Muzak once more...

Yes, even more muzak… Pretty worn out these days with all these little concerts. Another night at the 2nd Street Jazz and this time not only was the sound rubbish, but there were technical delays that caused us to wait an hour or so before being on let in. Again, we were there mainly to catch Thee Out Mods. Instead of waiting in a queue outside, we decided to meander (one of my GF’s pals walked by, and suggested we have some drinks elsewhere) on over to another bar on the other side of the village. It turned out to be quite amusing as I’ve walked by it many times over the past few years but never bothered to walk in. Turns out it as a rather good choice as I’ve forgotten how pleasant it is to suck down a couple of beers while munching on Japanese snacks as watching baseball with a bunch of old, drunk Japanese people…

So after all of that, we went back to the Jazz, only to find that we still had to wait in line for a while longer. After a while we got in and got settled, and the first band started up. While significantly better than the other band that’s been opening up, Hokma Gandhi still wasn’t quite up there with the other bands (and what the hell is it with asian chicks playing bass?). Anyways the singer (big, tall, white dude) though was actually quite good, although I think the band would have looked (and sounded) more appropriate singing covers of anime opening themes. Next up was Mongoose, and they were much cooler. I’ve seen the drummer around quite a bit, so it was kinda nice to actually see him play rather than just move equipment around.

Afterwards came Dig Jelly (don’t really care for the name). Reminds me a lot of Korn/Limp Bizkit hip-hop rock blend. Not really being my flavor of music, I still enjoyed their performance and I was impressed that they made the most off the Jazz’ poor sound (personally acoustics wise, they sounded the best of any of the bands there). For the first half though, I also could only hear Rayko rather than see her as her small stature prevented me from seeing her over the crowd (granted I’d seen her walking around the club earlier). Still, it allowed me to focus on her voice, which was wonderfully good when she actually sang. The whole, guttural, death metal wail in to the mic thing though didn’t really do anything for me (although I was impressed to see such a sound emanate from such a compact, cute little package). Later on she moved to sitting and strutting around on what looked like a piano (yes she’s that tiny) and thus I got a better look at her performance. A couple of observations.

1. She needs to perform more with her hair down. Looks much better than the girly little pig tails.
2. Part of me wants to say “cover up the mid section and cool it with the sports bras”. I mean don’t get me wrong, her mid section is pretty awesome and she sports a lovely set of well done tits (and who wouldn’t wanna see that!?!). Still, I found myself paying more attention to her figure than her singing, and personally I think she could do better style wise (the cute, athletic school girlish look, while nice to look at, doesn’t really jive all the well image wise to me).
3. Like I mentioned above, lose the guttural wailing thing. It’s just not cool, hot or anything when chicks do it, and is more of a novelty coming from a cute, small package. I think she should focus more on the singing quality of her voice (which is quite good IMO).

One final thing that I liked that she did though was instead of drinking bottled water or a beer, she drank milk instead… Coolio…

At last came Thee Out Mods. All done up with white pressed shirts and black ties, you’d think Oreskabandhad gone punk! Anyhow, they rocked as usual, although Sana had to suffer through technical failures as her mic kept going out during their performance. Still, even when the mics are working, the Jazz never quite seems to do them justice… At least we got to have fun ’cause Yoshiki passed out party poppers. Also, he didn’t moon the crowd this time… Dunno if that’s a good thing or bad thing though (after all there are lots of fan girls there)… Well I guess that’s enough for now, hopefully this will be the last of these muzak posts for a while.