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The Murder Of Rosa Luxembourg / Selah - Nottingham, Junktion 7 Friday 14th February 2003 On arrival in Nott's the night before the High On Fire gig, we decided we needed some pre rock, ROCK, an ordeurve of noise if you will. Only one gig had flyers with ladies genitals on them… and only one gig had the mighty Murder Of Rosa Luxembourg from Worcester playing - luckily they were the same show. So we hotfooted it to Junktion 7, which turns out to be quite a nice new club and also packed full of "the Kids" evidently that Rocksound recommendation for this year is paying off for the Midlanders. They arrive onstage in a flurry of spitting, bare-chested, skinny, teenage maleness. One of the singers (Steve) is only wearing boxer shorts with hearts on and lipstick hearts over his nip's. Handily all the screaming his fucking head off, bashing occasionally at keyboards, and hitting into the rest of this band seems to keep him warm! The other singer Shaun opts for pointing his finger at the crowd and jumping off the drum kit to keep the February chills out… luckily these activities are all entirely appropriate a response to the bands extraordinarily lively mix of blood brothers style metallic hardcore, double bass pedal drumming and random guitar abuse. Their single is a marvel of a thing, a massive slab of blood splattered vinyl, and also entirely consistent with their demented vibe. The only thing that jars is their niceness, "mind out there's broken glass on the floor" comes Steve's plea - sadly the crowd are intent on crowd rolling, knocking my pint out of my hand and, in the case of the two teen girls in front of me, impersonating those Russian fake lesbians off the telly. Marvellous! Selah are a band I should have checked out long ago, one of the bands whose members I have met on numerous occasions but somehow I always managed to miss. They are something of a mixed bag, the songs that the bass player sings/ screams, are excellent nuggets of angular post hardcore, really making full use of their three guitar line up and the drummers obvious technical skill. However they lose it slightly for me by having two other singers whose vastly different styles don't always gel with the band as a whole. However their commitment to one and another and their drive to perform and perfect all the material they can do as a band, is a joy to see. Everything is played like it's the last song you see most other bands do. Steve the bassist in particular is full of energy. If they could just direct it a bit more… but then maybe that's the charm of it. All in all, a top night and at the end of the day we had some pictures of girls genitals on the flyers as well. Nice. Ian Unpeeled (the zine that covers the John Peel shows, info from shane@unpeeled.freeserve.co.uk)

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