It must be really difficult to pick support for Animals as Leaders. They’ve carved out a niche as a ridiculously technical, progressive metal jazz fusion band. I mean, how many other bands are like that?

Bloodworks seem pretty aware of the fact that a narrow-minded individual might not expect a death metal band at a show like this. Having said that, an incredibly tight set, great musicianship and brutal vocals more than justify their presence here. Local, too.

I accidentally discovered Apollo’s Arrows this week through a friend. I’m not sure if he knew something I didn’t about tonight, but either way I enjoyed them then, and I enjoyed them live more. It must be pretty intimidating to go on straight before a band like Animals as Leaders but, once they settled, they played brilliantly. A sort-of combination of Saosin, At the Drive-in, (post-hardcore, not crazy experimental) The Sound of Animals Fighting and in:aviate. A very entertaining and talented frontman made for a brilliant opener for AAL. I hope these guys do well.

Animals as Leaders are just amazing. The Joiners is a tiny venue and it gets hot. So hot, in fact, that my awareness of my own soaked clothes dissipated. Tosin was worse – his black shirt was shining by the end of the set. Still, the band put on a fantastic show. Three astounding musicians working perfectly together. Playing seamlessly with a backing track, you wouldn’t have believed what they got away with. The venue was packed with sweaty, smelly, inconsiderate metal-heads but I didn’t care. We even got a track off their new album, which was more jazz than metal and I wasn’t a massive fan, but still got it!

Some more famous light at The Joiners forced me to shoot with black and white in mind this time. Pleased with these, actually. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of band members missing. It was so packed, I had to stay where I was throughout the show. Luckily, that was about five feet from Tosin during AAL’s set.

Bloodworks

Apollo’s Arrows

Animals as Leaders

Before the photos, I’ve got a story to tell. So sit back, relax and scroll past all this shit. Or don’t. Y’know when people try to tell you about a night out that was funny? That’s what this is going to be.

So, I have this friend. When he drinks, he’s pretty funny. He’s the sorta guy who gets to a point with his drinking, then he’s done drinking and he goes home. But this guy doesn’t get in a cab and go safely home. Oh no. This guy runs. And I don’t mean “hmm, I’ll enjoy a gentle jog”, I mean “shit, there’s a dog chasing me”, fast-as-you-fucking-can runs. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a drunk guy running, but it rarely ends well.

Anyway, so now that you know the man: my account of yesterday evening.

Brontide is a band you have to see. Any post rock band works way better live. The irony of lyric-less music is that it’s great to work to because words don’t distract you, but it’s never as good on your hi-fi as it is live. So I go to post rock shows as much as I can.

The evening is a relatively boozy one. It’s customary to precede every drink with a Jägerbomb. By the time Brontide takes the stage, I’ve stopped drinking because I’m pretty drunk and I don’t want to miss the band (bands I’ve missed because I drank too much before they started: Hadouken!, The Chariot, half a The Ghost of a Thousand set). My friend has not stopped drinking. Y’know when you’re drinking at a live show, and you get to a point where the material your bottom three vertebrae are made from changes from bone to some sort of rubber, and you sorta flop forward with total disregard for rhythm (see: La Dispute, Basingstoke), that’s where my friend is at right now. I’m snapping some photos and he’s trying to keep his face off the floor.

Brontide plays an amazing set. And I don’t mean “I’m so wasted, you guys were amazing”, I mean “holy shit, I didn’t think it would be that good”. We leave and start the walk back to my friend’s flat. We’re in an area of Southampton that I’m not accustomed to. I am not the navigator. Fifteen minutes of walking and chatting shit later and we’re on a street I don’t recognise. It’s dark and I can’t see the end of this street in any direction. I’m kinda concerned. Out of nowhere, my friend does his running thing and he’s gone.

I am so fucking lost.

