock expires and boredom sets in.
Next. Shuttermouth. The hype precedes them and the front rows are a little more animated. They know the songs off the radio, the security fence in front of the stage feels the real pressure of flesh for the first time. Shuttermouth are all dressed in black and pale faces, very un- Cape Town. There are one or two beautiful songs, but where’s the drummer? The guitarist quips, “He couldn’t make it tonight.” Obviously they’ve had this criticism before. Seems like not too many people like watching a machine play live.
Give me Plum, give me ripe, juicy beats with that freeflow don’t-stop skank- rapping. More of that wannabe-black-white- boys’ noise; that hip-hop undercurrent tripping on Beastie Boys riffs; those sinewy guitar curdles stretching out lazily underneath the beat. It’s the stuff that puts the lead back in your pencil. At first I think I’m so seduced I’ve got double vision but it turns out the two lanky front men are cousins, not twins. And by the time the skank-rapping threatens to become tedious, it’s time for Nine.
For a band that many consider should have been a contender, it was a return to form. It’s clich territory: Nine cooked, they rocked, they had the crowd screaming song requests. Only vocalist Farrell Adams, with cheesy lounge shirt unbuttoned, could pull off the irony of unleashing Not Your Fault (about racism) on a mainly white audience. If the song has lost its political force through repetition the same argument could be applied to the rest of Nine’s material. The magic’s still there, but they need a new set.
Last: four men in black moon-unit suits. Urban detritus litters the stage. Metal, plastic, pneumatic springs, the latest in trash technology. Is this Live Jimi Presley with their angle-grinder tuned to C? No, Battery 9.
A beat. The security fence wobbles. Another shudder of beats. The security fence wobbles again, lunges forward. The beats detonate: Kiss The Machine shatters into 1 300 pairs of eardrums. Looks like the security fence is having an orgasm. Of course: music is sex and sex is dirty; scratchy noise pushing against a wall of hardbeats; a humanoid voice instructing you to “kiss the machine”. Later, it’s a canvas slashed with paint, a garbage barrel lacerated by a weed-eater device. You cut, you bleed: so what.
I’ve heard it said many times that Battery 9 are South Africa’s answer to Nine Inch Nails, but they’re more like an answer to an implicit, frustrated need for music that questions the comfort zone. Yet there’s none of the onstage fuck-you attitude so familiar to the so-called industrial genre and they don’t seem to buy into the ancillary culture of SM either.
In a way, that makes them different, but it’s not enough. After a while the ritual thump of synthesised beats spirals downward into monotony; Battery 9 could easily afford to manipulate the technological boundaries, transgress the dance frontier – and still get the security fence to tremble with desire.
— Malu van Leeuwen is the music editor of Student Life magazine