Torres @ The Lexington

I love The Lexington. It has separate standard pub and gig spaces, so the music doesn't have to take over your evening if you don't want it to. Its gig space is wide and shallow, meaning that wherever you stand you get a good view and feel intimately connected to the performer. And it has a great range of draught and bottled beer and probaby the biggest selection of bourbons this side of the deep south. Plus it trusts you not to chuck any of those bottled beers at the performers, which is nice. No plastic cups of Tuborg here...

Torres is a singer-songwriter from Nashville. From the cover of her pseudonymically self-titled debut album and the fact that Pitchfork described her voice as one that "conveys raw, urgent desperation, the sort we flinch from instinctually" and her lyrics as "full of tricky, messy subject matter--loaded poses of female need, abjection, subjugation, dominance", I half expected the experience of seeing her live to be a bit like that episode of friends where Chandler gets trapped in the front row of some vagina monologues-esque play.

I was relieved to see that she was to be accompanied by a bassist and a drummer, and actually I needn't have worried at all. Yes Torres is brilliantly capable of conveying raw, urgent desperation, even live, but she also knows not to bludgeon her audience to death with it. This was her first gig in Europe, and she balanced endearing tentative attempts to connect with her audience between songs with extremely impressive vocal displays during them, steadily winning over her initially rather reticent crowd. As an aside, I do enjoy it when someone extrapolates from a roomful of a couple of hundred people to a city of some 8 million. "Hello London!"

Presumably Torres has extensive performing experience under her belt from her home country. On the basis of this showing, her first tour on these shores will not be her last.

Not bad for a Monday night

If you arrived at this post via the Trash Talk tag, this is not a Trash Talk review. All it is is a blog post that in 5 years' time will remind me that I saw Trash Talk tonight, the reason being that today I know I've been to Underworld once before, about 5 years ago, but cannot for the life of me remember who, why, who with, etc...

All that will come back to me is buying beers and tequilas together. This is perhaps self-explanatory.

The most significant thing about tonight was that Brew Dog, once you get past all the brash self-mythologising, sells some damn good beers. Even at a time when most pubs and bars now offer at least a beer or two more exciting than the standard 2007 fare of Stella, San Miguel and Heineken, Brew Dog stands out.

Some of their own beers are pretty damn great. I've drunk some before, of course, but tonight I was reminded of how good their Punk IPA and 5AM Saint are. More esoterically though, some of the bottled beers they offer are alone worth the trip from Brixton to Camden. The Founders All Day IPA was rather nice, but the Stone Levitation was outright fantastic. It also boasts the finest bottle I've seen this side of... No, just the finest bottle I've seen:

Little surprise then that we were 5-10 minutes late for Trash Talk, and when it comes to hardcore you can't hang about: we only got about 20 minutes. Gig Buddy loved those 20 minutes, but I was more 50-50. My favourite hardcore so far is Sick of it All, which is partly due to their lyrics, and I couldn't hear word jack of Trash Talk.

Musically some of it was pretty good, but some of it was a bit eh.

The venue and crowd were pretty impressive: Underworld is split-level, and from what I could see from up above, the entire bottom row was kicking off for the duration. Crowd surfing, kicking the shit out of the spotlights, you name it.

The downside was more sweaty teenagers pushing back past me than it seemed could have been possible without gaps developing up front - what were they, popping back up out of a wormhole every 20 seconds? - but they probably needed to rehydrate, bless 'em.

I don't know about hardcore. I don't think even Sick of it All like Yours Truly, which is the album of theirs I've taken to heart and embedded there, so maybe I and that genre just don't mesh.

But craft beers and I do. Oh yes.