Live: MTV 42Unheard Final

That picture right there of the cute girl holding the giant 42Below vodka bottle and the winning ticket is Ruby Frost a.k.a Jane de Jong, a.k.a the winner of the MTV 42Unheard competition. Frost was picked from a panel of judges (including Gin Wigmore and for some reason Shelton Woolwright) out of 357 acts that entered the competition months back. She’ll now go to New York to play the CMJ Music Marathon, get recording time, a single release deal (with options) through Universal, a feature in Real Groove magazine and a list of other swag. It’s tough to know where to start with this since a month ago I put all my bets on her to win this thing – I guess sometimes I’m actually right. On stage and especially on paper, Frost is the logical choice – she’s extremely marketable in a country that hasn’t exploited pop music all that much recently (in part I guess because we don’t do pop music all that well) – and she’s genuinely talented whether watching her on stage or hearing her recordings.

The night started off a little shaky with opening indie-rock act The Frisk doing their best to amp up a crowd that was mostly happy to enjoy the open bar. Their show was predictable with their songs sounding like a slew of other indie it-bands but there was nothing that separated these guys from the pack. They list their influences as The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys and Kings of Leon, which shows their youthfulness, but ultimately it didn’t add up to much. It doesn’t hurt to know your history kids. There was good music before 2001.

And that was the gist for The Pink Pound Experience too. Despite reading their bio which told me to “take a listen, it’s the future…” there were only elements here that reflected how late they were to jump on the indie-rock bandwagon. The rest of their bio is every bit ridiculous: “We got together in mid 2009 and practice hard to deliver and mental product that may only be sold on the top shelf, alongside penthouse, mayfair and euro boy.” There were rumours that these guys got a ridiculous amount of votes from fans that got them into the top six but on stage they barely clicked. Maybe they were just having a bad night but a friend of mine joked that they wouldn’t even had made it into the Rockquest.

Then shit got interesting. Rap Authoritar (Joe Buchanan) is the brother of Eric Ultimate a.k.a that dude from Coco Solid, and he had people in the crowd wondering if he was serious or if he had us sucked into a huge joke. Not that he couldn’t rap or anything (even though it was impossible to hear what he was saying) but no one seemed to know what to make of him.

For Da Grind were the biggest surprise of the night. There’s a possibility that there was guitar shredding involved but this was an R&B group taking their favourite influences and applying them to make an impressive set. There are officially six members but the stage was filled with a couple of others as well (one vocalist even quipped that half the crowd was now on stage). Compared to everyone else in the competition, they seemed like the wildcard (I guess because they sounded unike anything else) but they easily stirred up the crowd, which the other bands failed to do. There was also a group of girls standing at the front that screamed for them the entire way through their set. Somebody get these guys a deal.

Out of all the indie-rock bands Tiddabades were easily the best. They were animated and showed that they had been doing this long enough to know how to play a set like this and impress. The Wellington four-piece put on a great closing set that I’m sure impressed the judges but it wasn’t to be their night. Amber Peebles took on the emceeing duties (how good is she looking lately?) and introduced Kidz In Space who filled in the, um, Downtime, with a set that opened with Phoenix’s 1901 and went to show why these guys will be sticking around for a long while yet.

But the glory belonged to Ruby Frost, who made it well known from her charisma that she deserved to be the one that took this thing home. Her band was tight, and from the get-go where she opened with a new song called Hazy, she blew away most of the competition and remained on point throughout her performance. I don’t know how she’ll fit in at a festival like CMJ but that’s still a year away so who knows what she’ll produce by then. The judges made a great decision picking her – she’s young, beautiful and when she let the short but pounding epic Goodnight ascend from this tiny melody into something a lot bigger than the demo sounds, you can see and hear all the potential that this girl has. And that’s the thing with this competition – it was judged on who had the most potential to take this opportunity and run with it. Let’s just hope that Universal don’t mess it up for her.