Guys, please don't forget we are playing the Silent Tempest/Angel Foundation charity ball on Monday night.
No fee, but much exposure and free booze. Check out the poster, it's in the appartment somewhere.

DD

Charity Ball poster

I've been away for a while. But I'm back now! Yay! I'll be there on monday. Hope to see you guys then or sooner.

I'll do my best to turn up, and you know it! Just, I got exams...

-Smurfette

((This review is posted on the Stigma Magazine website at 10am this morning.))

Stigma Magazine Online

“The Last Word Stripped Bare”
The Last Word at the Silent Tempest/Angel Foundation Charity Ball
Monday, July 9.
Review by Chance Mullet

I have just returned from the least secret gig in secret gig history, and I want to tell you that it rocked. The rumor mill has been working overtime about The Last Word performing a set at a charity gig, but fans found it impossible to get tickets for last night’s high-class shindig. But Stigma Magazine was there and witnessed the la-*test*-('") step in the evolution of Paragon’s hot-*test*-('"), genre-blurring outfit.

This was The Last Word stripped bare. Without the melodic keyboards of Samantha Carter and the awesome vocal gymnastics of Desiree Bell, the performance was raw, brutal and frenetic. With the band’s songwriter Dee Dee Diablo taking on vocal duties with a schizophrenic tone jumping from raucous staccato to heart-felt, dirty emotion, The Last Word showed authenticity and maturity sometimes lacking in their early performances.

It usually takes the acquisition of a couple of mansions and a private jet before rockers start producing their worthy cause material. But Diablo has jumped the gun with the first of three new tracks performed last night. Other Side of the Street isn’t your usual charity track though, seething with Diablo’s trademark rage and language of the gutter. Backed by Alice Spring’s machinegun drumming and Lance Simmon’s screeching guitar riffs, Diablo enters an on stage confessional with a song about a girl, lost and abused on the street’s of Paragon. Losing her familiar **** you swagger, Diablo becomes the vulnerable girl in her song as she tells us about a young woman bouncing between one night stand to one night stand in search of the love never shown to her but condemned to always be on the “other side of the street.”

The Last Word didn’t disappoint the audience, although they didn’t exactly look like the band’s usual crowd, playing the high octane anthems Slip of the Tongue and Chemical Burn before Diablo got all introspective again with the heartrending diatribe of Mother’s Ruin.

The band rounded off the set with another brand new track. Turmoil is a Jekyll and Hyde of a number, with Diablo baring her soul in the versus about a girl at a crossroads between her self-destructive lifestyle and the looming danger of alowing herself to believe in the hope of change.

But after she has laid it on the line, she screams “But let’s talk about you again!” leading Springs and Simmons into a rollercoaster cacophony of rage.