Roia at Rockhouse, Salzburg

Our first gig in Salzburg was at a venue called Rockhouse, to see a band called Roia. There isn't a huge choice of what to see in Salzburg if you don't want Mozart, with a version of Deep Purple, Hugh Cornwall "The Voice of The Stranglers", and The Chippendales being the only 'names' to visit the city in the next couple of weeks. I saw Roia advertised in a flyer though as electropop, and so we decided to give it a go.

Rockhouse is a nice little venue, reminding us a bit of The Magnet Club in Berlin. One side is a long bar, and the other side is the actual venue itself. We stopped in the bar for a while listening to the DJ, who was playing stuff off the Thom Yorke solo album and lots of the kind of stuff that Thom had been listening to when he was making it . In fact it sounded quite like one of my DJ sets.

The main venue was a barrel-vaulted room, with I guess a capacity of around 200. It was pretty full, and like the previous gig we'd been to in Austria earlier this year, it seemed like quite a family affair with kids and grannies as well as people our age (and, obviously, younger).

Live, Roia are a seven piece, although I think there are ony four core members of the band. They have a male and a female lead vocalist, and I guess the nearest thing you might compare them to would be something like Moloko. They started really brightly, and had some simple and effective visuals as well.

Our reservation was that almost inevitably with two lead vocalists they suffered a bit from Sugarcubes syndrome - the more you wanted to hear her voice, the more he sang. The male vocalist, Dorian, looks a little like Seth Green, and was fine when singing alongside Nina, but we weren't over-keen when he branched off on his own. Nina on the other hand was the real star attraction - very attractive without being over-the-top, with a great voice and a really emotional delivery style. They also suffed a little from having some quite messy arrangements, with far too many detours away from the main thrust of a song.

We liked them a lot though, and if we had seen them whilst we were 'Going deaf in a foreign land' on our travels, they would have been up there as one of the best bands we saw.

You can download an mp3 sample of one of their tracks from their website - "Suicide Butterfly"

We didn't stay right until the end of Roia's set, which was a little bit wimpish I know, but our last bus towards Niederalm leaves Mirabelplatz at 10:16. We got there with plenty of time despite a little panicked detour around the one way system, and headed home.

When we got back for our last night in Kaiserhof, we watched the first episode of That Mitchell and Webb Look on the laptop, which finally means that I can randomly shout "That's Numberwang!" without Claire looking at me completely blankly