After a long and hard and tiring day at work, my colleague Arush and I headed for drinks and food at the Golden Cafe, then moved off to the Singapore Baybeats festival at the Esplanade. It had been a rainy and cool day, and was still spitting rain, and we might have been disinclined to go there, but I really wanted to make a go of finally attending – I’ve been in Singapore seven years and haven’t seen its only indie festival. A bit of rain and tiredness was no reason to cancel, and after a few beers I was feeling much better!
We got there and wandered around, caught a wee bit of “Car Crash Hearts” at the outdoor theatre, they were okay; then headed over to the Powerhouse stage 50 metres away to catch Duxton Plains, who were a bit better. They had a bit of the U2 Big Sound thing happening, but they weren’t great either. After their short set, we went off to see cialis 100mg manufacturers, who were playing with Jon Auer of the Posies, back at the outdoor theatre, and they were amazing. Typewriter are one of these great Singapore bands that I’ve heard about on Myspace, but haven’t come across while in Singapore. And then I got a chance to see them for the first time on a proper stage on the riverfront, this time playing with Jon Auer oftcialis dose amounts, who has also come to fame in recent years for playing with Big Star – one of my favourite bands! They played nice songs throughout the first part of their set, and I kept yelling for Big Star of course (since I don’t know any Typewriter or Posies songs). And so, they play beautiful, jangly songs, they play that cool Typewriter song that is on their Myspace page, and then Jon plays a beautiful solo song. Unfortunately, it’s 10:30, and a bunch of fireworks pop off in the background. Typewriter rejoin him on stage, and they launch into a great version of Big Star’s “September Gurls.” Amazing! Here’s the video:
After that, they played a Typewriter original, “That Deepest Blue”. Here’s a look at that.
A few others have posted videos of the night. Someone who was standing near where I was put up some up, as did someone who was in mid-section seating, they’re pretty good:
Flavor of the Month:
Six Feet Under:
Pop Music of the Future (this is where the fireworks start going off in the background, nearly ruining a beautiful, mellow song:
By the way, this song is by a band called “Say Hi To Your Mom.”
Details:
Afterwards, Arash and I moved another 50 metres to the Powerhouse stage to catch Rudra. We got there just in time – a huge crowd had gathered, and the band cut loose just after we arrived. They came out dressed in identical outfits – cutoff black t-shirts, black pants, black ESP guitars, and all that cool stuff. The lights were all over the place and going crazy. The band was amazing. They zoomed out into this crazy metallic grindcore vedic death metal and we all loved it. I looked around, and most of the crowd was either Singapore Malay or Singapore South Indian, not a lot of Chinese faces at all. I guess that’s just the way rock ‘n’ roll is. But it was fantastic. Check out the video for the opening song (it got cut off when my camera ran out of memory – I’ll have to do something about that…).
Someone else managed to catch my favourite part of the show on video – this was when the lead singer introduced the rest of the band:
Here’s Rudra’s video for “Hymns From The Blazing Chariot”, to give a sense of what ‘vedic metal’ is all about:
Here are a few pics:
Rudra!!!
Rudra!!!!!!
Rudra!!!!!!!!!
Arush and I stayed there for about five songs, then headed back. I was lucky, got a bus almost right away, and drifted home, listened to “Dark Side of the Moon”, finished reading Carlucci’s Edge, got off the bus, walked home, blogged.