Good as Gold, Dec 13
Emerging from the grey area somewhere between The Strokes and Black Lips (as much a negative as it is a positive, given the amount of bands that could fit in there), Japanese Motors made a brief excursion down to our neck of the woods this weekend. After playing the Vice xmas party, they then played two shows here- one at Good as Gold at midday, and then again at Mighty Mighty that evening.
I managed to stumble out of bed for the GAG show, and I think everybody there (band included) gave and got exactly what they expected. As an aside, GAG worked quite well as a venue – sound was good, it wasn’t cramped, beer flowed, and there were good vibes all round. People were clearly either still drunk from Friday or ignoring their hangovers long enough to have a good time, which was AMAZING. The music? Well, Japanese Motors stuck to their modest guns nicely, jogging through 40 minutes of pretty bland surf-rock. As a band who’ve been jetted around the world by Vice, I think they’re probably aware that for them the party is more important than the music quality, and it seems to be an ethos they freely embrace. Lead singer Alex Knost twists and struts around like either Mick Jagger or someone REALLY needing to take a piss (while sporting a fringe directly plagiarised from Younis Phillipakis), and the rest of the band chill out and strut their chords out pretty effortlessly. The band hit their peak when they tempo lifted, and the doo-wop backing vocals brought the crowd out onto some sunny beach in SoCal (probably the one in their video for Single Fins & Safety Pins). It kinda fell when they announced that they were playing their favourite song so ‘you should nod your head or something’, then proceeded to delve into a banal dirge-esque number.
It was a really good time, if not a good show – but isn’t that what Japanese Motors are all about? For a band whose lyrics entail surfing, girls, and materialism, they delivered wholly on the aesthetic of good times surf-rock. I also imagine that given the right amount of alcohol, their show that night at Mighty was far superior- instore on a hungover saturday gave the show a bit of a fish-out-of-water context. Its just a shame that the best part of the show was when the bassist started playing ‘O Katrina’ between songs.
James Beavis
