Music / Reviews
Review: Evil Scarecrow, Thekla
There’s always a concern whether the music is going to hold up when you’re going to see a band described as a thrill-a-minute fun fest. After all, it’s one thing stuffing your set full of larks and hi jinks, but if the actual songs aren’t a lot of good that can make for a long, arduous night. Thankfully then, Evil Scarecrow more than lived up to expectations; with an offering of muscular prog-tinged metal punctuated by frequent excursions into the visually absurd.
Entertainment was much needed after a pair of earnest, but dull, support acts (in Endeavour and RSJ) and a long delay after technical issues put paid to a swift start from the headliners. However, once they’d finally got on stage boy did they rip it up. Festooned with blood, spikes and corpse paint, these amiable horrors tore into their set, opening with a brace of solid stompathons before the real fun kicked off.
The epic goth metal breakdown of Book Of Doom saw the start of a long line of props get hauled onto stage, as the songs’s deathly incantations and operating instructions were recited from a dusty old tome. And if that wasn’t enough, the power waltz of Dance Of The Cyclops soon set the whole boat into a frenzy of extreme ballroom dancing.
is needed now More than ever
The band have often been described as Pythonesque in their humour, but this was pure Red Dwarf-flavoured swords and sci-fi silliness, and every university electronics club and twelve-sided dice fancier in the region were down the front and loving every last ridiculous minute of it. And we’d hardly got going yet.
Robototron saw the drummer hurl himself into the crowd and sail across their heads, pounding his floor tom as he went, as an eight-foot cyborg tottered about the cramped stage behind him and everybody in the room did formation robot dancing. Hurricanado got the packed house spinning like windy dervishes, while the sublime finisher Crabulon got every last man and lady in the house doing the crab moves. “Are you ready to scuttle, Bristol?” growled the charismatic frontman Dr Hell, and by golly we were.
However hard you try it’s almost impossible to hate Evil Scarecrow. Their cheeky charm might be a bit sixth form common room, but it’s also utterly inclusive, and every single person on that creaky old tub left with a massive beaming smile on their face tonight. And sometimes in this troubled world that’s all you need
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