The Main Grains/Doomsday Outlaw/Modern Day Dukes/Sour Tusk – Corporation, Sheffield, Saturday 29th July, 2017
Well its been a good while since I saw a gig at the Corporation and even longer since I witnessed one in the small room – a few years in fact. Last time I was here there were toilets on the right hand side downstairs and a lot smaller stage. The stage has now been extended because they’ve got ride of the stairs to the stage on the left and even put a killer lighting rig in their now!
First up of the three local outfits were gruesome stoner twosome, Sour Tusk who to say were only a duo make a f*ckload of noise up there with the bassiness coming from the drums and the bass notes of the guitarist, Jake Johnson. Cool to see that both members took on the lead vocal role – well lead bawling to be honest Hahaha. Superb drum-work came from Nic Rudd with some solid axe-playing from Mr J. Loud and loving it!
Modern Day Dukes came next who had a quirky sound to them feat. Former Silverjet bassist, Liam Pais. They were aggressive but had something that was extremely confident all the same, performing songs that were punkish metal but with an avant guard vibe to them.
With kinda outta tunish weird keys and notes that went together well but appeared to mystify and puzzle the audience that were in here tonight. I do remember a killer 12 bar boogie number in the middle of their set though that went down really great.
Direct support to the headliner were in my opinion the best band of the night who go by the name of Doomsday Outlaw from Derby – killer name for a start with my buddy Steve Cooper positive that the guitarist used to be in the band Unleash many moons ago. These guys really had it together with vocal chops and musicianship to die for.
That singer, Phil Poole has one hell of a set of pipes on him and could easily nail any single rock number going – Danny Vaughn meets Freddie Mercury and Ian Gillan or something like that – extremely impressive to say the least with their hard edged melodic rock set and featuring none other than local hero, Indy on bass!
Now even the headliners have a familiar local face in them, this one being Guitarist, JJ Watt, formerly of the amazing Spill Sixteen. Anyways, The Main Grains feature not other than Danny McCormack on lead vocals on bass, perched on a wooden chair in the middle of the stage due to part of his right leg being recently amputated– not that it appeared to bother his overall performance on the songs at all. I also gotta mention the creative tightness of Guitarist, Ben Marsden & Ginna Rhodes on Drums – be rude not to!
Old school punky gabba hey hey is what we got for about 38 mins while they were on stage that was a nice cross section of their album 'Don't Believe Everything You Think' not to mention a cover of ‘Teenage Kicks’ where the drummer took care of lead vocals plus one with JJ on the microphone too.
The Main Grains went down amazing and finished up on a song whereby Danny informs us he’d sooner be in California – wouldn’t we all at times mate! He thanked the audience and even received a Jagermeister from one of them too! Nice going guvna! Looking forward to the new E.P. and forthcoming second album!
8/10
By Glenn Milligan
