The Drums or the Noise, fans will be the Fans

I went to their gig in HK last week -- I mean that of the Drums. And it’s probably the worst gig I had been to.

Well, partly because of the outrageous high ticket prices, I haven’t been to many gigs in recent years. (Actually few were really good enough to make me want to spend a fortune.) But I can’t remember a worse gig, of local or foreign bands, than theirs. Even when many weren’t really my cup of tea, they mostly played their music decently well. But what a nightmare of sound the Drums had to offer me, on that night when the weather is calm.

Frankly, I don’t really know much about the Drums. I don’t own their records, but only heard them on YouTube. Though they didn’t sound as great as the critics said, just as many other overrated ones, I thought their songs were quite good and probably it’s worth seeing them live. At HKD360, the ticket price was high but at least slightly lower than others.

They were supported by a local band called the Yours, which was mediocre enough. Still, I thought the Drums played even worse than the Yours. At least the latter managed to play some decent guitar riffs and one song nearing the end was fine.

And even these drums could make me wait for an hour and a half? Ridiculous! They didn’t deserve it. My time is precious, at least in front of those drums.

So after such a painfully long wait, I was only rewarded with a crappy jumbo of noise, amid some madly happy audience, who perhaps heard the music with their body and their mouth instead of their ears.

Song after song, the noise only repeated itself. The guitars drowned in a smog of noise. The vocal was thin and dull, diluting the melody lines and reducing every song into some repetitive whining and shouting. Simply said, every song sounded mediocre and boring. If their songs weren’t that great, I thought they could at least play some pleasant and catchy tunes on stage. However lively the atmosphere seemed to be, it just ended up like a mess.

It’s an eerie night for me, as if I had an awful trip into a strange world of an unknown people. How come the audience were so excited? Didn’t any of them find the sound horrible? Then, I even worried if I had some hearing problems. But after leaving the venue (a bit early, the encore only meant the noise encore une fois), I found my hearing OK. Then, what’s wrong with the audience? Either they were very undemanding, or they were simply great…fans, come rain or shine. They could only choose to Like anyway, and so must act as liking puppets jumping to the rhythm of those drums.

Surely the concert left me dissatisfied and perplexed. I have wasted my time and money for this?! Shouldn’t I have saved it for a football match instead? At least it would be more entertaining! And you don’t have to pretend to be cool!

Besides, what a dumb name for a band, the Drums! The Others, the Music, the Dears…,the what? There are loads of stupid band names around these days. How can you expect much from their music when they couldn’t even make up a more creative or meaningful name? The drums with a capital letter D? Pas encore.