GIG REVIEW: Atomic Hooligan
- Posted on March 25, 2008 9:56 AM
- 0 comments
Atomic Hooligan
93 Feet East, London
19th March 2008
Review by Holly Groom
Atomic Hooligan play loud. that rave kind of loud that you can actually feel inside you. which is a clever trick because I naturally tend to assume I'm having fun at a show if the music is making my internal organs vibrate. In that respect Atomic Hooligan started with an advantage - but could I look past the tinnitus inducing beats at 93 Feet East and work out if the self appointed 'wet dream in shell toes and blue jeans' were actually any good?
The answer is, of course, no. I got drunk and confused and ended up spending half the night grooving around like Julia Stiles in Save The Last Dance and the other half giving the finger to members of the band I had decided I didn't like. The thing is the band seem to have a lot of interchangeable members and they are kind of an odd mix (that's what I superficially decided anyway..) Some postured around like poor men's Mick Jaggers, some attempted a sort of 'lame nineties DJ' aesthetic, some played percussion like hippy christians and some threw themselves around the stage like those annoying girls who wish they were Karen O. But although they look completely incongruous, something about the way they sound all together is really infectious - the crowd in the Secret Garden room certainly seemed to appreciate the ecclectic mix of hair styles and musical genres.
I have to admit to feeling some nostalgic love for long time Hooligan's collaborator, Justine Berry of M.A.S.S (although I've never got over the whole renaming themselves after their only hit song thing. They went from 'M.A.S.S' to 'Hey Gravity' after the 2002 single - is that weird? I think its weird..) and New York rapper Afu Ra was quite cool so I kind of swung around from drunken hate to drunken love to discombobulation all evening. They are definitely a good club band - they're having fun so you kind of find yourself having a good time too even if you think that guy from the Furies looks like a foaming, pretentious, Shoreditch moron.
All in all, Atomic Hooligan do their breaks/d&b/hip hop mix up really well and they do it really loud so while I probably wont be buying their new album 'Sex, Drugs and Bla Bla Bla' in a massive hurry, I'll probably be unwittingly dancing to it in a club somewhere quite soon..
Post a comment
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.seatwaveblogs.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2772
