20 December 2007
CSS @ The Leadmill
Before all you geeks who read my blog get too excited, this is not a post about Cascading Style Sheets – it’s a post about the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy who a few of us went to see at The Leadmill last night.
We unfortunately missed Joe Lean and The Jing Jang Jong but arrived in time to see Metronomy perform their crazy electronic music whilst wearing battery powered push lights attached to their t-shirts. According to Wikipedia, Metronomy started as a side project for Joseph Mount who’s remixed for loads of bands and is the friendliest man in pop (according to NME). The three Metronomy members have some interesting stage choreography, like saluting the corner of the room in the middle of their “slow and sad song” called Heartbreaker, which goes quite well with their interesting music that sounds a bit like Klaxons. Anyway, I think I’ll be listening to a bit more of their stuff as some of it was pretty good.
One of the reasons I decided to go and watch CSS was because I’d heard that they put on a really good show. I didn’t know that the lead singer – apparently known as Lovefoxxx – once stripped naked at one of her gigs until reading her Wikipedia article just now. Sadly, there was none of that at the Leadmill. Instead, the band casually appeared on stage dressed as Christmas presents while an interesting rendition of Jingle Bells (I think) was being played in the background!
Wearing a skin-tight leotard, high-fiving the first crowd surfer, grabbing someone’s mobile phone to sing into, constantly teasing the crowd with the microphone (she’s not got as much control with the mic as the front-men from Kaiser Chiefs or Pigeon Detectives yet) and generally dancing like a crazy woman for the rest of the time before throwing herself into the crowd at the end, Lovefoxxx is actually a pretty good front-person (is that PC enough for ya?) with too much energy. The crowd did seem a bit confused when 30 minutes into the set she announced “this is our last song’ before playing Alcohol and then proceeded to play from another half an hour or so. My guess was that she meant that Alcohol was their last song to be released and her English isn’t too good but I guess she could’ve also been joking, the cheeky minx. She even kindly thanked someone for throwing a bag of Brazil nuts at them. (What kind of weirdos go to these gigs!?)
CSS also appeared to have their own version of Bez; except theirs was a heavily tattooed girl who danced around the stage dressed up as a Christmas tree for a couple of songs, changed into a Bob Marley t-shirt to hold up a Jamaican flag then a sheet containing some lyrics for another song, and finally appeared as a Christmas present towards the end of the gig. She also helped Lovefoxxx try to teach the crowd how to do their little dance moves which they’ve got for each song. Quite amusing really.
With a bit of token instrument-swapping for the last song, CSS put on an impressive live show. They’re definitely better live than they are on recordings, so keep your eyes peeled for a CSS gig near you!
