check out the photos of the gig

CLAIRE:

First up was Claire. This was the second time I've seen claire play, and I still love everything about her. She has the most beautiful songs, the most gorgeous voice, a lovely guitar style, and she looks stunning too :)

Last time I thought she was rather jewel-ish, and this time I agree with myself. Not the jewel you hear on the radio necessarily, but it sounded very pieces of you (the album, not the song).

THE BABYSHAKERS:

Next up were a band called the babyshakers. To put it simply, they sucked. Oh, they had potential, the intro of the first song was somewhat promising. But then the vocals started.

They are an all girl band, heavy guitar band. Two guitars, bass, drums, vocals. and the vocals were what killed it. If it weren't for the vocals, they might have been alright. Maybe not good, but certainly not bad either. But the vocals were appalling. She was one of those "singers" who screams. And I don't mean she couldn't sing, I mean she was actually trying to scream the words. Monotonal screaming vocals in every single song. Every one without fail. Two songs also included normal singing. They sounded alright when she was singing. But the rest of the time, it was just weird.

SNEEZE:

I didn't know anything about sneeze's music before I came tonight. The lineup was guitar, bass, drums and a teeny tiny baby casio keyboard. Sooooo cute!!

The songs were rather amusing at times, and all very light poppy fun catchy danceable lovable songs.

At one point nic (guitarist/casio-ist) swapped with the drummer - drummer on guitar, nic on drums. He has an ... intersting, shall we say, drumming style. But eh, was good all the same.

A few songs were slightly plunderers sounding (80's/early 90's band with nic and stevie plunder), but generally they had a fairly consistent three piece joke pop feel to them. Which was good, not bad. Wasn't bad three piece joke pop, was probably up there with the best three piece joke pop.

The crowd was rather disappointing. Much the same as the lazy susan crowd, and a few other gigs I've seen mid-week at ANU. Unlike lazy susan, where there were a whole 10 attentive people on the relatively large front area, this time there were two. Which was good for us, because we pretty much got a private show, but very disappointing for a band who clearly deserve better crowds. And somewhat disappointing for canberra, because the more bands that play to shit crowds like that, the more bands we'll see passing us by next time.

End rant :)

The sneeze set was cut short due to time - apparently they were supposed to be finished by 11:30.

Overall, I still love claire, the babyshakers are well worth missing, and sneeze deserve to be a household name by this time next year, I reckon. I don't always like three piece joke pop, so really, I mean it when I say these guys were good. I liked them. And you should too.

SETLISTS:

SNEEZE