I Went To A Gig Last Night... Well, Sort Of



I went to a gig last night. Swathes was being put on by FLUX=RAD, a brilliant little weekly night at Cardiff Arts Institute who play great music and put on gigs, usually for free. To convince you how good they are, last night's DJ-ing was opened with Georgia by Yuck and followed by Surfer Blood... great! And only a few weeks ago did they put on Beach House. So yeah. They're good. But last night things didn't quite go to plan.

Cardiff-based support band Among Brothers ' set was really good and passed without any problems. They play a sort of blend of Arcade Fire and Sigur Ros with some electronics chucked in for good measure and are definitely worth checking out.

But one-man-band Swathes' (aka Matt Webber) set wasn't so successful. Opening with a wall of noise, reverb and distortion, everything sounded really good only for his laptop to start playing silly buggers and cutting out randomly for a few seconds at a time. A reboot and a few guitar smashes to the floor later and it turned out things could not be saved, which is a real shame because when they laptop was working, things sounded very good.

It was still a good night. I heard enough of Swathes set to confirm my suspicions that his music is very good, and I found a new band in Among Brothers.

Swathes - Distances

Swathes - Very White