When in the course of an evening it becomes apparent that a concert is going to be noticeably underattended, everyone has their own theories as to why more people didn't turn up. It's always the day of the week, the promotion or the weather that's to blame, but more often than not there's no one single factor at fault, it's just that shit doesn't always come together the way it's supposed to. It's a shame though when it happens to a particularly killer show, like tonight's brief, but action-packed, bill featuring Milwaukee standouts Dogs in Ecstasy and the new project from ex-Monotonix guitarist Yonatan Gat.
After the usual hemming and hawing and waiting for last-minute stragglers to arrive, Dogs in Ecstasy took the stage for a typically short set of their punchy neo-grunge pop. What's more impressive than their insanely catchy tunes though is the speed at which they seem to crank them out, to the point where each time they play there's more fresh material to add to an already long list of favorites. Tonight that included the as-yet-unreleased "I'm the Hot One Now" and "You've Got to Get It While You Can" but, while they were appropriately loud, most of their acerbic lyrics were lost in the mix.
Set up on the floor instead of the stage, Gat and the rest of his trio gathered what crowd there was by roaming around the club, ritualistically striking bells and woodblocks, before ripping into a blisteringly intense set of exceptionally heavy transnational psychedelia. Gat's a superb guitarist, and the Middle Eastern-influenced jams more than make the case for checking out their new Iberian Passage, but live he's upstaged by machine gun drummer Igor Domingues, who attacked his kit with such ferocity that it was continually falling to pieces. Overall it was an astonishingly good show, no matter how many people were there to see it.
