Seeing bands live enables me to make final judgement if i do like them or not and that sure thing requires to go out and see bands, sometimes by word of mouth. The Pears from New Orleans are currently traded by some as hot shit and even Mr. Milo Aukerman praised them – so on a hot Sunday evening it was just the right thing to close down the weekend.
The support slot named themselves after that bloke who runs that other club in Hamburg and they must have thrown an additional letter in not to get sued (or beaten up). And they are from Hannover and their T-Shirts stated “Han. Hardcore”. Outsch. [Warning: The section you have just read contains ironic statements only making sense to people in the know and from Hamburg. If you are neither, then they do not make sense to you!]
Nope, i did not dig them. Neither sound (actually specifically sound) nor stage presence. Sorry – in my ears weak copycats with no own ideas (and being old i tend to cast harsh rulings). Luckily i was not alone with my judgement, so me mate and i left to savour a beer outside, watch them ships and warn the Pears guitarist of the health dangers of smoking (by telling him he would die: he would not believe us though).
No clue how the rest of the audience (less than 50 to much disappointment) liked Slam Harder – we only came back in once the stage had been handed over.
Yep, that is how Pears kicked off. And it provided the intro what the audience would be getting: Some stop start, fast, slow and all of that packed into 2:00 smashers delivered by the very extrovert stage persona of the singer.
Pears (Hafenklang, Hamburg, 24.07.2016) (c) gehkacken.de)
Doing a bit of an Sméagol-crawl from the stage into the audience (and the rathere open space in front of the stage) he even managed to scare off a young lady that came to see the Pears!
Ok, you can see how someone with a Descendents mind could like them and that without even a scent of copycat style. It was no surprise to see a Milo-Tattoo on the guitarist and see at least 5 people with Descendents shirts in the audience.
The one thing though that stood out for me was that whilst they had all of these variations and also from a mu-sick-al style not a singular sound (which on the one side is a positive rating) they also felt somehow undecided or at least instilled that thinking in me (which is the non-positive side of that same coin). In the end that back-and-forth between Hardcore and melodic Punk Rock somehow gave an itchy feeling.
The other odd thing was that it was damn fuckin hot, a rather small audience downstairs (they would have worked better upstairs on the smaller stage and with the smaller room) and a band that seemed exhausted – thus it never clicked between those on stage and the few in front of the stage.
And that is how the finished, no encore. No more than 40 minutes.
I give them credit and i will try to see them again, if i then still have that itchy feeling than they are not for me – not a fail yet!
And that is indeed why you have to go out and see bands – sometimes it is for that itch!
