Gig Reviews
Modey Lemon
/ Part Chimp
@ 93 Feet East, London - 26/05/04
Pictures this way...

I hate London crowds. A bunch of yuppie poseurs standing around in their "vintage-clothing" chic nursing bottles of Corona in one hand and camera-mobiles in the other. Occasionally they'll nod in approval if the band does something that "Face" magazine might like.


London crowds don't deserve bands like these. Bands like these don't deserve London crowds.

Part Chimp deserve 500 awe-struck Aerogramme and Cave In obsessives, crammed into the Cockpit in Leeds, salivating at every squeeze of the Big Muff and groaning at every frenzied masturbatory strum of the curiously twitchy bass player (a compelling centre-figure). Part Chimp deserve Sonic Youth anoraks who truly appreciate just how difficult it is to make that Telecaster feedback when you've fashioned a pick-up coil out of a comb.

Part Chimp also need some better songs.

Modey Lemon deserve the 1970s. People don't have the same reverence for rock and roll music today. Then, it was a religion, rather than a commodity. Plus, there was a lot of acid going around and people seemed a lot less concerned about their particular brand of footwear.

They must stare into the vapid faces of these approval-seeking, polite young English men and women and wonder exactly who they're doing this for. Because no one looks like they're enjoying it. Standing like sandbags, they clap at the right points and they cheer at the right points, but their hollers are hollow and their cheers are cheerless. There should be grimy, smelly people of indistinguishable age flailing their...

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