Our second time seeing Grendel and, well... it didn't start well really. Rocking up to the Elektrowerkz we realized the show was in the (smaller) downstairs room, despite there being enough people to use the upstairs room. And it was looking pretty rammed for the support band. Joy.
So we found a corner away from the door, away from the bar and for the first half of the gig it wasn't too bad. But later on the room just seemed to get fuller and fuller and space was getting shorter and shorter. At least we could see reasonably well, I'll give it that.
Grendel then, they opened the set with about 6 tracks from the new album, which was great. Having listened to that album quite a few times recently it all made perfect sense and I was enjoying it despite the close proximity of 'other people' (the horror). But I wanted to hear some old tunes as well, and this is where it started to go a bit wrong.
For some reason Grendel's old stuff sounds 'off' live. I thought this at Resistanz but put it down to a bad mix, but here again it sounds like all you can hear are counterpoint melodies from the keyboards, encore 'Harsh Generation' being particular badly affected, without the lyrics I wouldn't have recognized the song at all. Indeed, I don't know what song they played between 'Chemicals and Circuitry' and 'Timewave Zero', but I thought it was 'Timewave Zero'.... very strange.
And then there's singer 'JD Tucker', leaving aside his political bollocks ('Fuck the Tories', 'Fuck Brexit', etc...) he doesn't know when to shut his cakehole sometimes. 'Flux' from the new album was one track in particular where he kept repeating the lyrics ad nauseum before it started and after it ended. Also, why does he look like George Michael all of a sudden?
I mean, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either, and I think we'll be thinking long and hard about travelling to London to see another band anytime soon.
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