It’s time to get down and dirty in Area51 with the most dangerous band of the moment: The Fat White Family. It’s been quiet in the skatecenter for a while, but music is being made in their refurnished concert hall.
The place was suffering from a lack of isolation for the sound, but that seems to be fixed with this new solution. Luckily, the grimy atmosphere is still there. Walking past the railing, visitors can see kids skate untill they face a black curtain, behind which the magic happens.
Todays show is one by the Gruismeel club, who’ve been putting up awesome psych shows in Eindhoven for a while now. One of their great talents seem to be to find the exact right location for shows.
Warming up is the band The Voyeurs, who capture they eye mainly due to their almost identical guitar players on the stage. Inspiration seems to come from the early garage scene of the artsy seventies and a bit of Iggy Pop. That results in a hazy sort of psych rock, where you can casually drift along with. The turtleneck sweaters are very noticable.
They calm sound of the five from London makes the a good warm-up for what is to come. Interesting is the fact that the band has roots in the middle-east, which might be detectable in their hypnotic sound. There’s something about this band that is captivating, but I find I cannot grasp it fully.
In between the set, DJ ONONiiONIONIION is playing a maddening mixture of what seems to be Eastern folk music, dance beats and Bollywood blitz. Though confusing some visitors, it is a detail to the night that creates a rather fun atmosphere. Better than to drown the crowd in fuzzed out psych, it opens up the bouquet of the bands a bit by letting it breathe.
Fat White Family has become notorious for their live act. There’s something fatalistic in their whole swagger. Frontman Lias Saudi makes you feel drunk or stoned (or both) by just the way he holds himself. The band needs no words and lunges into a set full of jangling punky tracks, mainly from their debut album ‘Champagne Holocaust’.
Wether you find them ridiculous or outrageous, there’s a strenght to this band and a conviction to simply not give a flying fuck about anything. Saudi soon has his t-shirt of, jumping into the crowd, shrieking and franticly dancing. In fact, I think he’d do the exact same thing if no one had turned up. The pants stay on however, which makes this an occasion where one can actually take a look at the rest of the band.
It’s that empty gaze of doom of guitar player Saul Adamczewski (formerly of The Metros) that seems to embody the futility of it all that can be felt through songs like ‘I Am Mark E. Smith’, which is one that gets the crowd going. The band just throws itself at one song after another, of which the perverted tones of ‘Touch The Leather’ seems to be the peak of the set.
The band doesn’t last an hour, but that’s ok. Instead of making you think you had enough, they leave you hungry. That feels about right with these guys.