Live Music: White Hills / Twinkranes

I mentioned that I went to see the popular film Good Vibrations. When I left the cinema, I found myself brimming over with fondness for the world of live music, so I decided to go and see the a concert that night by White Hills and Twinkranes. This was in the Grand Social. And I went alone - that's how crazy for rock and roll I am.

Twinkranes are a local band. They used to comprise two members of a previous band called The Transformers, who may have been made up by advertisers to sell some kind of product and were most famous for having funny haircuts. This time round they had lost one of the funny haircut people and now were a two piece, comprising the blond haired guy who I kind of think of as Mr Twinkranes and another guy who lacked a distinctive coiffure. The blond guy played drums and did vocals while the other fellow did stuff with what looked like pretty old-school synthesisers. The music they make is interesting, treading a strange line between avant garde nonsense and impressive musoiness. By the end of their set I found myself thinking I should make the effort to see them again sometime and perhaps even check out their album on Finders Keepers.

White Hills are a three piece - a guy on drums, another guy on guitar and lead vocals and a woman on bass. The bassist has a slightly "hello sailor!" quality to her attire, wearing a fetching red suit with a rather short skirt and high red boots, while the guitarist looks like he might have wandered in from the set of a Tolkien adaptation. Their music is of the "yeow!" variety, so they serve up lots of psych-rocky stuff to us. They are pretty good and they do rock hard (particularly the lady bassist) but I ended up thinking that maybe they are only pretty good and not the truly amazing live band they aspire to be.

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Irene reviews a concert by White Hills and Wizards of Firetop Mountain

Now I am recycling Irene's review of a concert I too was at but failed to write about.

The main attraction here was Wizards of Firetop Mountain, a bunch of hairy geezers (ian's voice: "and one woman") who live to rock 24/7. And just as they did at Hunter's Moon, they served up straight down the line ROCK in the spirit of ye Sabbath. Ian called them "beyond irony" and this would appear to be true.

White Hills had more of a modern take on heavy rock, putting together Hawkwindy effects, guitar pedals, slightly acid-y vibes etc (Wizards would have had no truck with that kind of nonsense). But still LOUD. The drummer with White Hills was amazing, and I remarked to Ian that he was almost as good as Oneida's own Kid Millions. Imagine my astonishment when, a few days later, I learned that Mr Millions actually plays on White Hills' album. So, er, was I stood in front of Kid Millions for all that time at the gig, not realising who it was? Probably, but I can't be sure because, in spite of having seen Oneida loads of times, I have no idea what Kid Millions looks like. Hence my question about band-member-specific prosopagnosia, because this seems to happen to me a lot. Does anyone else have this problem?

I have many problems, but I don't think prosopnagnosia is one of them. The only thing I have to say about this concert was that it is hard to communicate just how hard Wizards of Firetop Mountain rock. White Hills also rock hard, but in a somewhat spacier kind of way.

Later testimony suggested that we had not seen Kid Millions drumming with White Hills - suggesting that there are several very good rock drummers in the world.

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