Birdeatsbaby, Hana Piranha, The Cesarians, One Last Thrill Live @ Black Heart Camden

This was the launch party for Brighton based “Prog-Goth” band Birdeatsbaby’s single Painkiller that’s on the bands 6^th album The World Conspires that’s due out on 18^th October from http://www.dr-music-promotion.de/

I arrived about halfway through One Last Thrill’s set and they sounded like they really would have been perfect to see playing the legendary Big Bobs Gone Strange club at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden in the late 1990s. Steph Whitehead’s vocals are full of anguish while telling us to Face It and just move on if needs be, the guitars are pretty crunchy and I really liked the closing song If Leaving Was An Option that had a good sense of despair in it as long as they can find enough gigs to play they should be able to build a decent following.

Next on were The Cesarians who I seem to see play live once every year or two for the last 11 or 12 years I can’t remember when I first saw them as an opening act or on the bill at Gypsy Hotel, either way they are always worth seeing as Charlie Finke the bands lead singer said they now describe themselves as playing “presidential revenge bebop“  which is a perfect song intro,  I know just what he means as the current six piece line-up are as much of a Bebop band as a Eastern European cabaret influenced seedy rock band.

Songs like Antichrist and the quite brilliantly dark Shitpocalypse really grooved and got everyone moving. By the time they closed with the call and response friendly Woo Woo Man that asks “what part of don’t understand don’t you understand” they had done everything they could to shake everyone out of complacency. As ever they are great fun live no matter how angry or political, they get.

Hana Piranha were the main support band and feature Hana Maria on Violin and vocals who is also in Birdeatsbaby they are a dark angsty goth rock band with some nice twists and the Violin solos made me think of Within Temptation a bit although the band they most sound like to me are Lacuna Coil.

The new single Naked Flame sounded good with some really interesting lyrics and a great violin part. Silk and Poison sounded like it could be a dangerous pursuit while Slave is darkly sexual and possibly scary if you don’t want her to be your slave that is. They closed with a cool if somewhat proggy cover of Toxic and I had to google it to realize that it’s originally by Britney Spears this cover at least makes it listenable.

Then Birdeatsbaby took us into properly dark progressive territory with a set that opened with the bands lead singer and Synth queen Mishkin Fitzgerald singing Box Of Razorblades that certainly let us know they are taking us into the dark maelstrom and the music was intense and a touch complicated.

Zero 43 sounded like a score to some nightmarish sequence in a dystopian drama Hana Maria’s Violin squalling and scraping at our souls. The title song of the new album The World Conspires was mainly a duet between Mishkin and Hana that felt like the calm before the ragingly complicated storm that was Deathbed Confessional that’s almost as complex as the dying American empire it’s at least partially if not totally about both confusing and confounding quite a tune.

Apparently it was drummer Anna Mylee’s first gig with them so to hear the complex drum pattern on set Closer Painkiller was quite something this has so many musical twists and turns that Gary Mitchell on guitar was really flying all over the place while Hana Maria played both Violin and Double bass which was quite a way to close a cool and rather intense set.

Words by Simon Phillips & Photography by Ricard Ellington of Birdeatsbaby, Hana Piranha, The Cesarians, One Last Thrill Live @ Black Heart Camden 19th September 2019.