Bloco Vomit
King Tut's, Edinburgh, 05.12.1999  
 

Officer, it's those those damned cross-dressing accountants again. That must be the cry that goes up in the leafy environs of Edinburgh when the Bloco Vomit squad - there's enough of them crammed onstage to form a football team - start tuning up. Despite their name and particularly their dress code (the women wear the trousers in this band for sure) Bloco Vomit are serious about their music - deadly serious. So when they play a set made largely of other people's material, they stick to the first rule of cover versions i.e. bringing something new to the song - and how! Samba-punk is the description but there's more to it than that - maracatu, baião and batucadas are just three of the various derivatives of South American music to be heard showing that the Bloco Vomit sound is more than just a comedy cover version, in fact its something of a science.

Although to the untrained ear it might sound like 10 (I counted them) slightly scary people making a hellava racket and careering through the likes of Teenage Kicks, Police and Thieves, and sundry other punk favourites. They mix their first album which was mainly raw covers with some impressive new stuff from their charmingly-entitled Play This Ya Bastard LP which includes, whisper it, a couple of originals including the frenzied Carnival in Olinda with stop-start rhythms and searing trumpet! The closing number seamlessly melds together Wild Thing/Louie Louie/Surfing Bird which again shows that, like football, there's a bit of Brazilian in everyone.

Copyright © 1999 Stuart McHugh