Earlier this month, I completed the first season of K-On! after getting Sentai’s DVD re-release set. The last episode in that collection dealt with Houkago Tea Time (the main girls’ band) being invited to perform at a live house on New Year’s Eve with a few other bands. On Saturday night, I went to a live show at Witch Room in midtown Sacramento featuring three bands – local group Desario, Tennis System and headliner Be Forest from Italy – and thought back to that episode while I was there.
I arrived around 8pm, the time listed on the venue’s event calendar and in the local paper, but the doors weren’t open for selling tickets yet so I waited outside for 15 minutes. Once I bought my ticket and went inside, some bands were still doing soundchecks and it wasn’t until around 9pm that Desario took the stage. The bands all seemed to play about 45-minute sets with around eight songs in each and I seemed to like each of them. There was a small crowd of about maybe 30 people in attendance so it wasn’t as packed as I expected it for my first live show there.
Here’s a video someone recorded during the show of Desario playing – they also captured about 4 minutes of Be Forest.
Before I left for home, I bought a CD from each of the bands: Mixer by Desario, Technicolour Blind by Tennis System, and Earthbeat by Be Forest. I had trouble hearing the lyrics on many songs during the bands’ live performances but that’s not a problem on the CDs. All three can be classified as shoegaze, though I felt Tennis System had a bit more bite to their sound when they were on stage (seeing the guitarist wailing around helped put that into my head).
Love Crysis setting up for their practice session.
Returning to the K-On! episode I mentioned at the beginning, it featured pre-show preparations like bands filling out songs & effects on a setlist sheet and practice sessions on the stage. I wished there were songs from the other bands within the episode but I guess that would have made its runtime longer. (I read on a K-On! wiki that Love Crysis appears again in the post-TV series movie so maybe I’ll get to hear them play when I get to that.)
An interesting live show