Blog: Diagonal – Live @ ULU
Check out James Gill’s live review of up-and-coming prospects, Diagonal.Diagonal @ ULU -December ‘08
Any scene gets tired after a while, and the braver bands look around impatiently for something to enliven the moribund sound. Hardcore seems to have wrung out and the ravenous inventors are turning to ‘prog’ for new ideas. And few new bands have managed to go retro, stay relevant, and be mind-boggingly good like Diagonal have.
The album is great, but the live show is something else: lots of long-hairs all bobbing heads and looking as spaced as a Woodstock casualty as their driving prog rock peaks and troughs through layers and layers of guitars, drums, keyboards and brass. Fuck stagecraft, these catatonic rockanisms don’t draw the eye so much as draw the third eye, your mind dragged as if by tractor beam into a whirling miasma of jazz rock fusion and progressive heaviness.
Before you know where you are you’re standing agog at the scene trying to grab hold of the music, meta-fishing for notes and wondering when 1974 will finally end. An acquired taste worth acquiring.[8]
GILL
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