the Insaniacs - April 18, 2008

The Royal Albert threw a joint party celebrating the INSANIACS 10th anniversary/one-night reunion, as well as Royal Albert mainstay Maladin's 10th year of terrorizing Winnipeg.

For a reunion performance, I thought the INSANIACS exceeded expectations and were in fine form, and it was a nice touch having original bassist Karla come on stage to play a few of the band's older songs. Johnny Nuclear is one of Winnipeg punk's great frontmen and apparently has a new band almost ready to go. The crowd was lively but not as retarded as I had anticipated.

The opening bands aren't my thing at all. QUAGMIRE have a loyal and rowdy following and scored points for covering TURBONEGRO but to me they don't come across as confrontational or as rocking as they seem to aspire to be. Maybe requesting that their singer stab me during their next set will do the trick.

KRAWTCH ROCKET features Winnipeg punk rock veterans and play the most god-awful cliche-diseased cock rock I have been subjected to in a long time. Fuck was that insufferable. Their singer Norm used to front mid-80's hardcore band THE UNWANTED and has resurrected the band recently with a new lineup. They're totally worth checking out. How someone could be involved in both of these opposed bands is anybody's guess.

THE AFTERLIFE opened the show and were the worst band I've seen since my youth. I don't even know what they are. Generic bar punk/rock with 4+ minute torture sessions of complete bullshit deprived of any songwriting. Their drummer wore a TYPE-O-NEGATIVE shirt and would randomly have outbursts of prolonged double-kick rolls. The singer/guitarist was apparently in Winnipeg's old punk band, DISCHARGE. (I haven't heard them; for all I know they might be just as bad.) I read this in a copy of Stylus that I found laying around in the Albert lobby, where I retreated to distance myself from the "music". The writer introduced the band with something to the effect of "Do you know when you go to see a band and they throw 15-minutes of improvisation at you... and it totally blows you away?" The band went on to describe themselves in the article as having MC5 and STOOGES influences. Fuck off you assholes.


THE INSANIACS @ the Royal Albert in Winnipeg, Canada















The rest of Jason Penner's photographs from this show can be viewed here.