Sad Day For Puppets
Live @ The Social, London, UK - 02/23/2009
This week is a great week for Swedish music connoisseurs living in London, both Sad Day for Puppets and First Aid Kit are playing here. Yesterday I went to The Social to see Sad Day for Puppets. First up were The Deer Tracks (also from Sweden), who play music I don't get at all – some kind of slow ambient electro drone. There are fans of this genre, I'm pretty certain on that, but I don't associate with them. I watched half their set, then I ordered another beer and sat down as far away from the stage I could.
Sad Day for Puppets are great, their album is very solid and they've got some blinding songs (they sound a bit like a more melodic The Radio Dept. or a more shoegazing Camera Obscura). Yesterday it was all shambles though, mostly due to the sound situation being catastrophic. Over the weekend I went to a festival in Oslo and, despite short changeovers and stressed out musicians, nothing there sounded as bad as yesterday's show. There was feedback throughout the whole set and Anna Ecklund's vocals were barely audible (something that the crowd kept pointing out, alas to no avail). I don't blame the band, they did as best as they could, just a shame that they had to suffer on the behalf of a sound engineer not being able to do his job (The Deer Tracks brought their own engineer who annoyingly ran back and forth all the time to check that the sound was ok, but at least he got the job done). I'm not particularly fussy about how a gig sounds, as long as I can hear the vocals I'm usually ok, so this was a very rare occasion where the quality of the sound actually ruined my whole gig experience. A total waste of £6 and an evening.
- Simon Tagestam
