GIG REVIEW – Four Wheel Drive, I.C.O.N @ Railway Institute, Bangor
(review n pix neil crud)
Nice ploy, turn up really fucking late for your own gig so that the audience are absolutely leathered by the time you hit the stage. Although you can’t blame the bands for that, but you can blame the road-planners who insist on making the A55 a complete fucking misery for 330 days of EVERY FUCKING YEAR with their fucking cones, miscoordinated roadworks and ‘maintenance’ – FUCK YOU!!!
Anyway, it gave us the opportunity to gas and drink and drink and gas from our arrival at 8.30pm until the first band I.C.O.N hit the stage 2 hours later.
This is gonna be a short review as I wasn’t gonna do it because I hate bands who play 2 or 3 of their own songs then fill their set with covers. That’s not a band, that’s karaoke, that’s Saturday night TV, that’s very fucking boring… that was Four Wheel Drive. Jesus! I’ve been moaning like a boring old cunt about this since the dawn of time… Don’t get me wrong, I’ll go out watch a covers band and have a great time because it’s party time – have a ball, have a laugh – but covers bands are not within the remits of this site, this is a music website for genuine bands who make genuine music, not karaoke with distortion.
I was/am probably way beyond the mark as a listen on the website to their single Hammered Again makes me regret walking out after 4 songs, but if you start your set with three well worn covers, you’re gonna have some casualties and there was a few; well, three of us who were in search of real full blooded bands.
Bands like I.C.O.N, who, by all accounts are a hard working and hard rocking hard rock band. A band who fight the road planners to bring a handful of devotees, misfits and party animals their rock, and it’s good stuff. Yeah, the guitarist makes all the cliched moves from the Donnington Book of Rock Poses, but they (and he) can, and do deliver the goods with some well honed, well thought out, well crafted, well fucked up tunes, with riffs and licks from the top shelf of the metal porn section.
I.C.O.N are clever in the fact they give you your meat and two veg metal as you’d expect, but they also offer up dessert while you’re still gorging on the main course, it’s all good, dirty fun.
As I previously mentioned after hearing two note perfect AC/DC covers and ZEP‘s Rock’n’Roll delivered as if Airbourne were doing it, I should have switched from seething music critic to partygoer to enjoy the rest of Four Wheel Drive, whose own stuff is far better than playing crowd-pleasers, there again, I’m a boring old cunt (so what… etc), and for once, after hearing online their own rhythm n blues inspired rock I regret being so, but I couldn’t find anyone with a sober enough memory to tell me I missed a real band or a covers band…
Shoot me down in flames for this one…
