452 words on Live
A topic that I’ve moaned about many times here is the sheer boredom that is manifest in Göttingen. Despite all the students there’s not a lot happening in the small town. In particular, there are very few bands coming to play. So it was nice to have at least the third band playing in town this year with it only being February. The band in question was Labrador from Denmark.
A quick preliminary investigation of their web site suggested that they’re doing slightly mellow pop music which isn’t entirely my taste but which I wouldn’t mind to hear. So I went to the gig in a small club in town with Michi and Tina. It was announced to start at ten, but as things usually go this meant they wouldn’t start before eleven (which sucks a bit in the middle of the week). So, surely enough, when we arrived there around twenty past ten, we were almost the first people there. And while the people who had been there before us decided to leave again to have a drink elsewhere until things began, we just had a drink there – avoiding to go out into the rain once more. It became a rather long drink and people starting arriving slowly with the gig eventually beginning around half past eleven.
And when it started, we were a bit disappointed. To begin with, the mixing wasn’t good at all. We couldn’t hear the guitar at all, the singing sounded bad (although, I suspect that this was in part due to the singers’ competence) and the only instrument we could hear well was the bass. Unfortunately, the band didn’t have a bassist but had a little machine do that job for them. In addition to the guitarist/singer, the keyboarder/singer and the drummer, they had a guy playing the trumpet, which seemed to be the only actual instrument that was properly mixed (or that just happened to be loud enough to be heard despite not being mixed well).
I guess, the trumpet made the band somewhat unique. But unfortunately they didn’t make much use of that. For example, the trumpet guy was just standing around doing nothing at times, while the keyboarder played some melodies with some brass-like voices at the same time. It seemed like all that wasn’t thought through too much yet. In addition, the music was really boring in places with Why does nobody listen? that can be downloaded from their website being clearly one of the most exciting pieces.
I wasn’t too impressed. Yet, people happily (?) applauded to get a total of three encores. I’m not a big fan of encores anyway, but in this case I found them wholly unwarranted.