LA SHARK swim where others sank

O. Children / LA SHARK / The Ghost Frequency at The Lexington (04/04/09)

I first saw The Ghost Frequency supporting The Rakes at an SE1 collective club night/gig a couple of years ago. They were brilliant. I was tanked up on San Miguel and Cobra but they were definitely brilliant. Sharp in look and sound, their rousing anthems of electro-punk secured themselves a place in my ‘to watch’ file. Two years on and I hadn’t watched them. Typical. But headlining a bill at The Lexington gave me a chance for a progress check. It seems given two choices in which direction to head, they picked the wrong one. Dirtying up their sound with some more electronica would have been the way to go, but their new material smacks of two guitarists desperate to prove their masculinity by duelling through each song with more and more unnecessarily complicated metal guitar licks. No need boys. Their new material is heavier but not better, and provoking some over-beered teen to start throwing his weight around by the stage (when no one else was acting in a similar way) reminded me far too much of wandering into a festival tent where Amen were playing circa 2001. Maybe it’s their experimental phase. Maybe they’ll return to what they can undoubtedly do fantastically well. I do hope so.

Now show me the chase because I’m cutting to it. My fellow Sonic Mouth contributor failed to summarise O. Children (through no fault of bad writing, I hasten to add as I see him eyeing up my balls for a kicking) and I don’t want to fall into the same literary bear trap, winding up 500 words down the track no fucking wiser as to what the hell I think of this band. It’s time for air rifle journalism with pellets of fact and targets of truth…hideously shit metaphor but deal with it because I have.

O. Children played first on the bill.
Their frontman Tobias is simply the tallest musician I’ve ever seen live, not helped by the fact his fellow his fellow bandmates seem to be rather small in stature.
His height is only matched in extremity by the hauntingly low pitch of his vocals which threaten regularly to drop off the bottom of the scale (you could be singing Edith Piaf, but if you sing the notes that low and mumble over the microphone it will forever sound like the voiceover intro to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Put it into a few songs, and everyone is going to say you sound like Joy Division, like it or not.)
They ARE a good band who have written good songs, admittedly not brilliantly received by the thin-on-the-ground crowd at The Lexington.
They THINK they’re a much better band who have written much better songs. Which they aren't and haven’t. Yet.
These are all facts.
O. Children. O. ver and o. ut.

Next up, sandwiched between openers and headliners, LA SHARK. Cue entry for a band of merry troubadours who look like a costume shop has just thrown up on them; the lead singer and guitarist sporting matching Clockwork Orange eye make up, with the frontman’s jacket sequinned to the hilt (although it was later removed – either it got too hot or the sequins were refracting the mirror ball lights and arbitrarily blinding audience members). The bassist looked like Robinson Crusoe at a B*Witched party, dressed in a double-denim combo (although he admitted to my girlfriend while smoking outside he had in fact dared to don quadruple denim previously. Respect).
Their appearance providing the visual equivalent of what their music did aurally – give the gig a much needed shot in the arm. Scuttling through their songs which rose and fell effortlessly, spanning the sub-genres of electro, indie, folk and psychedelia; the quintet warmed the crowd up excellently for what eventually turned out to be a disappointing climax.