Our newest writer BusinessKeith introduces this cracker of a booking. Look at their faces!
Loose & Businessman Records present…
NODZZZ / RACE HORSES
Sat 26th September 7.30pm-9.45pm *early curfew*
Buffalo Cardiff
£6 entry
If you’re promoting a gig and grappling with a curfew so early it’s almost before the doors open, you want a headline band who appreciate the virtues of getting their message across quickly and effectively. Enter NODZZZ. This splendidly geeky-looking San Francisco trio’s eponymous debut album clocks in at a massive sixteen minutes. Yet it crams in ten songs; and the hooks are so memorable and the simplistic brevity of the songs so charming that it still satisfies.
Theirs is a slackerish, jittery new wave pop which echoes bands who offered a different slant on familiar styles, whether it’s the Modern Lovers’ wide-eyed pre-punk innocence, the idiosyncratic take on 90s alt-rock of a Guided By Voices or Pavement, even hints of Minutemen (the song lengths and loose, ready-aim-fire attitude) and Weezer (the powerpop crunch and wilful nerdiness). There’s also parallels with West Coast peers like Abe Vigoda or Wavves – a laidback, beach-party sound more concerned with FUN than cool. Good attitude.
RACE HORSES are unmistakeably on the up. Their support slot here comes on the back of the single ‘Cake’, their first release since their change of name, line-up shuffle and switch from former home Peski to the fancy London ways of Fantastic Plastic. The Beach Boys/Gorkys/SFA melodies are still pin-sharp, though, and the cheeky humour intact. Their approach to fuzzy late 70s new wave might be through oddball 60s pop rather than lo-fi slackerdom, but they end up considerably closer kin to Nodzzz than you might first imagine. It’s almost like Loose plan these things, y’know.
“Like the Feelies or Modern Lovers before them, the group wears its quirkiness as a kind of badge of honor” – Pitchfork
Nodzzz MySpace
Race Horses MySpace
