I have been looking forward to this show ever since I found out about it on punkstelle.de at the end of last year. It's very rare for us to get to see Japanese bands play live in local clubs, so I gave the music of Akiakane a try via their myspace site and I instantly liked it. Very nice melodic punkrock with enough energy and aggressiveness.Arriving at the "Sonic Ballroom" at around 2115h the place was decently filled but definetely not sold out. First up were a band from Cologne called The Bloody Valentines, a name today often associated with whiny emo bands, but those guys were more into the punkrock kind of things. Well, there were somewhere in the middle between classic 77 styled punkrock and German fun punk gods Die Ärzte, although only on the musical side of things. This was too much cliché. Interestingly though their bassist seemed to be blind, still he was making all the announcements and it seemed that he was writing a lot of the songs. So,w ell, yeah, they played for around 45 minutes which a quarter of an hour too much if you ask me.
When the samurai girls of Akiakane entered the stage the expectations were very high it seemed. There was some kind of strange atmosphere in the room. Noone knew what to expect now. Introduced by what seemed to be their tour driver from England they then went on to absolutely tear down the club. Fast, high energy and aggressive punkrock tunes, not very much talking on stage (maybe due to the lack of English knowledge - which wasn't true as I found out after the show when I talked to singer Moe for a few minutes), that's the way it should be. People seemed to enjoy the show and were dancing around, getting them back on stage for one encore after around 40 minutes. It's a pity the Ballroom wasn't more packed than the ~40 people who turned up on this Sunday night. But I really enjoyed myself and hope that they will return in the future. If not I might go and check them out in Japan. That's what their merchandise girl Nao told me to do. よろしく。
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