Gig Review

The Chariot
My Children My Bride, Odessa
Birmingham, Academy 3
20th March 2011

                                                                                               
The Chariot       My Children My Bride        Odessa
                            

Odessa play a certain brand of hardcore music that just doesn’t feel natural. It appears as though they are being heavy just for the sake of it and there’s no real feeling. Saying this they are not a bad band they are still talented musicians and the music has very melodic tones built in amongst the heavy breakdowns but I do feel the singer needs to work a bit on his vocal range as it would make their sound much more interesting. Speaking of the vocals, I don’t think they should be a purely screaming band; If they added some clean vocals over the clean melodic tones that are found in parts of their songs them it would give them a bit more of an interesting sound. The fact also remains that during their performance their singer paced up and down the stage that many times it was like watching a tennis ball during a tennis match, he tried his best to energise the crowd but alas they were having none of it.

My Children My Bride are a tough band for me to review. Parts of their songs I hated, they sounded like there were too many different elements from many genres in them and it was too much; yet other songs were absolutely perfect and had a good feel to them spurring violent reactions from the crowd. I must say the vocal comment from the previous band fits here too I think a bigger range from the vocalist would make it slightly more lovable and playful. However they do seem to know how to handle themselves onstage amazingly, the singer specifically is just a driving force gets down with the crowd allowing them to sing with him down the microphone and jumping around viciously. Very interesting band to watch and very passionate to be back in the UK after 4 years they stated, you definitely felt the love.

The Chariot may as well have called this show world war 3. What the absolute hell did I just watch?! It was too crazy for me to comprehend. It’s like a record company walked into a mental institution and picked the 5 craziest people, gave them some instruments and took them on tour; it’s just a shame that the music sounds like it was made via the same method. From the moment the lead singer stated “This microphone is your microphone, these instruments are your instruments, this stage is your stage, this is our house let’s do this” the entire of the Academy 3 loses their freaking minds. The bassist dives into the crowd smashing his feet off the light rig, then throws his bass into the crowd and then when he got it back started swinging it all over the place. The guitarist I’m surprised didn’t break his neck with the force he was head banging. The monitors were kicked all over the place and the singer was always on the barrier singing with the crowd passing the microphone around. Then the guitarist gets IN the crowd with us head banging along with us and the bassist got carried around the room. One thing that did get annoying was the fact the singer was some kind of hippie kept going on about “Being fee” and “Staying safe” which got quite annoying after a while. Also the weird recordings of strange distorted pop tracks they play during some of their songs are quite funny. The band keep changing instruments, at one point the singers playing bass whilst the bassist sings, the singer gains a drum from somewhere and starts smacking that with some drum sticks. This show has definitely been the craziest thing I have ever witnessed in my years of going to music concerts; the good rating is purely for the atmosphere and what the show was like. If I was to review the music it would be a very low rating.

Odessa 2/5
My Children My Bride 4/5
The Chariot 3/5

Review By James Webb

 The Chariot


Josh Scogin
Jon Kindler
David Kennedy
Stephen Harrison
Brandon Henderson

 MY Children My Bride


Matthew Hasting
Robert Bloomfield
Dan Alvarado
Joe Lengson

 Band Related Links
The Chariot Myspace
My Children My Bride Myspace
 Review Score Code
- Top Cheese
- Brilliant
- Pretty damn good
- Ok I guess
- What Was That?