Love of Diagrams, Holy Hail

As it so happens, good things come when you least expect them. Aimlessly wandering around the internet on a Sunday night, I discovered that one of my recent favourite bands were about to play in London in less than 24 hours. Since they are from Australia, I thought that this might be well worth a visit.

The venue was the Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, a place I usually don't visit too often, but I always enjoy being there. The spacious, slick concrete basement also has a concert venue and that's where it was supposed to go down.

Holy Hail were opening up and although I didn't know them prior to that day, I kinda liked them. They were quite original (as original as you can get in the midst of a 80s revival) and I recognized some musical references from bands I really like: Talking Heads, Suicide, The Slits, etc. Clever vocal lines and a drummer who, although he mainly played a four-on-four staccato beat that you hear ever so often these days, somehow struck me as having a strong punk-drumming background. I might be completely wrong, but amidst the rather mechanic beat patterns he played I noticed kind of a strong willingness to break out of it and turn it into something more tense and aggressive.



Love of Diagrams unfortunately had some technical difficulties and their set was only 40 minutes long. I nevertheless enjoyed it and appreciated that somebody actually still cares about the more top-heavy and divergent sides of indie-rock rather than trying to be upfront and straight in songwriting which only really works when you're truly good at it. Most of the time it's really boring but in most cases nevertheless makes great chart material.




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