Haunted House Party, To My Boy, Tax Collectors @ Gagarin 205
free translation from the article of Elias Pyknadas (17/11/2007)
Gagarin 205 seemed like a haunted house...
The first night of of Sonic Playground at Gagarin 205, a very ambitious effort that wasn't rewarded as it should have, took place in the presence of 150 people that became less and less as time was passing by.
Instead of being carried away from all these new bands and their fresh sound - even if this is a contradiction in itself if you consider that the scottish headliners of the night, Haunted House Party, have a style based on retro-analog sound - we consumed our time discussing the usual: ...."If we don't have even a half-decent radiostation how can people know these bands?", "and even if we did would Gagarin ever be a full house with this line-up?", "...ok then where should they play, are there any serious alternatives to that?", "are we living in our own little imaginary world where no-one has a sense of reality?", "Does Nick (Triantafyllou) have money to burn?", "Let's see how many of us are gonna be here for the Selfish Cunts!", "If it's like this when of Montreal play I'm going to fall in deep depression". As you can understand everything else we said was along the same lines of "optimism".
Other than that the 15th of November left us the following impressions:
The Tax Collectors raised a few eybrows, had their moments, their fans, had done their homework on their, much-neglected by greek bands, style and appearance, and the ball remains on their half of the field. We shouldn't forget that they are a very young band - they were founded within 2007- and a couple of songs showed some of their qualities making them one of the new musical propositions that Athens has to offer. As such we will be following the way they will evolve.
To My Boy brought the fresh sound of Liverpool in Athens but as people living in this city we seem to prefer watching Dimoutsos than Gerrard (comment of the translator: "Kato ta heria apo to Dimoutso!" hehe). Laptops, sequencers, synths, pre-recorded loops and the two nenbers of the band hugging their guitar/bass and jumping around. A lot. Non-stop. Terms like nu-rave and other nonesense written in NME get out of the picture and give its place to a crazy robotic music wave from two nerdy boys whow seem to have studied the traditition of Kraftwerk and consecutively to have applied it to the Myspace generation which has as its top friends groups like The View and The Knife.
As for the end... The 60-odd people who hadn't left yet, enjoyed more of a Haunted House rather than a Party, even if the Scottish electropranksters did their best. It was a trip back to the 80s, to Ibiza, with eurothrash rythms and multi-coloured t-shirts. It was actually meant to be music for a sweaty party in the Meteorit, but unfortunately not the best case for an almost empty Gagarin. What a waste of bpms...
