Gig review - Thrash Night at Musician’s Mall

Musicians Mall is getting active these days and all the more since Razz closed down due to some legal hurdles almost a month ago… MM are making it a point to have a gig once every 2 weeks.

This time it was Thrash Night, with some kickass thrash metal bands(my favourite genre!!). The gig was supposed to start at 5:30 but it started at around 6:15 with Lethe opening. They played 2 Maiden, 1 Megadeth song and 2 OC’s, one of them was called “Aaj ki shaam Shehzan ke naam”. But the man of the moment was conspicuous by his absence.(cue for everybody to say “SCAM!!”). The vocals for the Maiden covers were pretty good and I say this ‘cos not eveybody and their uncle can add vibratos like Bruce Dickinson. And so were the leads. Good job. 

Next up were Kryptonic Kaos. They are a new band and are certainly raising some eyebrows. They played some Metallica, Slayer and some OC’s. And when they played Metallica’s Seek and Destroy, the crowd simply loved it. I must say, Metallica still gets the crowd moving. The quality of their covers was OK and so were the OC’s. I liked ‘em.

Lined up next were Zohak, which was the only band I was actually interested in. Zohak are famous for their Megadeth and Maiden covers… and they opened with an amazing cover of Megadeth’s Holy Wars!! That was good enough to send the crowd into a tizzy. I’d come to listen to Shehzan’s leads and fuckin could not hear a single note. I had to be content with watching his effortless picking and flying fingers. They played 2 of their OC’s (which were quite good again) and some Sepultura stuff. They consumed some time during the sound check, which disallowed them to play their complete set. Like, damn, no DAMN cos they were to play Machine Head’s Davidian and Megadeth’s Tornado Of Souls. Sigh! 

Blind Image, from Chennai, were to headline the day’s gig. They played some Metallica, Megadeth covers and some OC’s as well. Their lead guitarist brought a stomp box, was absoultely insane and was playing his solos with perfection. What i liked about him was the feel with which he was playing. There was no rhythm guitarist in Blind Image and that in a very vague way helped the lead’s sound to be heard clearly.. The vocalist was nothing great but was energetic nevertheless. That was the end of the gig and time to go home.. hey wait a second, my review aint over yet.   

The sound at MM sucked this time and i didnt like the setup one bit. Apart from the drums there was nothing that could be clearly heard. If there were 2 guitars, one would end up sounding muffled or wouldnt be heard at all. Even the vocals could not be heard properly. I hope Musicians Mall gets its act together for the forthcoming gigs, if it has to prove itself to be even a patch on the other venues where Mumbai’s rock junta usually flocks to.

Sania Mirza on a roll…

I’m just charting Sania’s performance these days, and the graph seems to going just one way… up, except that small blip in the form of Sania’s defeat at the hands of Chakvetadze (these Russians, I tell you, they can use their names for the World Tongue Twisters Bank) in the Stanford Cup final.

The ascent started with the Stanford cup, with Sania successfully showing Akiko Morigami the door with a 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 (7-5) win. She went on to upset the 19th seeded Tatiana Golovin of France with a comprehensive 6-4, 6-1 victory and zooming into the finals to face that tongue twister I mentioned earlier. She lost alright(6-3, 6-2), but she’d regained her confidence and had become a force to reckon with. And oh, she’d also won the doubles cup partnering Israel’s Sahar Peer successfully demolishing Victoria Azarenka of Belarus and Anna Chakvetadze(ask Sania, how sweet revenge tastes!).

All this hullaboo made sure that Sania jumped to 31 in her WTA singles rankings and to 26 in her doubles rankings…

Now you’re sitting up in your chair, huh? And that also silences all her critics with her new found cofidence, and I can sense a load of improvement in her strokes… she just needs to cover her ground better.

And now she’s serving her aces at the Acura Classic defeating Sahar Peer(her doubles partner) and Eleni Daniilidou from Egypt. Now she’s bumped into Maria Sharapova for the quarter finals.. and the chances that she’ll advance are less… but the entire nation’s there with her.. Go girl go!!

Sony Ericsson P1i, its here!!

I’ve waited long for this phone and Sony has been kind enough to the Indians to launch the phone withing days of its international launch.

Some quick market research shows that it costs around 23000/- or something like $570. And thats a steal for the sucessor P990i(the earlier model in the “P” series), which was touted by many as their most awaited gadget last year. And Digit Magazine, India also complained that the phone had too many features for the average user…. talk about nit picking…And all this ramble is about the last gen P990i.

 

First impressions from the images I got to see, say that the phone is definitely slimmer and very much unlike its predecessors. Its more like the M series SE lauched recently.. which is not a bad thing at all..

 

 

  

The camera is the 3.2 MP unit found on many other SE phones. A good thing again..

The keyboard too is M series style, with the usual QWERTY fromat, but with 2 letters on a single key..i suppose that’ll take some time getting used to…

I sincerely want to talk some more, but this is just a preview and, if all goes well, i’ll be laying my hands on the phone within 48hrs, expect a review soon!!