Egads, e-god are good…

Been meaning to get this written for a while and so now, with the latest deadline out the way, almost as much work done on my website as can be done and a free hour to go over some of the songs again, I want to tell you about e-god.

Dancetastic, mates – this is a band that, for three rather middle-class looking, middle aged fellas, can really get stuck into a groove and take it off to places that will surprise some, alarm others and delight the rest.

I have to come clean and mention that the drummer, Phil Escott, is an old pal and back in the days when I could barely count to four, Phil was easing through 13/8 without really thinking too much about it, but this is rather by the by. If I didn’t like e-god, I wouldn’t write about them. The thing is, I do…

With Escott on V-drums, the band is essentially a trio, with Drew Dolan on guitar and Dominic Smith on bass, keyboards, MIDI pedals and the all important trigger finger.

I say essentially because the band’s first offerings to the world were paired behind a set of excellent videos that showed nothing of the distinctly un-rock star look of the players – for exactly that reason (I am assuming here). In a live set-up, however, our lumpy threesome are the musicians to those same videos, which means that the ‘front man’ is the screen at the back.

This would be cool enough, if it weren’t for the fact that the synchronisation the band achieves with said videos is nothing short of flawless. It’s a slick act.

The songs swing from predominantly funky to downright danceable, via dollops of reggae and rock and a lot of accompanying and unexpected noises. With all this going on, the band doesn’t really need to do much other than get the notes right – although there are a lot of them. In fact, when I first started going through e-god’s material, I thought that they were a bit ‘serious’, you know, on a bit of a downer.

Closer examination proves this to be wrong. These guys are actually having a whale of a time, it’s just that, with the focus taken away from them by the back screen, they are happy to get things right. Yes, of course, as I have alluded to, they are middle-aged Englishmen, which means, by default, inklings of OCD have managed to creep into their beings. Watching the videos playing alone to the studio recordings and your feet start tapping and your head nodding.

The solution to this dilemma (which I admit, could be mine and mine alone) might be to put the projection screen front of stage, but then we would miss the opportunity of seeing some fine musicians doing what they do best. Ignore me, I’m blathering.

You have to have your wits about you listening to e-god. There is a lot going on – but this is where, I think, the band comes into its own. Yes, you have three excellent musicians, with triggered sounds and accompaniments, so there is a lot of opportunity to stumble into a flat cacophony of too much going on. The trio never does this. There is a lot of colour, a lot of light and shade and, most interestingly for me, even live, there is a lot of space, regardless of how much is going on.

This points towards careful composition and cautious arranging and it all works splendidly well.

A personal favourite of mine at the moment is Lay Down GI, but the blend of styles and displays of dexterity are such that tomorrow could well throw another song my way and I’ll wonder why I missed that the first time round. It's happened before... Yesterday.

Good work, lads – keep on doing.