Q: When is a band not a band

A: When you end up unsure if it is the band you wanted to see

I went to the last night of Club AC30's three-day Reverence 2005 stint at The Water Rats, to see Czech band Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. (This unofficial site has a little English on it). I have one of their records from back in the early nineties - but to be honest they looked so youthful and sounded so different from what I was expecting that until I did a bit more research I began to labour under the impression that they must be a different band called Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. They were much poppier now, but suffer from the fact that any slightly quirky european female vocalist is liable to be compared with Bjork. I enjoyed it a lot though, even if in a slightly-apologetic-to-my-mate 'this wasn't what we were expecting' kind of way.

(You can download the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa track Sweetabyss from Insound, which sounds like how I expected them to still sound)

I also enjoyed the two bands who opened the evening, The Early Years and Sleepless. The Early Years were a three-piece who did a decent job of filling the Water Rats with sound, despite not having a bass-player. In parts they reminded me of Spaceman 3, at other times of Half Film, neither of which are bad things at all in my book, although I felt some of the arrangements were over-complicated, with time signature and pace changes all over the show. I slightly preferred Sleepless, who had a more full-on sound, though they were still in roughly the same shoe-gazing territory.

The same cannot be said for Flotation Toy Warning [My Warning: Web site simulates the use of the <BLINK> tag, but using flash], who I have to say were one of the worst bands I have ever had the misfortune to endure at a gig. They were astonishingly poor, whether it was the keyboard player seemingly in a competition to use all of the pre-sets on her Korg before the end of the set-list, the guitarist missing his cues, or the singer, who wanted to be a moody mix of Thom Yorke and James Dean Bradfield, but came over more like Val Doonican in an army jacket. Shocking, shocking stuff, and everything seemed to be at about half the pace it needed to get going. At one point they did a track where the singer launched into some operatic style vocals. I was actually moved to laugh out loud in the crowd. Unbelievable.