Just came back from a night up at 007, the club in the basement of the #7 student dorm known as Strahov. Now celebrating 40 years! A truly great place with low ceilings covered in reed mats and whose sight lines are improved by a series of wooden boxes in the middle third of the club. Anyone who's ever been to a show in Europe knows the back third is for table football.
Saw Czech dance punks SPORTO play songs from their new album, MORE, and the crowd was moc enthusiastic for the new tracks. It's their second album – very poltiical, more aggressive vocals while still that same tasteful new dance Ghostly acoustic guitar + beeps vibe that denies its Depeche Mode origin. Good to see friends taking risks with their music and lyrics - that's what SPORTO is to me as a sound. Their whole distro, online, merch politics is forward thinking too. Just found out that they killed their Myspace presence recently, I will have to investigate.
They opened for Astronautalis, a Florida posi-core emo rapper who does the man with a thousand voices thing starting with Tom Waits and ending with J. Timberlake while crafting tracks from particularly melancholy Ride songs and the like. Dude's banter hit tourguy bingo, lamenting his health care situation and promising to drink the whole country; singing the praises of DIY and demanding, half joking, everyone buy his merch; celebrating Czech underground culture while trashing promoters who'd failed elsewhere...and then promising to "impregnate everyone" in the next two days since his failed Italian tour left him with said time for Praha. I have successfully avoided becoming impregnated by him in America and hope that I will continue to be so lucky in the next few days. Maybe he was just boasting, I hear that's what American rappers do.
