Saturday, 16 March 2019

A View From The Back Of The Room: Lacertilia

Lacertilia, Not Since The Accident, Zinc Bukowski & Lighthammer, Andrew Buchan, Cardiff

The Andrew Buchan is an odd venue, it's pub that used to be a video shop (remember them?), but it was a place for what dubbed an Antipodean Expedition as it was all for Mark Fry brother of the Lacertilia frontman who was moving to Australia. Mark has been a staple of the South Wales music scene for a good long while so the Lacertilia crew put on a show featuring four of the South Wales most eclectic acts. Crammed into a the back of a room that is essentially a corridor the first band on was Cardiff based Lighthammer (7) who are a spunky, punky, alt rock trio with and big sound and some massive riffs. Though the drums were a little drowned out in the small venue. They then switched gears Soul Of Orion which was a more progressive bass led number that's brought the first touches of psych however it was back to rampaging riffs for Adventure Time before concluding their tales of galactic exploration. A great little set that kicked off the evening with a bang.

Next up were shouty Zinc Bukowski (7) they had a chunk of heft with as much reverb in the vocals as there was in guitars. Their ear piercing volume meant that their psych noise rock was a real shock to the system after Lighthammer but there's guys have been doing this for long while now and the shimmering stabs of guitar over the low slung bass playing got the groove nice and ready for the heavier passages where the vocalist tore his throat screaming down the mic. Their music can be described as noise rapidly veering between heavy psych to hardcore punk but played with same amount of attitude, there was a lot of instrumental grooves going on really raising the temperature of the venue yet again as the beers started to flow.

The final support of the evening was Cardiff punks Not Since The Accident (7) who finally came on stage after waiting for guitarist/vocalist Steve, they finally got going (twice in fact) with some jangly melodic punk that pairs some clean guitar lines with an Oi attitude. From the t-shirts and patches should be enough to tell you their influences Bad Religion, Dead Kennedy's etc, you know the punk bands metalheads can like, as the music has a bit more depth to it. With two lots of vocals trading the shouting they were inspiring some movement down the front with a lot of pogging happening. They're set was relentless never really slowing things down too much and spilling attitude with every single note, it caused a frenzy that meant everything was ready to boil over as the headliners for the evening.

Lacertillia (8) are a band I've seen many times, in fact I often joke that a few years ago I basically saw them at least once a month! This was the second gig I've seen with the new rhythm section in force. It was great to see drummer Tom Lee doing some shameless self promotion with his white Tides Of Sulfur shirt standing out. However when he got behind the kit he was a different beast to his other band, a drum roll and they opened with the well known Crashing Into The Future which is still a cracking song, but as they playing to a partisan audience, they threw in some new songs (which are sounding great) along with Abstract Reality, as fans and former band members looked on full of smiles.

The new songs were now more fully formed than when they had been aired the previous outing, which bodes well for album 2. Further especially, has a dirty blues feel to it with an almost sharmaic chant. But it's with the rockier numbers they got the front row jumping like bunnies on speed as Matt cavorted and crawled through the crowd in his usual style, the rest of the band cranked out riff after head banging riff. Still as vital as ever Lacertilia were on fire here, buoyed by celebration of probably their longest serving fan this was great send off. Good luck Mark!

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