This is an excerpt of an article written by Tom Girard
Sound Guernsey started off their new year with a packed show at The Fermain Tavern featuring five acts, including a unique set from headliners Static Alice.
Things started out with Zak Trimmer who has made a few appearances at Sound over the last few months and each time has developed in both performance and confidence and this was no different.
Mixing acoustic guitar with synthesised bass and beats he has hints of the likes of Ed Sheehan and Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.
His songs went down very well with the young audience here and, while there is of course room for a lot of development, he is fast becoming a highlight of these events and has a surprisingly mature presence of stage which is great to see.
Making their debut tonight were Isle Stone who played their way through a fairly startling amount of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers more poppy repertoire.
While that was ok and closed on a fairly impressive high in a rendition of Aeroplane once they had found their confidence, the highlight of the set for me came with a surprisingly powerful version of Iggy & The Stooges’ Search & Destroy.
They may have had problems with the drum kit tonight, but Cosmic Fish continued to look impressive in away clearly influenced by bands like Jawbone as they made their way through a nicely sloppy set of pop punk covers.
They dealt with the issues with the kit well and it just became part of the show and was great fun in just the way that pop punk should be.
At this point The Phantom Cosmonaut played but I can’t really offer much on that obviously, but we had a lot of fun on stage and it was great to get the crowd moshing for the first time.
Having played Sound a few times over the last couple of years Static Alice came to this one with something a bit different in mind, that they called ‘set list bingo’.
Basically this meant that between each song Dan from Jawbone (with the help of the audience) drew a number and that decided what song would be played next, including now rarely heard older songs and covers – the last band I remember doing something like this was Thee Jenerators around the time of their third album, but they had around 50 songs to choose from.
This worked very well though, despite the potential for chaos, and really showed the breadth of Static Alice’s pop rock sounds from slower tracks to heavier, hard rock stompers, including a brand new one getting its first play.
As always the Sound audience loved it and really got into the spirit of the show with the dance floor packed throughout leading to a double encore topped off with an impressive version of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name that got heads banging and bodies moshing and brought the show to an end on a high.
