This Will Be My Year: Monster Magnet at Southampton University

I went to see Monster Magnet at the Southampton University Student Union on Monday night. I didn't have high expectations because I only know them from one song released 12 years ago, but my husband was quite excited about seeing them and I figured I owed him after the Goo Goo Dolls.

The venue was essentially a big hall with a table off to one side selling band tees, and a "bar" selling room temperature cans of Fosters, Blackthorn cider and Coca Cola or bottles of Smirnoff Ice poured into a plasic cup...classy! It wasn't even that cheap at £3 per alcoholic drink and £0.80 for the coke. However there wasn't much separating you from the bands, the crowd wasn't that densely packed, you could move about freely and see the stage easily; it was probably one of best gigs I've been to for actually appreciating the music.

The opening act was a band called Seventh Void who seemed determined to make up for a lack of good songs or lyrics with volume. This tactic is used by many of the metal bands I've seen live, and I still don't see how it works in their favour to deafen their fans. (The amateur AV nerds running the sound system could have been at least partially to blame though.) I'd never heard of the band before and they weren't even billed on any of the promotional material for the concert, but after reading about them on Wikipedia I found out that two of the band's members were from Type O Negative, so it's surprising they didn't suck even more.

So as for the headliners, their songs did at least sound different from each other, and I could make out some of the words, but there was nothing that memorable except for the last song of the night, "Space Lord" which had a surprising number of the crowd singing along...clearly the only reason we were all there! The lead singer had an annoying habit of turning his back on the crowd and facing the drummer towards the end of each song, and there wasn't a whole lot of chemistry on stage. However, the band did have the most impressive collection of effects pedals I've ever seen, the sound check was probably one of the highlights of the night, watching them test each one individually.

Rating: 4 out of 10, entertaining enough for a Monday evening, but wouldn't pay to see them again.