GET OUT MORE............GIG REVIEW

Don Caballero, Medicine Bar, Birmingham

30-11-2006

Ear-splitting guitar riffery rode into town on Sunday. Martin Longley's hearing has only just recovered.

Birmingham's Capsule promoters are dedicated to music's more
confrontationally brutal side, roughly dividing their bookings between
carbuncled laptoppery and total guitar onslaught, although the latter
side has reared up into full dominance for their Autumnal season.

A resurgence of electronica is, however, promised for the New Year...

How much more guitar thrusting could we possible consume during
this triple-bill of instrumental hard-riffage? Yes, no singers were allowed
onstage tonite. Birmingham's own Calvados Beam Trio adopt the standard
guitar-bass-drums posture, intensely working through their complex stop-start
configurations, angularly cerebral yet still imbued with gut-level expression.

Next up, Capricorns have lumbered up from London, but they'd really be at
home in the Black Country, taking their mega-weighty riff-crunch from Black
Sabbath, but given a certain degree of time-changing complexity, building up
their frequent climaxes with a taut sense of dynamic release, sometimes
pent-up, but never for long. Menacing might their biker music be, but these lads seem like a personable bunch, raising their bottles in salute to the crowd's fearless ear-capacity.

Contrastingly, there's something kinda unfriendly about Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania's Don Caballero. They're off to a bad beginning, floundering
around in indecision, founder drummer Damon Che guardedly 'communicating' with the now-thinning audience. This is a band that pioneered the instrumental angle of so-called 'math rock' in 1991, producing an influential canon over most of the ensuing decade before disbanding in the midst of personality disharmony.

Only a few years later, and Che has re-formed the band with fresh guitarists,
releasing World Class Listening Problem earlier this year.

Are Don Caballero uninterested and slack, as they undergo tedious pauses
between each number, or are they just introverted and laid-back? Once each
tune's in progress, everything's pretty damned tight, Che's monstrous runs around the skins making big booming detonations, intricate though his patterns may be: the guitars are equally convoluted, making zig-zag jumps whilst retaining a bleeding rock'n'roll rush.

Perhaps it's just the cumulative effect of experiencing three instrumental guitar bands in quick succession, but the Caballeros seemed to lack an overall aura of excitement.