I've been meaning to get along to Some Weird Sin, a still reasonably new club night run by Mauro Venegas from Johnny Cola and the A-Grades for a while and finally I made it down on Friday night. I got in fashionably late enough to have missed the other band that was on, but I was more than in time to hear a good bit of Mauro's DJ set before the arrival of the Deadcuts who have been causing a bit of a fuss over the last year since they formed.
Much of the fuss has been to do with them also acting as backing band for a certain Mr Doherty, but far more interesting for me is that the band is fronted by Mark Keds who I saw a good few times playing with Senseless Things. He's the front man and guitarist for Deadcuts alongside Mark McCarthy who also looked rather familiar (he used to be in The Wonder Stuff) on bass and then they have The Skuzzies' Jerome Alexander on guitar and backing vocals and on drums is Joni Belaruski who I'm sure I saw play with someone else last year at The Barfly, but that may not be correct.
Still they look like bands used to look like, you know like a bunch of junkies who may be having trouble standing up yet somehow manage to play loud, slightly obnoxious rock and roll drenched in reverb and attitude. Thankfully, no matter what Mark Keds has spent the last few years doing to his body, his voice is still intact. The opening song (all about being Without Love) was deliciously dark and twisted and the reverb it was drowning in worked perfectly. I also liked whatever pedal Jerome was using to make his guitar sound like keyboards.
The darkness is never far away in Deadcuts' songs and anytime you hear that someone is Praying For Jail you know they are getting near rock bottom and that some sort of salvation is needed. I have no idea if Mark is singing about his own journey or someone else's but it's a great slab of noise and as they don't really stop between songs, they just break down into some feedback before firing off into a song about the Show Must Go On but not in any queen like way at all, this is more crawling out of the gutter and hoping to wake up tomorrow in some sort of shape to carry on.
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Still if you are looking for a Payoff it helps to have the sort of bass line rumbling through it that this one does and it gets the place going even more than it already is. When Mark starts singing about how he could spend his nights like this you're not quite sure if he means rocking the hell out of clubs or at the end of a glass pipe. Something he certainly needed some separation from.
As the set went on and they got hotter and sweatier it just got more exciting and the riffs got more skewhiff and slanted but not enchanted so that by the time they are singing about a Speed Sister you know you need to drop another couple of speed bombs just to have enough of a rush going on to be with them. Everyone in the Buffalo bar is with them too, no matter How Many Times they sing of letting us and the nearest and dearest down while chasing what they need.
They wrap things up with the new single Kill Desire.It sounds like The Libertines meets Gallon Drunk and has a hard time standing upright and then they get told they have time for one more and we get a song about Survivors which they certainly are. It's great to see Mark Keds playing again it's been too many years since I last saw him in action.
After they finish we have some great DJing from David Ryder Prangley who keeps up the night's New York v London theme in style.
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