again.

However, this unusual encounter left me with a desire to find out more about the band which had provoked such a reaction from my temporary travelling companion, so I scoured the web to find what little information was available, before finally coming across an online record store which stocked their debut album 'Purely Evil'. It was everything that I had been promised and more, and became such a firm favourite that album highlight 'Zero Point' was the first song I played in my first ever DJ set (between bands at a Special Needs + Neil's Children gig at Catch 22, if you're interested).

Sadly though as the months and years wore on, and no new material became available, I eventually grew weary of the album, and it was consigned to the darkest realms of my cd racks to gather dust.

That is until tonight - finally The Rogers Sisters have returned to our shores, bringing with them an outstanding mini-album 'Three Fingers', and so it's

back to Highbury, where my love affair with this band first began, for a long awaited opportunity to see them live.

First though is the small matter of tonight's three support bands - Go! Team! Go! contacted me months ago about getting a live review on Joyzine, but which ever dates they were playing, there was always some reason or another that I couldn't make it. I always feel bad when we can't cover a new band, like I've let them down, and we

could be missing out on something special, so I was happy to finally have the chance to put it right.

G!T!G! (not to be confused with the similarly named Go Team), made an admirably confused racket filled with sqaulls of feedback and discordant stabs of sound emitted from cheap Argos keyboards. It's very hit and miss, making you want to dance like a Trash regular and rip your own ears off, often at the same time, but when it works it sounds like Liars at the top of their game. I just wish the singer (a Londoner judging by his spoken accent) would stop singing in that irritating Americanised whine.

Next are the copiously monikered 3hostwomexicansandatinofspanners - a band who regardless of what they sound like, are likely to stick in your head solely on the basis of their name. As such, I was rather disappointed by the lack of Mexicans, spanners, and indeed hos as they emerged from backstage and launched into their first song.

buying them from me for more than I originally paid). They're good fun for the first few tracks, but the novelty wears thin pretty quickly.

The penultimate band of the night, Citizens Here and Abroad, have popped across the Atlantic for a series of shows around the UK. By now the venue's really starting to fill up, and they receive a pretty enthusiastic response from a section of the crowd. Quite why I'm not particularly sure, as their bland amalgamation of US college rock does little for me. A lack of movement on stage doesn't help proceedings either, though I have to admit their bass player had a certain charm to him with the between songs banter.

Things take a turn for the better with the introduction of a

glockenspiel on a couple of songs, which adds a bit of individuality to their otherwise generic sound. But for the most part there's little to recommend here, and all they're doing is prolonging the wait for the band that most people have come here to see tonight.

Finally The Rogers Sisters make their way onto the stage, Jennifer Rogers with her hair piled up atop her

head in what is truly an impressive feat of couffeurial engineering (of course, within the first minute and a half it's all collapsed and spends the rest of the set flailing around her face), her sister Lisa more conservatively attired sliding in behind the drumkit, and Hawaiian ball of energy, and honorary sister Miyuki Furtado strapping on his bass before launching into a truly astonishing set.

I've been questioning my passion for music recently - now that Joyzine has grown to having so many contributors, and I'm spending most of my time checking for spelling mistakes and arranging other people's words onto the page, rather than writing everything myself as when it started out, it's become as much an administrative task as a labour of love. And while there have been some decent bands come our way over the last few months, there has been nothing that has grabbed my imagination in the same way that Bloc Party, Special Needs, Art Brut or Mika Bomb did when I first heard them. There have even been a few moments where I considered just not doing it any more - passing on the reins to someone who still has the enthusiasm that led me to start the site in the first place. In short, I needed a special band, something to

believe in, something to reinvigorate a soul tired of wading through bands trudging relentlessly over the same ground and adding little of their own beyond the accepted template. The Rogers Sisters are that band, and for that I shall be eternally grateful to them.

And so it was that two years later, I left the Garage with a great big smile on my face, and made my way to that

same tube station, full of the same excitement that Art Brut had filled me with before. The gibbering girl wasn't there of course, that would have been too much of a fairy tale ending, but I vowed from that moment to take on her message to as many people as I could, so here it is:

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodi'vejustseenthisamazingbandcalledtherogers
sistersthey'resocoolit'slikewatchingtherapturewithoutallthecrapbitsonlymuch
muchbetterthanthatyou'vegottogoandseethemYOU'VEGOTTOGOANDSEE
THEM!!!!!!!!!!

Review and photos by Paul Madden
www.therogerssisters.com
www.citizenshereandabroad.com
www.3hos.com
www.goteamgo.co.uk

See more photos from tonight's gig here

Watch the video for The Rogers Sisters latest single 'Check Level' on our Downloads Page

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