The 100 Club has always been a strangely shaped venue for me. It’s a wide-slither of a venue, where the stage is an equally wide-slither along one of the longest walls. It has always made me sceptical about how well sound can consistently function there. Granted, I do think the sound desk is in a good place in relation to the stage. In the three times I’ve been there the sound has never been bad, but it’s a venue that makes me sonically-nervous. Or maybe the nervousness comes from the hauntings and ghosts of subcultural past. The ghosts of every punk band and beyond that have ever played there – because yes, I do believe venues can be haunted by such things, and that you, or at least I, can feel it. Just look at Scala.
Nevertheless, on the 21st of December 2024 I attended my third gig at the 100 Club, which was a joint effort between C Turtle and Mitsubishi Suicide. I missed C Turtle by the skin of my teeth. They were finishing their set as I trampled myself down the stairs to check/scan my ticket. I am very bad at making it to see support bands and I aim to get better at this in the New Year. I get too much of an adrenaline-kick out of the lightning-in-a-bottle internal moment of seeing a band I want to see just in time – and always sacrifice seeing any other band for it. It’s a fatal flaw.
I got to the venue around half-an-hour before Mitsubishi Suicide started, from what I was told at the ticket-desk-thing. He didn’t seem fully sure though. I took that as a good sign of the energy floating around that night, time hopefully folding into itself in interestingly-loose ways. I had more than enough time to put my bag and coat in the cloakroom, piss and then wander around. Situate myself in it all.
This was the first headline show Mitsubishi Suicide had done in a while (a few months). When a band hasn’t played many shows in a while you wonder how things have changed and shifted. Mountains could have been moved in a band’s music and you wouldn’t really know until the moment you next hear them play (recorded or live or otherwise). This was even more evident in this instance due to the addition of a new member, three becoming four. The new member plays bass and the old bass player plays a second guitar. I really wondered how this would change it all, how they would calibrate this lineup change in reference to their older work and the general balance of their sound.
Across their set it became increasingly clear they were not currently calibrating the new lineup towards playing any of their previous work, instead focusing completely on new stuff. I think this was probably a wise move forward:
Audiences of music automatically build-up this kind of severe, sometimes counter-productive, sentimentality towards how a particular song or album should sound, and then can get very odd when that shifts in any dramatic way. Of course, between time, every live performance, and every practice in between, how anything gets played changes because the musicians (themselves) change. But, with a whole-new-member/instrument, the dramatic shift might have been too much and distracted from the new. The newest moment of the new, at least.
A lot of bands with screaming don’t appeal to me. Some do. It depends on what contextualises the screaming. What works around it in the sound. If it’s just screaming, I tend to find the sonic-topology of the music boring and move on. Mitsubishi Suicide sustains a very interesting topology between the screaming and all the other stuff in their sound. When listening to their 2023 debut album for the first time, just before first seeing them live, how the screaming was arranged around the rest of the sound made it feel like a kind of contrasting catharsis to the chords-of-sentimentality that occupy so much of their music. Like a build-up and fall, an auditory capillary reaction of energy. The kind of stuff I look for in music, screaming irregardless. True jolt-music. And they transfer it well live, as first evidenced to me at Ormside Projects in November 2023. Kept being evidenced (to different extents) after that.
It has been over a week/two-weeks since the gig and I can never take/find enough recordings to be objective nor specific, but I remember an array of feelings and thoughts and that is probably enough for me. In fact, more often than not that’s all I care about (marvellously selfish obsession with my own internal experience of subculture).
Their new stuff has a lot less screaming, at least right now. That may change. New, unreleased music is bound to shift, and that’s the great thing about it, for me. You see it live, see how it exists in that moment, and then it probably changes. Maybe in a way you like, don’t like, who knows. But you end up getting this kind of privileged (subcultural) moment that can never happen again (in that way); because things, and how the music is, will never be that way again. Unreleased music is always exciting to me because of this, because I will possibly never hear it in that way again.
But yes, less screaming. It still happened, but in less instances. Many of the new songs seemed to exist with an extent-of-absence of it, which was interesting. I don’t expect that to last necessarily, but it was interesting to see (hear) this iteration of how Mitsubishi Suicide could sound.
I expect that even if screaming, over time, becomes more present in their new stuff it won’t evolve back into what their sound used to be, at least in the same way. It was very clear to me how much the additional guitar had altered how they constructed their sound. One thing I enjoyed about their previous work was how the instrumentals seemed like they were playing oscillating, syncopated games with themselves. Leading back into themselves in new ways and then splitting – the listener having to predict whether it’ll be predictive or not. Then seeing what part of the sound they need to mentally grapple onto next. The addition of a second guitar gave new possibilities to this, yet didn’t over-complicate it. I feared it would. When a band has balanced the density and topology of the sound-games they play it can be so easy for them to topple-it with the shine of a new instrument, but they have balanced it well (so far). The second guitar seemed to only amplify the complexity and density, and not flatten the topology.
