A bit sur­re­al Fri­daynight. After the usu­al vri­jmi­bo drinks with the col­legues at in10 I slept in the train to Utrecht, got on bus 64 and af­ter a ride through a dark labyrinth of sub­urbs I end­ed up at 't Veer­huis, a com­mu­nist style com­bi­na­tion of li­brary, fake brown bar, cul­ture cen­tre and mu­sic par­ty place, or "a bowl­ing al­ley with­out balls", as Gentle­men like to play it. The set­ting was like a Coen Brothers movie in­deed...

The line­up of the fi­nal of The Kleine Pri­js van Nieuwegein was Mon­sieur Can­ni­bale and the Vege­tar­i­ans, Kens­ing­ton, Gentle­men and Sense. I vot­ed for Gentle­men be­cause they pro­vid­ed a sol­id, bal­anced gig, con­sist­ing of well writ­ten songs that are fo­cused on the mu­sic. The prob­lem I had with the oth­er bands is that while it's nice to have some "WTF's hap­pen­ing now"-ex­pe­ri­ences dur­ing the gig, at that point you also re­alise you're think­ing "maybe it's get­ting bet­ter now", be­cause their styles are all over the place. For ex­am­ple Mon­sieur Can­ni­bale ranged from punk with a bull­horn to funky dance, Sense had one up­beat melo­di­ous song be­tween a lot of whin­ing with gui­tars to match and Kens­ing­ton also was a mix of styles. All but Gentle­men still seemed to have the rough edges of mu­si­cians want­i­ng to try out tac­ti­cal spec­tac­u­lar things, but even­tu­al­ly that gets in the way of the strate­gic ap­proach to the mu­sic and turns a gig into a Cir­cue du Soleil. Gentle­men also have sur­pris­ing twists in their songs, but those are of the in­tel­li­gent kind that are also sur­pris­ing in ret­ro­spect, and not just a gim­mick. The oth­er three might have po­ten­tial if they man­age to fo­cus on one style of their own and fill a whole EP with tracks that fit to­geth­er - like Gentle­men al­ready did with their sti­wi­fl.com.

And the in­ter­web worked pret­ty well when I got Alain Yard on MSN wednes­daynight, switched my iTunes to KinkFM and heared the in­ter­view with Tom Bell, all with­out leav­ing my couch. We don't need no stinkin' Web 2.0 for that.

Or for this.