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Live Review
by SashaS
8-11-2001
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| Six By Seven's Chris Olley (riff mode) |
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Live: Six By Seven
Electric Ballroom, London
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
Six By Seven are probably the best band UK’s got now but, unfortunately, it is also its best-kept secret
While Graham Coxon (of Blur) was making his alternative noises at one venue, a few hundred yards down the road Six By Seven were demonstrating how to hypnotise with imagination, inventiveness, and quality. From the moment they took to the stage the Nottingham band delivered a repertoire that ranged from minimalism and misery to sonic explosion and fury.
Manic Street Preachers, Muse, Stereophonics and, even, Starsailor make it big in the commercial arena while, inexplicably, one of the most consistently interesting Brit-rock bands is not being recognized?! Ironically, being underground might make their music better but with its lexicon so huge it might be detrimental to the band’s appeal in the mass-world that appears only able to concentrate on one-dimensional consuming.
Starting with a dark and menacingly insistent phrase that drives its theme into your skull to suddenly mushroom into a magnum rocker is our launching pad into their cosmos without frontiers. There are touches of Gothic (The Cure, Bauhaus), early Brit-electronica (John Foxx’s Ultravox?) and Kraut-rockism, song-building that recalls Magazine, depresso-rocking in the best Joy Division doom-tradition to show all the Elbows, Coldplays and, even Radioheads, where it’s at. Then, there are instances of fuzz-cum-prog rocking, certain elements of jazz and King Crimson-esque experimentalism…
Making all these old-skool comparisons is not a critique, nor accusation of nostalgia’s cash-in; Six By Seven are a genuine item on par with those greats that is such a contrast to today’s devalued rock scene. It is a reflection, a slight homage but never – derivative. Chris Olley’s sonic search is as verifying as he is his anti-stardom and, doubtlessly, nothing matters but his musical obsession and search for that perfect chord.
‘European Me’, ‘Eat Junk Become Junk’, ‘Oh! Dear’, ‘American Ban’ roll out until refrains of ‘Another Love Song’ and ‘Never promised’ were dropped on us like a 50-megaton bomb! It was such a fury, such vitriol, such anger, like another band emerged from the members’ shadowy psyche. A vintage performance and I wish I could have heard all the songs from their two albums, ‘The Things We Make’ and ‘The Closer You Get’ (third one is due out in March)! They also perform the new single, ‘So Close’, which some media-bods expect to chart. Are there people out there with enough broad minds?
Not having seen the band live in a while, I’ve almost forgotten how good they are. Six By Seven is 42, ‘the meaning of life’ according to a mega-hyper-macro-computer from the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and that’s more than enough for me. Well happy for this to be my life’s soundtrack…
SashaS
8-11-2001
Six By Seven single ‘So Close’ is out now on Mantra/Beggars Banquet
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