Indie Revolution

This week I was planning on stretching out another thousand words about another album released by some fashionable guitar band on the other side of the planet, when, deadline looming, I received an invitation to a “Night of Indie Rock” at Bucharest’s B52 club. I didn’t expect to be impressed. Although there are a host of genuinely exciting Romanian producers at the moment, you can count the number of good Romanian bands on the fingers of one hand. I suppose I was expecting a bunch of high-school students playing Oasis cover versions. I was very, very mistaken.

Upon entering the venue, the first thing I noticed was just how much like an indie night in the UK this was. Pale looking indie boys wearing ties? Check. DJ playing The Liberties and The Zutons? Check. The crowd even cheered when the DJ put on The Arctic Monkeys. Yes, this was reassuringly very much like any other Indie night anywhere else.

Three bands were fronting the line-up. Rather oddly, they played in reverse order of popularity. First to take to the stage were The Mood, who’d brought along a sizeable student following, managing to make the whole thing more entertaining by chanting incomprehensible things between songs and singing along to some of them. Although they looked like a band that’s only beginning to learn its stage-craft, they have the huge advantage of a pretty-boy frontman who managed to look charismatic even when the rest of the band looked fairly uncomfortable. “Give him five more gigs,” I shouted to my friend, “and he’ll be amazing.” Their lyrics (like all the bands on show tonight) were entirely in English, and he managed to sing them in with a punky note-perfect whine not too far from Johnny Rotten, nor too far from the Stateside skater bands of the west coast. And, what’s more, they have good songs. I had to keep on leaning over to someone else to ask “do you think this one’s a cover?” Ecstasy, the track they performed again for their first encore (two encores?) particularly sticks in the mind, with their lead singer having the balls to make a full range of orgasmic sound during the course of the song.

Next up were The Amsterdams (from Bucharest , as the lead singer reminded us). Somewhere between Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker, their frontman looked incredibly comfortable up there on stage, throwing in a few mock-theatrical gestures and generally enjoying himself. Halfway through their first song it had become clear just how tight they were as a band, with a full and incredibly professional sound, but it was equally obvious how much they owed to the US band Interpol: the vocals, the arrangement, the song itself sounded very much like a band who very much wanted to sound like Interpol. Which, I suppose is no bad thing. However, a few tunes later, it became clear just how much I’d underestimated them: the Joy-Division-esque melancholy of Interpol? Yup they can do that. The angular guitar pop of The Zutons? Sure, that too. The fast-paced punk-funk of The Rapture? Yup, perfectly. They even played, much to the delight of the crowd, a cover of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’.

I’ve heard that The Amsterdams are already getting radio play at a few stations. Take it from me, if there’s any justice in this world, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about them this year. They’re exactly what Romania needs right now: a band that knows how to press all the right buttons, knows how to entertain on stage, knows all the right musical references, and, on top of it all, sound fantastic right now, not ‘in a few gigs time’. They deserve to be huge.

Last up on stage were sure-to-be mis-spelled ‘Vaduvabob’. We’d spotted their suitably pale lead singer earlier, wearing black lipstick, eye-liner, one long black glove, a metal chain around his neck and a kind of sarong thing wrapped around his waist. The look didn’t bode well for the music – I was expecting more Doom Metal than indie – but they deserved sticking around for simply because they’d had the guts to get dressed up. Just three of them took to the stage, all dressed in black. “Romanian Placebo,” my friend murmured. He wasn’t wrong: like Placebo, they manage to take the darker sound of rock and make it poppier, more radio-friendly. Despite the fact that they have songs with titles like (and apologies if I slightly mis-heard this) “Black Lilies and Butchers’ Eyes”, they’re songs are actually accessible and fairly memorable. With Bucharest teeming with disillusioned youths with a penchant for black, Vaduvabob (did I spell that right?) are a band all ready to discover a public. The Romanian Indie Revolution starts here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Tom Wilson 2007