Everyone probably had one of those nights in the early 1990’s. You know the nights I mean, trying to grip the sweaty controller as you tried to finally beat that impossible level of Super Mario Bros. 3 that you’d been playing over and over for 4 hours. Anamanaguchi are the band created to soundtrack those nights. And the show on this night was just as great as one of THOSE nights.
A quartet hailing from New York City, Anamanaguchi specialize in making 8-bit music with live instruments. If you don’t know how that would sound, imagine a pop punk band playing an old NES and a Gameboy on stage, because that is almost exactly what Anamanaguchi are. They actually have old Nintendo game consoles on a table onstage, and before each song find some hacked 8-bit jingle (originals, not songs from old games) to play along with. This makes their music very nostalgic and upbeat. Easy to dance to.
This made for a highly appealing proposition in the confined settings of the Korova Milk Bar. The upstairs venue would be bursting at the seams if 50 people were inside, and there were almost that many in the room tonight. It was hot and steamy as the guys walked onstage, and ‘frontman’ (frontman is in quotes because Anamanaguchi are an instrumental band) Peter began by saying ‘Because of birthdays and cupcakes and shit, we will play songs’. And play songs they did. And to those songs, the crowd danced. And danced. And danced especially hard to set highlights ‘Another Winter’ and ‘Mermaid’. ‘Mermaid’ is a ten-thousand-pound steamroller of a song, a good 3 times heavier than anything else they played and over 7 minutes long. Length aside, it still got the strongest reaction of anything played tonight and even inspired crowdsurfing in the tiny venue. Eventually the set came to an end, and Peter introduced the closer by saying ‘As you all know, we’re named after our 3 favourite fashion houses, Armani, Prada, and Gucci, but we still haven’t done a song with Gucci Mane. Until now’. They then launched into a pretty epic cover of Mane’s hit ‘I’m The Shit’, complete with sampled vocals from the original. Anamanaguchi didn’t play an encore on this night, but it didn’t even matter, because everyone was thoroughly satisfied with being brought back to their basements in 1994.
-Scott Kendall
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