#partchimp

KRITIK: Part Chimp – Drool  

Part Chimp ist so eine Band, an der es einfach kein Vorbeikommen gibt, wenn es um Noise-Rock geht. Warum?

Die Londoner Riff-Monster von Part Chimp kündigen neues Album „Drool“ an! Noch nie von Part Chimp gehört? Dann solltet ihr dieses schleunigst ändern, insbesondere dann, wenn ihr eine ausgeprägte Vorliebe für noisige, verzerrte und brachial laute Riffwände teilt, denn die überaus gepriesene Noise-Rock-Formation aus London hat vor kurzem ein neues Album angekündigt.

Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element / 65daysofstatic / Part Chimp

The Wheatsheaf, Oxford

Oh dear, I can remember this one very well. This was horrible.

We'd done really well to be offered a gig as support to Part Chimp and 65daysofstatic by virtue of being noisy, local and cheap, so we were very excited about the whole thing. On the night, the promoter couldn't make it so he left his mate in charge. This guy had never heard of either Part Chimp or 65dos, so he put us on headlining over them as he'd heard of us. We protested, and I think the other bands did too, but he went ahead with it. 

So we soundchecked, left our gear on stage and stood back as the venue filled up with people eager to see the other bands and completely confused as to why we were headlining (quite possibly imagining that we'd demanded to headline, who knows?). Part Chimp - who were all lovely about the mixup/situation and top chaps - went on and ANNIHILATED the room with an amazingly brutal set. I was chatting to Chris Kogumaza recently about how it's a terrible idea to follow Part Chimp on stage, as they delight in destroying anyone who has to play after them. Very true.

Then 65dos did their usual epic quiet/loud thing, ending the set by climbing over the speaker stacks during a monolithic noise crescendo. No pressure for us, then.

We went on and about a minute into the first track, our electronic backing track started skipping. First just a little, in an interesting glitchy and recoverable sort of way, then in a proper broken-CD-player sort of way. So assuming we had a scratch on our backing track CD, we skipped to the next track, mumbling an apology to the sizeable crowd. It happened again in the second song. Then again in the third. We were dying up there, it was AWFUL. So we cut our losses, muttered something about technical difficulties and ended the set, tails between our legs. 

Then I did something I wasn't very proud of later. I was so massively annoyed that a really good show for the band had gone so badly that I picked up the CD player we were using for the backing track and chucked it on the ground, breaking it, like a geeky Argos version of Kurt Cobain's guitar smashing, except with negative cool points. I was later informed that because our stuff had been on stage in a hot room under stage lights all night, it was just condensation on the CD player's lens causing the problem, so if I'd let it dry out, it would have been fine. On the upside, this made us start using minidisc for our backing tracks for all future gigs, which was a much better idea. 

End of evening scores

Broken equipment = 1 x CD player (£80)

Embarrassment factor = pretty much 9/10

New fans for the band = 0