Shout Out Louds Live¶
483 words on Live
I started the weekend with a trip to Berlin. To visit Claus, meet Jörg, do some shopping and see the Shout out Louds and the Magic Numbers play at Magnet club which is just down the road from where Claus lives – yet we never got round to going there so far.
Shout Out Louds
The Shout Out Louds are yet another one of the cool Swedish bands in the world.
I first ran across their fantastic song Please Please Please and then went down the road to further addiction and became quite keen to see them play live. Hence being able to see them as the support band was great – although we arrived a little late because our dinner took a little longer than expected and the gig actually started when it was supposed to, so we missed the first few songs.
From their looks, the band didn’t quite meet my expectations. A bit old-school in comparison to all the other current Swedish bands. But they still played music and it was good. Rougher than it sounds on CD (which should be considered typical… but I find many bands to be playing very cleanly recently) and looking less cool with all the guys having their guitars/bass hanging too far up to look relaxed. But having a female keyboarder / second singer made up for that.
In total, their playing was very enjoyable and a bit too short. Particularly compared to that of The Magic Numbers afterwards. But to take some more of them home, I at least got myself a 7” and some buttons.
The Magic Numbers
But The Magic Numbers were the main act at this gig. Their music seemed solid to me so far but I didn’t particularly like it.
So when they played at Haldern this year in parallel to The Coral, choosing the latter was easy for me. And now there was an opportunity to catch up.
In and after Haldern I heard people describe The Magic Numbers’ music as hippie music
. While, strictly speaking, I consider this inadequate for a lack of hippies these days, they may be the logical development of hippie music to our days. Not too offensive, nice sounds, and by that I mean good playing and a phantastic female singer, and being more overweight than I’d like to see people on stages. They weren’t very tall either, so actually seeing them from half-way down the room was a bit tricky at times.
And while I still don’t like their music too much, I have to say I enjoyed the playing at most stages. The sound was good and they seemed to be both enjoying the playing and having an audience (which even included a sizeable English fan block, it seemed). In total, it was a little bit too long perhaps, with some of the slower songs being stretched too much.
