Cocco 12/24/2019
From the start I had no idea that I would have Christmas eve off until a few weeks ago. My manager told me that he got a temporary replacement for a few days last minute. I normally choose my concerts months in advance and normally pre check the band (by checking a few songs on you tube…). This band I chose because it was playing on a day I had off. While I really doubted it; this was the description on the site I bought the tickets from:
Hometown: Kolkata
Hello people! This is Cocco, presently playing guitar for the band Eeshaan. This page is created to share my music with u all! :)
When I looked online there are at least 4 artists and bands named cocco… while I assumed the band would be the Japanese one I wasn’t sure what music they were going to play…
So, on to the concert itself. I was back in Club Quatro and since my ticket number was 715 I figured it would be really packed. Since there were several people behind me in line I am guessing there were roughly 800 people there. While I only saw from the back corner (like normal) I guess that the audience had a good balance of men to women and most were older than 30. The singer thought that all of the people were older than 20 which led to an incident later in the performance… but based on the clientele I could get a decent idea what kind of music I was going to see and I was partially right.
The pre music was all orchestral (which is unusual for club quatro) which set a good mood then the intro music was just rain falling; which I guess that is suitable for this band. They set moods more than try to get the audience pumped up unlike most bands I have seen. Well enough delaying; here is the band that I happened to see.
Cocco begins and ends with the singer which is it’s greatest strength and probably it’s greatest weakness. She has a great voice and most of the songs are created to add emphasis to her voice. Which makes some incredible songs. I think the closest comparison would be female country singers in America: Shania Twain or Dolly Parton. It really makes most of her songs have a special something that I can’t explain.
She also is spindly and probably has experience in either ballet or gymnastics because her movements are very fluid yet elastic. Even more so that she wore a super long dress that would often trip her up so she would either not move and do her movements from the waist up or pull her dress to her knees to do her dance moves… Which leads to a very strange “dance” where during the more heavy metal songs she sways erratically almost like a zombie or Gollum from the Lord of the Rings. It probably would have to be seen to understand… Some of the slower songs the movement is more dancer like and the faster songs is more club dancing? The word I put first into my notes was “Haunting”, some of the songs were like someone was in the exorcist and being possessed by pazuzu…
It was not all doom and gloom, and children turning their heads backwards, the band had a quite expansive repertoire of styles of music that they could play. There was hard rock, classic rock, 50s rock, Caribbean style, country… and those were the ones that I could tell from my limited music memory. I am sure that there were many others that I missed. They were quite skilled and the music styles were broad which for me was the problem. I mostly prefer faster music which made the selection fairly hit or miss. Also they had a tendency of throwing in heavy metal parts in the slow songs which made a fairly wide disconnect and don’t get me started with the random English songs that made no sense strewn throughout the show.
The band was 2 guitarists, one young and attractive and an old man who looks like he would be playing in a coffee shop or a bar, 1 base guitarist, 1 piano + keyboard player, a drum player, and the main singer. While the players were skilled and seemed to really enjoy playing the music they were just unmemorable. Which led to my second demerit, the music was mostly internally repetitive (in that they didn’t transition much and kept playing the same parts of the song a bit too much), and there were only a few solos but they weren’t anything special. Great playing skill fairly bland sheet music…
The intermissions were pretty sparse and it was all the main singer doing the talking. She seemed really shy for the first few, they only lasted about a minute and were pretty standard (introducing the band and greeting the people), but the ending ones she started telling a story about how her being in Hiroshima gave her an idea for a song and how she tried to pitch her products which led to an interesting exchange. She started her last intermission with, “so, we are all adults here.” and then was interrupted by a voice in the crowd who said she was wrong. The person talking said she was 12 years old and the main singer rolled with the punches and had a quite entertaining interacting with the kid while keeping to her goal of talking about goals for the future. I’ll give her credit for her quick-wittedness.
That being said there were several gems and the singer’s mix of inhuman and ballerina dancing kept watching them interesting. If you like many different types of rock and don’t nitpick as much as I do about repetitive music as much as I do (I think if I had heard this band a few years ago I probably would have been listening to them a lot more), I think it is a good band to watch and listen to. While not quite my cup of tea it was quite enjoyable.
4.2 / 5