The bass is humming, the seats are vibrating, the crowds are anticipating something huge. Yes Fat Freddy's Drop are on the stage.
The brass section with the trombones and trumpets was alive, an electric feeling which is classic Kiwi style. The keyboards piercing through the mayhem of brass excellence. The bass wow!
Complimented with top hats and great costumes Fat Freddy's Drop are a class act.
The Opera House is a strange venue for most bands, all seating, no mosh pit, etc… however there was a decent dancing audience at the front (not normal in the opera house), and the rest of the sell out crowd were toe tapping in their seats. Certainly everyone was up for it, psyched and buzzing and it was a great atmosphere and fantastic acoustics.
Did I mention the bass? Every bone in my body is still tingling from the sensation. It wasn't in your face or over loud, it was just a good well balanced sound you could appreciate.
They had great stage presence, although I would have liked to have seen more interaction with the audience. Great showmen delivering a wall of reggae soul sound.
The dry ice, light show and theatricals didn't distract from the musical genius, it just added to the mystique of Fat Freddy's Drop with up to 8 people on stage at any one time.
Some songs had way too much echo after every sentence which became annoying at times and some songs seemed to drag, but just before it became boring the words "fire fire" rang out, accompanied by a fantastic guitar solo, what more can I say, you have to experience it to understand what I'm talking about.
Fat Freddy’s Drop is internationally regarded as one of the world’s finest live draws. The seven piece band has navigated their way from the incubator of sunshine reggae through a colour-saturated field of soul psychedelia before swerving onto a desolate Detroit superhighway at night. It’s a sound that demands to be heard live, a potent mixture of jazz virtuosity and diaphragm-wrecking digital sonics.
These influences have not only been formed by the band’s individual predilections, but also experiences on the road: Fat Freddy’s appearance at Detroit’s Movement festival in 2006 was a watershed moment for the band, fuelled by hearing May’s, Atkin’s and Craig’s stark futurism ricochet off the cold concrete of America’s broken dream. This stoked producer DJ Mu’s love of analog techno, balancing and fusing vocalist Dallas Tamaira’s adoration of soul and reggae with the band’s collective passion for Jazz, Rhythm & Blues, Rock, Disco, House, Post Punk and Balearic oddities.
For Bays studio album released in 2015, the 9-track LP was exclusively written and recorded at their studio in Kilbirnie, Wellington. Pre-Bays, Freddy's albums were formed almost entirely on the road; the songs slowly evolving live at festivals such as WOMAD UK, SONAR, Bestival, Lowlands, DEMF, Pukkelpop, Glastonbury, The Big Chill and Roskilde.