20/01 jubilee club at the camden barfly
You have to love small venues ... So much better an atmosphere, and so much easier to reach the bar. Which is of course a very important concern. Too often I've missed some fantastic performance when at larger venues by being on 'my round' duty miles away at the back of an auditorium.
Thankfully, no such danger of missing anything on this night. SPC ECO, composed of ex-Curve veteran Dean Garcia (Bass, Programming) plus progeny Rose Berlin (Vocals) and Harry K Garcia (Guitar), pulled a decent sized crowd despite being first up on a billing of three bands - Daniel Land & The Modern Painters and The Domino State followed. The set was as such rather short, but even with just six numbers the sound fell straight away into where it should be - a wonderfully deep, embracing wall of noise.
In tribute to my collection of dodgy bootleg cassettes purchased many years ago round the corner in Camden Market, just as an experiment I hit 'Record' on my phone and surprisingly the result, in retrospect, is not quite as abysmal as I expected (see embedded gadget).
Obviously, the quality is a million miles away from the full-on onslaught of actually being there and I can confirm that SPC ECO were on top form, the volume levels nicely up in the realm where this particular breed of expertly-delivered, bass-driven, driving yet at times angelic 'nu-gaze' permeates not only the ears but washes through the listener in the manner of a hallucinated tsunami. Yep, perhaps you can tell - I quite like SPC ECO.
Four of the six numbers came from recent album You Tell Me (Reviewed HERE), plus opener Telling You from 2010's 3 D. All of which hit the spot but the true highlight for me was by far the new track. Introduced by Rose as "written last week", this new offering was absolutely bloody huge. I'm tempted to use the word 'awesome' in its literal, non-american sense (insert Izzard/Hotdog reference here). A lot of probably involuntary slo-mo headbanging/nodding kicked off right there amongst the assembled crowd - which under the circumstances was completely understandable.
EDIT: - Typically, just as I posted this - I checked Facebook and lo and behold - there's an excellent video up (filmed by Wombbaby) from the night - New track is called Give You Nothing - Quality damn sight better than what I recorded.
Sadly the all-too-short set ended, and after listening to a couple of tracks from Daniel Land & The Modern Painters (which I'm sure normally would be great - but following SPC ECO just made them sound a little too 'generic' for me) I headed out and finished up my evening at The World's End down the road - Utterly appropriate after a half hour in the company of the most beautifully apocalyptic noise I've heard in a long while. An excellent night.
(See SPC ECO on Bandcamp for all their releases.)
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