Last Friday Night.

On Friday night one of my all time favourite bands in the world Ashtray Electric had their Joburg leg of their album launch tour for their new album Measured in Falls. Town Hall in Newtown is where it all went down. My lovely friend Gina with her awesome little new job asked me to write a little review for the Southern Pulse blog... It went a little something like this:

Ashtray Electric @ Town Hall
Still Electric
After a pretty close to perfect performance by Wrestlerish on Friday night, Town Hall in Newtown, Joburg, was eventually buzzing with a tight but pretty neat crowd of people waiting in anticipation to hear the new stuff from Cape Town based Indie rockers, Ashtray Electric. The new album, “Measured in Falls” has made its way to Joburg on this leg of their album launch getting loads of fans very excited, me included. I’ve been a bit of an Ashtray superfan since their first single “The Swing” landed in my hands and ears in the form of a scramble of Capetonians on one album, “Bellville Rock City”. They have since been known as the sexiest indie-rock band in SA. With uber cool melancholic lyrics and catchy rhythms it’s definitely not hard to see why. The first time I witnessed an Ashtray performance was at Oppikoppi Smoorverlief in 2009 (cue screams for Unknown Brother in less than 2 weeks!) since then, they sure haven’t failed to impress every time they play.
Opening up with a new track is a little risky because you never know how the audience is going to play it out but the guys quickly proved any skeptic wrong when they started off with Blood the 6th track on the new album. Clever catchy lyrics “I don’t need to dance I’ve got music in my blood” had plenty people in the crowd turning to each other with their ‘wow this song is rad!’ faces. Old but oh so lovely favourites from their previous album “Bonjour” like ‘Quite Overstared’, ‘Gallop’, ‘When Sex Becomes a Sport’ and ‘Heartbeat’ were heard in amongst a whole new collection of songs from the latest album including Tunnels, the single for their new video (scroll down… it’s on this page).


The night of amazing music ended with a tiny ‘colab’ if you will when the guys from Wrestlerish got up and accompanied the boys for a bit of a different rendition of the Swing. A brilliant end to a brilliant Joburg leg of the album tour.
If you haven’t yet seen this amazing band or care to see them again. Catch them on the remainder of their tour in Stellenbosch, Grahamstown, East London and Port Elizabeth… - Meryl Volker

* I quite like doing these little reviews, thanks Gina for asking me:) *
For more musical coolness have a look at the rest of the Southern Pulse blog here