Following on from my post last week of photos from the Kanadia gig at The Bullingdon, the local monthly music magazine Nightshift have used one for their review….

This was for the Nightshift March edition  review  More photographs of which can be found here .  This is the photograph they used.

Nightshift Kanadia review

This is the text of the article:

KANADIA REVUE

The Bullingdon

With his slicked hair, unnerving gaze
and tight-fitting suit, Pink Diamond
Revue frontman Tim Lane looks
like the sort of bloke who ends
uncomfortable conversations with
a switchblade. Tonight, though, he
channels any simmering discontent
by continually harassing the legless
mannequin on stage with him with
his guitar, all the while crunching out
relentless surfabilly dirges over the
drummer’s metronomic beats, washes
of industrial synths and disembodied
vocal samples. It sounds like Dick
Dale, Kraftwerk and Ministry dropped
a bunch of mushrooms together and
invented Death In Vegas twenty years
too early. It’s simple, highly effective
and brilliantly hypnotic.
Temper Cartel’s frontman,
meanwhile, looks like he’s dropped
in from an early incarnation of The
Kinks, bypassing the last 50 years
of pop music besides a stop-off at
Britpop’s first flowering. The band
can be a bit shouty at times when a
subtler approach would help their
songs better, but at their best they’re
anthemic, even elegant: a little bit
Oasis, a little bit Pulp and quite a bit
Space.
Anthemic is a musical state Kanadia
very rarely drop below. Twenty
seconds into tonight’s set they sound
like the climax of a U2 gig. The band,
from Abingdon, have seemingly
taken that mid-80s idea of The Big
Music and run with it, so everything
is built to be performed in stadiums.
Singer James Bettis is a picture of
nervous intensity as he hunches over
his microphone throughout the set,
channelling his inner Thom Yorke,
while carving delicate guitar spangles
and chimes that strive to escape the
venue’s confines.
At their funkiest, on `Ocean Blue’,
there’s a hint of INXS about the,
while the piledriving `Ugly Truth’,
runs close to Muse’s epic intent. Set
highlight remains `Into the Flames’,
KANADIA / TEMPER CARTEL / THE PINK DIAMOND REVUE
The Bullingdon
gorgeously airy compared to the
denser noise of much of the set,
although a slow-building, as yet
untitled new song with a touch of Six
By Seven about it, runs it close. Only
an overwrought number towards the
end of the set falls flat, a dull shrug of
a stadium ballad, but they close with
`Meet the End’ with a jammed-out
coda that’s close to majestic.
They might wear their influences
on their hearts and sleeves, but those
influences are bands who count their
sales in the tens of millions, and
Kanadia’s musical scope and ambition
suggests they might do too one day.
Dale Kattack