music.. cabaret & baybeats

I had a good dose of live music over the past two weekends. Sadly, I found both rather disappointing.

Baybeats was a 3day music festival at the Esplanade Bay featuring local and overseas rock acts. Although touted as a festival, the atmosphere was however quite sombre. There were no hippy, happy dancing teens, hotdogs, burgers, nor beer. Instead, the young crowd milled around, looked "cool", and generally unaffected by the music. The moshing, bodyslamming skinnieheads don't count; they vent their teenage angst at every opportunity. (In fact, according to wx, they got into trouble with the "security".) To be fair, it wasn't the fault of the bands. Not all of them anyway. Velvet Teen and Panda no Panda were awesome. The former is like Jeff Buckley with his balls squeezed backed by Sonic Youth, and the latter is just unbelievably funny rap and electronica (they're beyond me.)

I guess the lukewarm response is unavoidable. The organizer even got the audience to stand up and jive to Panda no Panda, but they sat down after maybe 3 songs. In fact, Velvet Teen was the second frustrated american band utter 'fuckyou' to their uninterested audience here in singapore. The first was Matchbox20 before they were really big playing to picnicking families on the Padang for free. So probably Singaporeans only get high at concerts they pay $100++. :(


Last Saturday, I was again at the Esplanade - to watch the musical, cabaret, with grette. I can't say much about it, perhaps the singing was a bit weak, but the costumes looked great. However, we were seating right at the last row, and the airconditioning was so warm that probably made me miss all the good parts.

So that's two unsatisfying music weekends for me. I really should shell out the bucks for Mogwai who's coming real soon. Really sad that the student tickets were sold out by the 3rd day...