The Red Sea, Bar 38 gig review

09/11/05

The Red Sea, Bar 38

Academy 3, 05/11/05

It is surprsising what sort of gigs as the editor / hack / editor / creator and lord only knows what else of Setting Sun I frequently end up.

Look at the last two ggis I have been to recently

Firstly, the mongolfier Brothers and secondly Bela Emerson.

Here are two acts that are as almost completely differenty as it is humanly possible.

Quietneess and Noise.

Meldies and terryifing.

I could almost write a university essay about the differences, so it would make sense almost to go and listen to something completely different.

How about Indie RockIndie Rock?

Sadly nowadays – Indie Rock is dominated by well too many bands that seem to be well interested in copying the past – speaking as a person from Manchester wich has all kinds of Indie rock bands over the years most recently The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Oasis and more recently Badly Drawn Boy and Elbow which are often more influenced by most if not all of the above but lack the ability or the sense to make something really original from it, when the music scene is really crying out for it.

Chorlton’s “The Red Sea” hopefully are one of those sort of bands that will hopefully
Fall into that second camp rather than the first camp.

I’d first heard of them through the efforts of my friend, John Deacons who is their website editor and I ended up going with the drummer also called John to go and see one of my favourite groups “Purressence” and found him a particularly nice bloke.

During that gig, he mentioned his group “The Red Sea” and they had some mp3’s available for downloaded. I’d spoke to John, had a listen to them and found their tunes much to my surprise certainly quite enjoyable with elements of Oasis, The Stone Roses and Purressence among others into a perfectly reasonable nice sound.

So I agreed to go and after I got there and was even more surprised by the fact they were much much better than the demo suggested which was nice and held promise, this was something else altogether.

Songs like “The Libertine” despite possibly bordered a little bit too close to Oasis for my liking had single written all over it in particular live and the anthem based “Tonight’s the Night” which was perhaps close to the way The Stone Roses would be sounding today if Ian Brown and John Squire could be bothered making up and matching the hints of how good they could have been.

Good stuff.

There was also a couple of other acts on after that – we stayed around to caught most of the next act “Bar 38” who despite the fact played in a local band’s night asked did anybody know the Tottenham score (A football club – Ed) which hinted at the fact they were a London based act.

Either way, it didn’t make any difference as frankly they were pretty bog standard average stuff sounding like a cross between The Cure and Franz Ferinard minus both the hooks of Ferniard and the ghost like nature of good The Cure and in the process sounded sadly a mess.

After that we had had enough and went home to the memory one band which certainly had potentional to do something and another which were…

Another normal night on the local scene then.

But good luck to the Red Sea…………..