Manchester Scenewipe

Future Everything Presents…FUCKED UP + KONG || ISLINGTON MILL, SALFORD || 12.05.11

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011, 10:14 am

“If the people behind FutureEverything have ‘cherry pick[ed] some of the most innovative, ground-breaking and sensational acts of 2011’ then why the hell am I having to watch Stranger Son of W.B?” was pretty much my only thought upon entering Islington Mill on Thursday night. The Manchester ensemble were already half way through a set of such loosely played, droning post-punk that for their sake I really hope they were making it up on the spot. I was being taken for a fool by the sales patter of an event-write up.

In an ideal world, Oxford Language Dictionaries would publish an ‘English (Promoter)’ edition which would include entries such as;

Innovative - adjective

[in-uh-vey-tiv]

●      Messy, dull and generally a bit tedious

Ground-Breaking – adjective

[ground-brey-king]

●      Any old ‘weird’ shit.

So after another few long minutes of a vocalist affecting an American whine, he announces “that’s it” in the broadest Mancunian dialect imaginable and walks off stage.

Yep, that really was ‘it’.

So now that’s over, I’ve got a chance to examine my surroundings a little more – it seems the crowd at Islington Mill is a mixed bag of slick-back hair, sideburns and knitwear. Black Flag and Misfits iconography galore! An audience trying incredibly hard to achieve something, but they’re just not sure what. I’m not sure what to make of it all, really.

I quite like watching Kong set up their stuff before a show – the construction of a bastardised jigsaw that doesn’t exactly make up a pretty picture once all the pieces are in place.

If I’m stretching out this horrid jigsaw metaphor for the whole of Kong’s set, then I suppose you could say it was hardly a 10,000 piece puzzle, but let’s be honest here, that’s not a concern of theirs – snarling ferociously, and battering their brand of Shellac-by-way-of-Lightning-Bolt noise rock to a crowd of happy, sweaty men and increasingly nervous looking women. I love it.

I’ve been watching Kong shows for the best part of 4 or 5 years now – and I think they’ve probably written two new songs in that time – and I’ve seen their equipment break a lot. Tonight is no exception, with five minutes of the set being taken up by a frantic attempt to fix amps – sadly it appears that the attention span of the crowd can’t really handle five minutes alone with their thoughts and so they begin to lose interest. Try as they might over the next three songs, Kong can’t seem to win them back – which is a tragic shame. I maintain that Kong are one of Manchester’s most exciting bands, and in the wake of the death of Oceansize I hope they find the time to prove it to the rest of the city.

As tends to be the case with busy shows, there’s an air of excitement brewing deep within the huddled masses. Or maybe it’s the Brylcreem melting, hard to tell really. In all honesty I’m not too excited for what’s in store – having seen Fucked Up at some ridiculous Vice Magazine/Doc Martens school disco fashion jamboree back in the colder months. They didn’t exactly blow me away. (Kong, incidentally, also played that show which was my main reason for going). So imagine my surprise when Fucked Up take to the stage and more or less instantly make a packed room abandon all inhibitions and just start having fun.

Does that sound odd to you? ‘Cause for some reason I very rarely see people actually having fun at gigs. It was nice to see a sea of smiles and sweat dripping off the pipes. True to form, vocalist Damian Abraham was on a mission to set foot on every single part of the venue, whilst the rest of the band stayed more or less stationary. It’s a dynamic that works in their favour – allowing the hardcore punk instrumentals to act as a platform for Abraham to literally launch off. The PA was broken, and the vocals were low in the mix – which just seemed to encourage louder screaming from band and fans alike.

As the set progressed, adrenaline (I’m using that as an all-encompassing word for any number of substances) fuelled the crowd more and more, for want of a better word it was intense. It was like the whole atmosphere was constructed around the underlying feeling that something catastrophic was seconds away from happening, and everybody thrived off it. This was a band completely in their element.

I witnessed one man stumble out of the crowd with a broken pair of glasses in hand, sit down, throw up, and head back in for more of the same. If that’s not some form of testimony then I don’t know what is.

Words by Luke Bather

For more about Kong, do a click here.

For Fucked Up, click here instead.