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this way...
Tonight I felt like going home for a pot of tea,
a nice hot bath and plenty of medicinal drugs,
but instead your intrepid reporter braved the outside
world in order to catch Reuben at Nottingham Rock
City.
However, having witnessed the rather awesome and entertainingly
glam Do Me Bad Things earlier in the evening (see
Tom’s
80s Matchbox review), by the time Reuben strolled onto the
stage I was well in the mood for some of their riff-tastic
emorama.
Last time I saw them here they were awesome, overcoming technical
difficulties to arrive at a triumphant rock victory, but
not so tonight unfortunately. Mid way through the first song
of the set something went badly wrong with Jim’s guitar
set up, and everything was swamped by a massive wall of hiss.
Cue 10 minutes of fiddling with things, plugging things into
other things, bemused looks, entertaining banter from Jon
the bassist, calls for bass solos which were soundly rejected,
and a complete lack of success in getting the guitar to come
back to life. In the end a guitar pod was brought out, and
the rest of the set had to be played with only one guitar
sound available (a quietly weedy, slightly-growly-but-not-quite
one). And that is the tale of how Reuben sounded flat and
rather dull all night.
So now, instead of eagerly awaiting their debut album, Racecar
Is Racecar Backwards, I’m wondering whether Reuben
actually have any new songs to speak of. The early singles
were recognisable as always, but the rest of the set was
a big grey puddle of nothing. As Billie Joe Armstrong of
Green Day once commented, a good song should sound good whether
you play it with a band or on a battered...
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