Live
Metakix: Live at the British Council
Date: February 22, 2006 | Venue: British Council, Madras
The British Council has an interesting venue for the performances it hosts. “The Courtyard” is an atrium roughly the size of three boxing rings, surrounded by their library. Proportionately, the stage (which I’m sure has been called ‘intimate’) gives you just about enough elbow room to work that tremolo bar, something that Metakix’s guitarists did quite a lot. In that context, the show starts rather ironically with the screening of a video of The Who with Roger Daltrey prancing, like only he can, about a significantly larger stage playing “5:15″, and nine minutes later my appetite is suitably whetted.
Metakix starts their show with their vocalist, ‘Zomb’, proclaiming rather ambitiously that they “are going to make history tonight�?. Obviously these guys don’t believe too much in the concept of a jinx. They open with a Black Sabbath medley that sounds as imposing as ‘Zomb’ looks. They claim to be the loudest band in the country — I don’t really have the facts on that, but after that first one my ears tell me that I should probably take their word for it. A surprising Jimi Hendrix choice (“Fire”) leads into a series of supposed crowd pleasers (“Comfortably Numb”, “Smoke On The Water”) that only result in the singer hogging the microphone too much, too affectedly, and the guitar solos coming off as being neither particularly improvisatory, nor tightly faithful to their originals.
A mish-mash of original compositions follow, from “Payday Blues”, a number that was a miss on capturing the feel of the blues, to “Anthem�?, a syrupy solo by their guitarist Viresh — patch-heavy, but one that didn’t go anywhere (Like a friend I was with remarked, “That sounded like the intro TO something”). The crowd is getting noticeably thinner and palpably more lukewarm as the show wears on, and by now I’m thinking about what the band could have done different.
Chosen songs that wouldn’t have sounded as off the mark if they weren’t going to play the original note-for-note (and they didn’t) — maybe. Gotten into the skin of the music they were playing a little more — definitely.
i cant believe someone took the trouble to review them in the first place!