Live: Here's To Future Days

Here’s to future days”: the title for the three-day music festival was an idealistic and optimistic toast to the undercurrents of New Zealand’s music culture that are supposedly going to flower into beautiful things. Thought Creature, Malenky Robot, Cherry’s Gemstones, Bastard Sons of Greypower, Big Flip the Massive, This City Sunrise, and Dial all featured in the line up, and by the end of the festival had worked me into a state of near alcoholism.

I had to admire the spirit behind the event, as it truly was a good attempt at promoting small bands that (for the most part) show promise, but honestly I was shit-bored the whole time. The music offered was at times ridiculous and degrading to the intelligence of the onlookers, and most of the few dozen people that were there had left Bodega well before the 1:30am finish.

Heat Like Me, the synthesised dance quartet were the apex of the entire ‘festival’, playing early on the second day, but after that the experience of “Future Days” was one giant fucking fingernail screeching over a blackboard. I don’t know what two-piece Goodbye Galaxy (feat. the event organiser Bernie “Galaxy”) would describe their genre as, but it certainly isn’t anything near music. Their awful synthesised space sounds, and vocals of a girl screaming “you mother fucking slut” as shrill as possible, wasn’t ‘art’, it wasn’t even a novelty, it was shit. Tommy Ill’s effect on the Wellington scene is also wearing off. You can only witness him attempt irony at rapping about how famous he is, to an audience made up entirely of his friends so many times before what used to be “fun” just becomes stupid. The majority of the rest of the sets passed without really offering anything special. Malenky Robot, however, are always a treat and the bland acts surrounding them made their set all the better, although I was a little sad to realise that their once quirky post-punk has now dissolved into plain hardcore. This City Sunrise were another highlight, if just comparatively.

Honestly I don’t know what else to say about the festival except I felt deflated and incredibly cheated. If these really are to be the ‘Future Days’ then I thank Thought Creature for composing music so insipid, bland and depressing that spectators will kill themselves before these bands are ever popular. ‘Here’s to Future Days’? I’d sooner say ‘Here’s to Global Warming’, at least that will be a quick death.