Sabot / Dandelion Wine

Tonight I went to the Rob Roy (for the first time this year, I believe; for some reason, good gigs have been a bit thin on the ground recently) to see Sabot and Dandelion Wine. Sabot (two American expatriates who have lived in Prague since the early 1990s) were interesting; the best category I could think of for them would be "progressive grindcore", or possibly somewhere between The Night Terrors and Mr. Bungle; one of them played drums (really tightly, and with lots of energy), and the other played bass, alternating between grinding powerchords and sinuous melodies. They played very tightly, in perfect sync, as they changed tempos and time signatures (they were on something like 7/4 time for a few bars, hence the "progressive").

Dandelion Wine (a.k.a. my friends Nick, Naomi and fact244) played a pretty good set too; the new version of Arc, with the distorted guitars, sounds better and punchier than that song ever did in all of its incarnations (anyone remember the tribal-rave version they did some years back?)

I missed the first band, Colditz Glider, though Nick said they were impressive.

Greta Gertler @ Bar Open

On the way back from the Rob Roy, I saw that Greta Gertler is playing at Bar Open tomorrow night. She is, I believe, a former member of Sydney indie-pop outfit Peccadillo (who shared members with FourPlay), now based in New York, and is on Lara Goodridge's Craving Records label, which for me is two reasons to check her out.