I was quite excited when Puschen announced Bohren & der Club of Gore to be headlining day two of their Puschenfest this year. They kept the support act a secret for quite some time and when the news came out that it will be Julia Holter, I admittedly was not that excited about it.
This concert was not only my first Julia Holter show but also my first time at Heimathafen Neukölln. It's situated on Karl-Marx-Straße and even though unimpressive from the outside, the main room itself looks quite fancy. It's an old ballroom now functioning as a public theater. Besides the occasional concert, a lot of theater plays, music theater, lectures and other performances take place there. Luckily, they had put up chairs for this concert, because watching a Bohren show while standing... well let's just say it's quite a challenge.
Despite the fact that the room was supposedly air-conditioned, it was already pretty hot and sticky when the staff closed the side doors and Julia Holter came on stage to start playing. It gradually got hotter and hotter, which didn't make her performance more bearable to me I have to say. I wasn't really familiar with her music before. It just wasn't of interest to me but I thought I'd give her a chance, after some friends of mine tried to convince me her records are good. She played melancholic and rather dark piano pop music that was very theatrical. She was supported by a drummer, a cellist, a violinist and a saxophone player. Her support band added a classical and sometimes jazzy touch to her music while she sang and played the piano. Now that all doesn't sound too bad, and it also probably wasn't. My actual problem with their performance was - it was just way too nice. So nice actually that I found it rather bland and eventually just boring. Yes it was all very professional and clean but there wasn't anything holding my interest. There were no rough edges, no irony, everything was smooth and everything was pretty. Too smooth and too pretty for me. So I had to sit this out somehow and waited and sweated until they finished.
Next band to play were Polvo and they weren't my cup of tea at all. I knew some of their stuff before and I had expected something totally different. I watched two songs and wasn't in the mood for any more boring Schweinerock, so I went outside again to wait for Oneida...
And waiting for Oneida was so worth it! They started playing with two drummers and played a great mix between ecstatic and highly danceable krautrock and repetitive psychedelic noiserock or something like that... They were so good and played everyone still left in the room in a sort of dancy trance. They seemingly had lots of fun and played like forever. I left sweaty, happy and tired. If you somehow get a chance to see Oneida live, don't hesitate to go see them. They totally made my Puschenfest!