Camden Crawl

My first ever visit to the Camden Crawl last night - kind of suprising considering its the only festival in the UK that is 10 minutes walk from my house.  Drank far too much beer, and don't remember a lot of it.   Highlights were definitely YYY's playing Maps, discovering a couple of new bands in the Monarch, and a Count and Sinden DJ set to finish things off.

Karen O's voice and energy are still as impressive as they seemed when I first heard Fever To Tell - Date with a Knight tonight was an immediate crowd favourite, and the material from the new album didn't disappoint either, Soft Shock and Zero especially.  Gold Lion and Cheated Hearts showed off that more melodic side to the band, and Maps had me close to tears.  Bit of a shame not to see more tracks from the first album getting an outing (Pin, Rich, Black Tongue, Y Control) but what can you expect from that short a set just after the band has released a new album.

Spending a couple of hours sitting down and filling myself with more and more beer in the Monarch turned out to be one of the best decisions of the night - we managed to catch Peggy Sue and Circle Square.  Although Circle Square is probably one of the worst band names I've heard in a while, the band itself definitely do not disappoint - the singer comes down somewhere halfway in between New Order and Depeche Mode, and the basslines place them somewhere nearer to Aeroplane.  I highly recommend you head over to their myspace, and check out some of their material - Hey You Guys especially, which I remember absolutely loving last night, and I can see this morning that it's been remixed by the Juan Maclean... A killer combination.

The other new band I managed to see at the Monarch was Peggy Sue, and although I'm told that their set was a bit of an unnusual one - mainly B-sides, with none of their more well known material, it was still an absolute corker.  They closed with The Sea The Sea, which I found on their myspace this morning, and it sounds as good on record as it did live.

Lastly I managed to catch the Count and Sinden DJ set at Dingwalls, and I'm so glad I managed to persuade my friends to skip Echo and the Bunnymen for it - although the venue was a bit empty at the start, the moment they started playing it pretty much went off.  C&S played an hour long set, rattling through a mix of their own productions (Afrojack, Rocky Raver, The Fear Count Remix), as well as some more well known tunes (Township Funk, Mars, Sound of Kuduro), and some stuff I had never heard before.  An amazing end to the day, and big props to C&S for managing to absolutely destroy what was at the start a half empty venue full of bemused looking rock fans.  By the end it was absolutely rammo, and no one was looking bemused.