Alex Dodd
With South African music getting slicker and slicker by the minute, the competition’s been stiff. Which local band would get the gig? Which group would be selected to support two of the biggest party bands in the world on their upcoming tour to South Africa?
The promoters are still not coming clean, but it looks like they’ve gone for the option of two bands, instead of allowing fewer talents to bask repeatedly in the spotlight. In the absence of a 100% stamp, the current most likely contenders are Fetish (for the Cape Town gig) and Battery 9 (Durban and Johannesburg).
Judging by the intense and relentless (in the best possible way) lineup plenty carriages are likely to turn into pumpkins on the big night. Apart from the headliners, expect two local DJs and two internationals – Heavy G who opens for Prodigy worldwide and Sister Bliss from Faithless doing her own thing solo.
In keeping with adrenaline-fuelled mood of the night, Battery 9 are a noisy and energetic Gauteng-based outfit with a raw, industrial feel and a bad enough attitude to be taken seriously in the dark. This is the band that makes a remix sound like an overhaul, never shying away from brutal reinvention. Also big on the audiovisual front, Battery 9 have earned themselves quite a rep for their intense and confrontational live acts that have included scrap metal percussion, live action painting and a severely edited schlock horror movie backdrop.
Battery 9 is the brainchild of Paul (not a shy boy) Riekert, who writes the songs and makes the CDs – most notably Gris (1997) and Wrok (1998). On stage he’s accompanied by At Nel (sampler) Huyser Burger (canvas, vocals) and Arnaud van Vliet (guitar).
People started taking Fetish seriously towards the end of last year when they became the first South African band to be signed by Virgin. And, judging by their newly released EP, Shade of a Ghost, there was no fly-by-night fluke involved. If ever there was a local band in the rock/progressive dance fold to crack it big beyond the equator then I’d put my rands on Fetish.
Michelle Breeze sings like a dream – and a nightmare – rolled into one. She has all the conviction and guts of a Tori Amos or a Mazzy Star that hits home in her dark and brooding bass registers (Once heard, who can forget that addictive mantra from the title track Shade of a Ghost: “Get out of my head/Get out of my fucking head.”)
At times Dominic Forrest and Jeremy Daniels’s heavy guitars and Ross Campbell’s driving drums sweep you up in a frenzy of wild rock abandon. But the band’s strength lies in their tight and disciplined return to a simpler clearer kind of sound: the gentle pings of David Fiene’s keyboards set against Breeze’s breathy spasms and a soulful looping chorus.
Fetish’s uniqueness lies in the intensity of Breeze’s burningly personal lyrics and their subtle layerings of sound which are born more of a digital universe than a rock one. This combination can be felt most strongly in the second track of the EP, I Might Fall, in which Breeze sings: “Give me the strength to detoxify myself of negativity/Cause she heals/I breathe again/I am again/I live again.” An anthem in a drug-heavy time.