But I have a phone. I whip it out, Eastwood-style and try to have Google Maps tell me where the hell I am. Google is unsure. Some people walk towards me. Perfectly politely, I enquire as to my whereabouts in relation to the city centre. I am “fucking miles” from the city centre and going in the wrong direction. I turn around and walk back down this paradoxical street until the end. I still don’t recognise this place. I consider calling a cab to come and get me, but then I remember you need to know where you are before you can impart such information to a taxi driver. So I go in search of a landmark that I can direct a taxi to. Finally, I see somewhere I recognise. I’m about three miles out of the city centre in the wrong direction.

If I start walking now, I’ll be home in two hours. It’s already pretty late and I have to work in nine hours.

I call a taxi and give some pretty decent details about my location. The woman at dispatch is very friendly and helps me determine where I am and where I need to go. Pissed at my friend for bailing, I ask the driver to take me to his house so that I can get my bike and call him a dick.

I call my friend. No answer. What a dick.

I call again. Call rejected. You fucker.

I call again. Rejected again. Now I’m mad.

I keep calling all the way back. All I want is my bike so I can go home and go to bed. I am in no state to ride a bike, but I just want my bike. It will be a good walking aid for the journey home. A hipster Zimmer Frame. I ring his doorbell for almost forever but he never answers. The fucker’s gone to bed and is rejecting my calls because he’s trying to sleep. Like any considerate drunkard, I begin shouting his name and ringing all the bells of the people in his building. They must all share my frustration. An irritated man comes to the window and politely enquires as to the nature of my fucking problem. I calmly explain the situation about my “fucking mate, [his] neighbour” and wonder if I can successfully describe my bicycle that sits on the other side of this door, will he buzz me in? He agrees to my terms, and I describe my bicycle down to the last tooth on the chainring. Satisfied with my intimate knowledge of the bicycle, he buzzes me in and I go home.

Upon my return, I can barely close the front door before my phone rings. It’s my effing mate. He quickly informs me that the police have dropped him at home because he’s been stabbed. I dash back to his house to check that he’s OK, try to find out what’s happened and make sure, y’know, that he doesn’t die. Suitably satisfied that he is, in fact, not going to be dead by morning, I leave and go back to my bed.

I wake up in a daze. I’m still not used to bed-head. My stomach is trying to turn itself inside out. The fajitas I ate last night are having a pretty big argument with the Jägerbombs I drank, and they’re refusing to share the space any longer. My head is three sizes too small for my brain, which is now leaking out of my facial orifices. My wife is oddly sympathetic. She shouldn’t be, really.

My phone rings; it’s my friend the knife block. He’s remembered the course of events of the evening.

You see, upon running full-pelt away from me as though I was made of fire, he was struck by inspiration. He bets himself that he can easily smash the window of the nearest car with his elbow. Naturally, he takes the bet – what has he to lose – and proceeds to smash a window of the nearest car. Knowing my friend and his impeccable luck and timing, the owner of said vehicle is within earshot and takes exception to these actions. My friend panics and starts to run. He’s not as fast as the owner of the broken automobile, who tackles him to the ground with ease (see previous: stab wound) and presumably keeps him around until the police show up to deal with the situation.

Luckily for my friend, he’s one of the nicest, soft-spoken-est (softest-spoken?) people you could ever hope to meet. He convinces the police and the poor car’s owner that he’s just a drunk idiot and promises to pay for all damages tomorrow. He’s presumably let off with a warning and given a lift home so his window smashing rampage can’t continue. Upon approaching his front door, he forgets the past 30 minutes (seriously, how?) and enters his house. He feels pain, sees blood, remembers the police and assumes he’s been stabbed, so he calls the one person he knows will drop everything to help out a friend in danger, who marches round to piece the evening back together, Memento-style.

And now the less crap bit. Black and white conversions are an unplanned necessary evil. Red noise is ugly as hell. Black and white noise is nice. I’m an artiste, don’t-you-know.

Sky Ride was not as good as I thought it was going to be. Was cool to see so many people on so many different types of bikes in the same place. The dude riding a penny farthing was definitely a highlight.

