 |
| |
|
| |
Live Review
by SashaS
18-12-2002
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Add N To (N) ponder nature of loudness |
|
Live: Add N To (X)
Garage, London
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Add N To (X) are lively eclectic and electric
With too much nostalgia and pop-acts manufacturia occurring daily, going to most gigs has become as exciting as London traffic… But then, you land at a show that simply is a jewel and you feel even more liberated than a drunken bird at a Crimbo party. In particular that Add N To (X) could well be one of the most underrated bands Britain has produced in a number of years.
Promoting their new album, ‘Loud Like Nature’, the band simply demonstrates how electricity and humanity can work in perfect harmony. Or cacophony. Launching the set with ‘Take Me To Your Leader’, these cyber-punks basically blaze through a set like a bush fire. Witnessing this display of power, unusual sounds and rhythms that evidently chomps expectations like a rabid pooch, it makes you wonder – what’s the purpose of everything you left outside the front door?
Thus, you gladly let it all go and give in: enjoying, jigging, climaxing because this show evokes emotion of – can’t resist! The band, employing drums and guitars, makes music that is rock in a spiritual sense, proving (again) that it is not important what instruments you use to create your sonic picture but the attitude you do it with. The AD2X certainly have it a-plenty: the line-up might be ‘trad’ but the souls are firmly plugged in.
Although it recalls Krautrockers, it is also punky, post-cyber, gets as intense as Slipknot, as offbeat as Cap. Beefheart, free-form like a fusion band, even cyber-funking it! The songs regularly grow into these live entities where original tunes are surpassed and titles become superfluous, limiting. Far from only replicating but tearing open the sonic envelope, kicking down the divisive walls and polluting sanity with fervour, forcefully but eclectically and electrifyingly.
There is certain madness going on stage, keyboards are ferried around while realising damn fine and innovative noises; there are gadgets you can’t name but emit tones you’ve not heard before. The chaos theory in action, as a rock statement. The band ‘jams’, in the 1970’s meaning of the concept, which turns this club date into a place of sensual transmitting! Transmuting?
AN2X remind you that Rock used to be an engine of yin to the cultural and social yang but it prostituted itself to become just another industrial division with its products as genuine as a Montego. (And as crappy…) It is a great pity that the show must have an end and allow life back in focus with its interferingly mundane demands.
But, the overwhelming impression lingers long after the show and that is – there’s a future for music as an artform! The return of a kopf-zeit?
SashaS
23-10-2002
Add N To (X) album ‘Loud Like Nature’ is available now on Mute
|
|
|
