Live Review
Bad For Lazarus/Saint Agnes/Dolls
Boston Music Room, London
February 25 2015
Words: Richard O'Hagan
Photos: Caroline Garden
Getting a start in the music business is hard. You need to put in long hours, learn your craft, enjoy a good slice of luck and seek out the goodwill of others. You also need other people to do their job properly, and when they don’t you’re still not in a position to complain. Which is how all three bands had to spend an evening battling with a sound system which seemed to have been hardwired to the nearest swamp and a set of intermittently malfunctioning microphones.
Openers Dolls are young, tiny and really rather noisy. Like an angular and less world-weary version of Blood Red Shoes, the spikiness in their music is nicely contrasted by singer Jade Ellins’ softly spoken pieces to the audience. Debut single ‘Killing Time’ is all jagged edges and unexpected time shifts, but makes for an odd set closer – something which betrays the inexperience of the duo. Listen out for pounding new number ‘Audrey’, though.
Saint Agnes are nothing if not ballsy. You have to have extreme confidence to open a showcase like this with the massive harmonica solo of ‘Where The Lightning Strikes’, let alone to overrun your set by ten minutes (as they do). The front duo of Jon Tufnell (late of Lost Souls Club) and Kitty Austen (the one from Lola Colt who actually has some stage presence) works well in the parts where he’s not drowning her out completely. New song ‘Black Hearted Girl’ is sleazy and sublime, ‘Sister Electric’ is, frankly, T-Rex fuelled by Red Bull, and current single ‘Old Bone Rattle’, well, rattles along happily. Definitely a band to watch out for.
Bad For Lazarus don’t do much more than provide good, old fashioned, rock to end the night’s proceedings. Unfortunately, they are also the point at which the sound system goes into total meltdown – four vocalists occasionally harmonising and occasionally alternating is clearly more than it can cope with, to the point that when The Duke Spirit’s Liela Moss comes on for her lead vocal on new single ‘7 Minute Itch’ she is rendered almost inaudible. That BFL deserve bigger and better surroundings is indisputable.
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