Now this was one gig that I’ve been looking forward to, the first reason for this is that I haven’t been to a proper gig since the start of January. The second reason for this is because I will being seeing (in my opinion) the UK’s premier Pop Punk band. This will be my 3 rd time seeing Not Katies but my first time seeing all the other bands on the bill tonight.
Bottlenex are the first band on and start off well but however their style of punk music is just too much like a lot of the punk bands in the UK and they fail to stand out. Next up is Skirtbox and they were a lot better and straight away showed why they are gaining a solid reputation. They describe themselves as a pop rock band but there are hints of Punk and Emo in their music and my favourite song they played tonight is their new track ‘For This Alone’ which sounded awesome live. With their album due out early this year, 2005 could be the year for Skirtbox.
The Fight are another band tipped for the top in 2005, gaining praise from major music magazines such as Kerrang and Rocksound, so there’s a lot of hype around this band at the moment. It’s easy to see why there is such hype around this band as they sound amazing and put in such an energetic performance. The Fight play exciting Pop Punk which is more Rancid than Good Charlotte and their Front-woman Kate (or ‘K8!’ as she likes to be known) adds razor sharp vocals and definite star quality to the band. They deserve to make it big in 2005 but whether they will be able to gain a large fan base remains to be scene.
Finally its on to Not Katies, now tonight I’ve been told to expect something new from the band as their have been a few changes within the band over the last couple of months. After guitarist Dave left the band they decided to make a few changes, the most dramatic change being the inclusion of the Keyboard into the band. Ewan now plays both Bass and Keyboards and they have brought in new Bassist Simon (not sure if this he is yet a permanent member of NK or not) and now Nick is left as their only guitarist. So it was obvious that there would be a different sounding NK tonight.
Not Katies kick off and sound as brilliant as ever on songs like ‘2 Halves of 2’ and ‘Saccharine Sweet’ then they move on to the first song where the keyboards make their first real impact on ‘Play Dead’. This song still sounds awesome however there where parts of the song where I thought that the keyboards where a big over used and took away from the song and overall I’d say that I preferred the pre-keyboard version. They played a couple of their other well known songs such as ‘Sequel’ and ‘The Hope You Choke’ which both sounded great but apart from that it was all new material tonight as Not Katies are definitely a band that are looking towards the future with only ‘2 Halves of 2’ played from their brilliant debut album ‘At Every Turn’.
The new material all sounded brilliant and is definitely a progression from their old stuff and with the band now having so much new material and still putting such energy into what they are doing, it left me wondering when we will see the next Not Katies release. I really don’t know when we will see the next release from NK as I’m not even sure they have another record deal at the moment after leaving Deckcheese Records. However I know that after hearing some great new songs from the band tonight that it won’t be too long before we see another NK full length release and it will definitely be totally different from ‘At Every Turn’ but I won’t be surprised if its just as good if not better.
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