concerts

Amanda and Brooke.
Band members of Fat Freddy's Drop.
While Fat Freddy's Drop plays, someone dances with pois.

Today I went to an O'Week concert - O'Week is Orientation Week, when students go a little crazy and try to ignore the large amounts of money they need to spend on textbooks. It was the "big" concert of the week, called Cheap as Chips - although it was actually more like the price of fifteen scoops of chips - and it featured three bands, Korah, Fat Freddy's Drop and Shapeshifter. They're all Kiwi bands, and Fat Freddy's Drop has done especially well in New Zealand [see their website here]. They've probably sold more albums than any other band over the last few years. They're a kind of dub/reggae group with a really laidback, summery feel, and they have a really cool brass section with trumpets and saxophones.

Well, the atmosphere of the whole concert was great. Perfect weather - not too hot, but I still managed to get sunburnt. Silly me. There was a huge range of people at the concert as it wasn't open only to students, and what was kind of nice was there were heaps of families with cute kids running round. So it was nice at times just lying back on the grass with a picnic lunch, listening to summery music and applying sunscreen, with my friends Amanda and Brooke.

All the same, I was kind of disappointed with Fat Freddy's Drop. Their two major singles ("Wandering Eye" and "Skanking With Me" - please don't judge them by their song names) are really, really cool and as I'm not a major fan, they are really the only songs I know well by the group. But they didn't play them! So they have been touring the last two years playing the same songs, but all the same, the rest of their music was a bit vague despite a cool beat now and then, while those singles were really distinctive and original music with great rhythm and great tunes. The perfect type of music for a summer concert. Therefore, I was annoyed that I had spent $27 and not heard them! It was also annoying that there was a one hour gap between every band, so the concert didn't end until 6pm, when it started at 1pm. Here the review endeth.