This is an excerpt of an article written by Tom Girard
The period of time between Christmas and New Year, euphemistically but aptly referred to by some as ‘Chrimbo-limbo,’ can be a strange one for live music. In the past it’s seen rowdy and raucous highlight of the year events such as Dead Sea Skulls return visit to the island in 2014 or the Vale Earth Fair’s 40th anniversary celebrations in 2016, this year though, as L’Islet Records staged their latest event at The Fermain Tavern, it’s hard to avoid the feeling it fell somewhat flat.
That said in terms of music it was far from flat with Coastal Fire Dept celebrating the release of debut record Control, From Darkness continuing to show their metal chops and Terrible Stuntman launching their fresh assault on the island’s music scene.
It was the newcomers who started off the night, but its safe to say Terrible Stuntman are made up of a selection of familiar faces.
Led by the self proclaimed ‘Riff King Of The Rue De Marais’ Bobby Battle and with Dan Garnham behind the drums it’s no surprise that this four piece shares some DNA with their past outfit To The Woods but there’s more to it than that.
With Liam Bewey on second guitar and, for tonight at least, Dolmen’s Hollie Lucia on bass, the whole thing has a more alt rock feel to it with hints of grunge, indie and alt reaching back to the 90s along with that modern, hard edged British rock feel that made To The Woods reputation.
While a few moments of Bobby’s ‘banter’ threatened to derail things (slating another entirely unrelated, but crucially popular, event taking place at the same time never looks good) the music more than carried them through, though it’s a shame the audience decided to remain as distant as possible throughout.
Having released their debut ‘mini-album’ Control the day before, Coastal Fire Dept were clearly on fine form launching into their set in typical tight and big sounding fashion and, while not billed as it, this really felt like it should be a launch event for the record.
Across the set the band mixed tracks from Control with newer songs showing the range their ‘grunge from the Vale’ has achieved channeling elements of the Pacific Northwest sound, the harder styles of indie, shoegaze and 90s britrock.
With Bobby Battle (working double duty tonight) now more firmly confirmed as the band’s second guitarist they showed a deeper sound here which allowed frontman and chief songwriter Ollie Goddard more space and, while he’s clearly still getting used to this, he showed a little more frontman like performance than in the past.
As has happened with them a few times there seemed to be a disconnect, in terms of energy, with the audience, who again hung back away from the stage but clearly generally appreciated the music.
With talk of a new record already in the works the new tracks showcased here provided some of the highlights, particularly the closing song which went into immense noisy territory to round their set off on a high.
Originally the night was set to headlined by doom titans Byzanthian Neckbeard but, due to last minute personal issues (hope all is well guys), they were replaced by a metal band of a slightly different bent, From Darkness.
Hitting the stage to Ride Of The Valkyires they brought some of their loyal fans onto the dancefloor from the off, though some of the attempted ‘moshing’ was questionable at best, as pointed out by frontman Martyn.
Nonetheless the band did what they do, driving powerful metalcore, and did it well but given the previous two bands it gave a disjointed feel to the night added to which something seemed to be missing compared to their stand out performances, such as that at Chaos, earlier in the year.
As the set went on they seemed to be almost be derailed by Guppy’s amp ‘blowing up’ but after a relatively quick change around were back and blasting once more, but it was at this point I had to call it a night.
While the music across the show was all at least good, something about the event as a whole didn’t quite click together right, which was a shame given the quality of what was on offer, but nonetheless those that were there were treated to some great original, ‘alternative’ sounds with all three bands promising a lot more to come in 2020.