It was, however, short and not scenic at all. Kinda felt like you were just riding in circles a lot of the time. And bragging about shutting closing roads is only attractive if you actually go on a road! I did more miles getting there and back than I did on the actual ride. Was good to meet a few guys from 63fixed, though. Just what I needed to get back started after a few days off.

Had a go on one of those rolling roads as well. I was not fast on it. No sir.

Spotify the service is brilliant. There’s tonnes of music on there now, and being able to import your own library and OTA sync with mobile devices is brilliant. The purchase-able MP3 bundles are a bargain (if you’re bright enough to spend £50 at a time). They’re doing really great things for music consumers when the recording industry seems to be working on triple-jointing its elbows so it can simultaneously scratch its own back and steal your wallet (or put you in jail). Kudos to you, Spotify.

My problem with Spotify, and the reason I’ll probably cancel my subscription (again), is that the player is broken. It’s a horrific abortion of an application. A worthless, frustrating, horribly-designed, fundamentally loathsome piece of garbage.

I come from a media library school of music-listening. That is to say that I have all of my music available to me all the time in iTunes. I can browse by artist, album, genre, I can arbitrarily create playlists, all the nice things that Spotify pretends to be able to do, but doesn’t. Say you’re in the mood to listen to something you know you’ve got in your library. Here’s a worst-case, oft-realised scenario of how that situation could end up causing you to want to kerb stomp a puppy:

• I’d like to listen to this album today
• I search for the album
• I’m presented with a visually cacophonous assault of things that are likely irrelevant to what I was looking for
• I realise what I was looking for was in my library, not Spotify’s and Spotify’s search only searches their catalogue
• I drop back to “Local Files” and I have to Command[Control]-F a string precise enough to match the album I want to listen to (I suppose I could create playlists in this instance, but by now I’ve illustrated that Spotify’s search is worthless, and the app doesn’t allow you to browse by artist or album unless they have the artist/album in their library. Suck it up, pansy)

Say I find my albums, and I want to queue them in a playlist, in the order I choose. I sort by “Added”, foolishly assuming that this will be able to emulate iTunes’ behaviour, whereby adding music to a playlist results in a playlist automatically sorted in the same fashion that I added it. If I add an album in Spotify, and sort by the earliest added, it seems to flip the track listing order, so that if I choose tracks 1-12 and add them, the order that they appear in the playlist is 12-1. I can’t even trick Spotify into doing what iTunes does perfectly and intuitively.

Assuming I’ve actually managed to find something to listen to, things go well from there. The controls are way more responsive than iTunes, which is nice. I don’t have to hit pause then wait for three seconds for music to stop before I can answer a phone call. Sound quality seems good, although if you’re doing something CPU-intensive, playback gets noticeably jittery (I say “noticeably” because I do a lot of CPU-hungry stuff, and have never noticed iTunes stutter).

Spoonful of sugar notwithstanding, the final (small-to-some) gripe I have with Spotify is their library tagging and how they force it on you. My #musicmonday posts are calculated programmatically by gathering all the songs I listened to in the last week, querying a few web services to get song lengths, then calculating the amount of time I’ve spent listening to artists individually that week. Naturally, as I started using Spotify as my main music player, I decided that I would implement Spotify’s music metadata API search, as I noticed that musicbrainz wasn’t getting a lot of the tracks that I was submitting. Having done this, I noticed that when using the Spotify music metadata search, submitting strings that it had obviously sent to last.fm as scrobbles, it couldn’t find this music from its own database! How is that even right? Is it not working from the same data? To make matters slightly worse, it seems to have inferred tags from my library. I have a beautifully-tagged iTunes library, which Spotify has taken it upon itself to apply its own shitty metadata to!

So there you have it. Spotify’s player all but completely ruins the whole experience of finding music to listen to, and my own esoteric obsession with collating data on said music. I guess Spotify’s plan is to piss me off so much when I’m looking for music to listen to that there’s no data to collate. Problem solved.

The day of deliveries, new avatars, stickers and a posing dog.

La Dispute might be the greatest post hardcore band I’ve ever had the pleasure to hear. Please help them continue making music; listen, buy and go to shows.