One of the ways this seemed to have been done is the instrumentals sprawling in a way that reminded me, rightly or wrongly (insultingly?) of prog-rock. Admittedly, I probably don’t know too much about that genre (or any genre really), but it reminded me of what I did know (have heard). The instrumentals fed into each other in a way where the music seldom-or-ambigiously felt like it was ever-ending during any change in the sound, feeling more like a continuum. This could have just been because it was all new stuff, but I honestly think there was something in the construction of the songs, particularly the instrumentals, particularly the doubling-of-guitars, that made it all sprawl more than previously. This is not to say it sounded like prog-rock, more that it acted like it, functioned like it in my ears. It still sounds like what it is, the genres it claims (on Bandcamp, etc.), just constructing it in some new ways. It still reminds me of all the midwest-emo music I listened to when I was a teen, only this time superimposed on with London and more screaming and jolting than I remember. Which is good, an evolved new context for my own genre-nostalgia.
Sound-wise this gig was among the best I have seen of Mitsubishi Suicide (live). I have been to most of their London shows since the first one I attended at Ormside Projects near the end of 2023. The Ormside Projects show always held up in my mind, feeling like it functioned so specifically well for me, that most of the shows after haven’t beat it. This could have just been because the physical structuring of the venue meant the Ormside show was particularly apt at allowing me to dance-but-circumvent the mosh-pit. This is something Peckham Audio, The George Tavern, etc. didn’t offer to the same extent. It could’ve even been because it was in some-technicality a release show (‘The Desirable Plot’ and ‘Sucks to be Eugene’). Though, that is something I didn’t really understand until during/after the show. Either way, I still think the Ormside show held something in the sound-construction that I haven’t felt to be matched. It always seemed, in my memory, that it projected the jolty-ness and jagged surge of the band’s sound just right. Whether that perspective is objective or not (bias driven by first-show-sentimentality) is something I don’t truly know. In any case, this 100 Club is the first time it felt truly matched for me.
The sound was well balanced, feeling like it held its own-equilibrium throughout the set. The jolty-ness and surge (of energy) I enjoy so much in their sound held its own and travelled through the room well, at least from the perspective of where I was. It didn’t feel like many/much of the sounds were getting lost or suppressed/compressed by the dimensions of the room. Previously, at Mitsubishi Suicide gigs, I have found that the lyrical-integrity can get somewhat lost in the noise. I think it can be easy for music with a lot of screaming to, in their live-mixing, lose the clarity of the lyrics due to the intensity of the noise. Sometimes that can be fun and is part of the spontaneous-plasticity of experiencing such music live, but it can get to the point where, as a listener, it feels a bit tragic and out of balance if you enjoy the lyrics/vocals. Also, I think if this becomes too out of balance it just feels like an underestimation of the value of the lyrical-phonetic-instrumental importance of vocals to the overall landscape of the music, which on a very-personal-level pisses me off (phonetics haunt me too much, I learnt poetry from lyrics more than poetry). This gig felt like it balanced it all well for me, I could find the lyrical-phonetic-instrumental in the typical-instrumental-noise, and it all seemed to weave and entangle in a way that was sympathetic to the music but still had the spontaneous-plastic-chaos that can be so unique to live music.
While writing this review in the scary-liminal-space between Christmas, New Years, and getting into the new flesh of the New Year after New Years, I fully processed the (admittedly) very clear reality that this 100 Club show was a bit of a release show. The day before the gig a compilation titled ‘Fourths’ was released by Hunkofplastic Records, featuring one Mitsubishi Suicide track called ‘Arash From “The Lack of Truth”’. I do not feel this is overly relevant to the majority of the review since, firstly, I am reviewing how the new stuff was live, which is its own entity. Secondly, my brain didn’t actually grasp that this new track existed until almost two weeks after the gig. It is notable though.
I will not do a fully-fledged write-up on the new studio-track (right now) because I don’t want that kind of ambiguity. However, I will say it very much solidifies my faith in my memories of their new stuff being a considerable sonic-departure from their old stuff. I do not know how ‘Arash From “The Lack of Truth”’ will fit into the wider context of their new stuff, I don’t even clearly remember how it fits into the context of their 100 Club setlist. The sounds in the studio-recording sound familiar enough that I am sure it was there. I wonder if they had the band lineup changes (three becoming four, extra guitar, moving bass) for the recording of this track, or if that came after? Next time I see them live I would like to try and figure this out, to the best time-movement allows. And the next show has already been announced – announced within two days of the 100 Club show.
As a last gig of 2024, it was good and bright. I like a gig that holds some promise of new-music-arising. There was a sort of poetic-justice to my last concert of the year (2024) being at the 100 Club, since I started the year listening to live-Bar Italia in the same place. I like it when everything feels a-bit full circle. And at least I remembered to get my stuff from the cloakroom this time.
bloated.utopia 