Righteous Riot

Another live review, this one from the night after the last post. Friday 18th July, Yvonne Ruve, Surry Hills. A delightful night of mostly quiet, almost sleepy sounding acts, the audience lounging, sitting, standing (except for a few louder moments, provided almost exclusively by the Castings lads) all enjoying a rather odd and out of place way to begin a weekend. I say out of place from my own point of view: I had been working all week and was in a mood to get a little wild and while the bands didn't have the same idea as those in my mind (you'd be surprised how often they actually do) I still managed to fend off the sleep they seemed intent on inducing and fall madly in love with the soft, quiet, awkward wonder of the music.

Recordings of all the performances can be found here: http://skyhut.blogspot.com/2008/07/ruve.html

After wandering lost through the messy bowels of Hibernian House - all graffiti and concrete and pipes and syringes - my brother Leigh and I finally located the space and, after some brief greetings, paid our entry, found a spot on the floor and tucked into our tasty bottle of vodka. We had arrived just in time to catch Polyfox And The Union Of Most Ghosts, who is a dude from Newcastle called Nick who plays lovely sad little instrumental pop songs. The pieces themsleves were tiny; short little licks of sublime melody that started off with a single chord sequence that then got looped and had colour added. My only complaint would be that the songs were to short, stopped abruptly without taking off into other spheres like they could have. But the tunes were delightful, reminiscent of all the lo-fi Kiwi pop that so many kids with guitars in their bedrooms produce so wonderfully, simply well.

The aforementioned Castings crew were up next, playing a monster set, probably one of the longest I've ever seen, maybe more than double the usual twenty minutes. Another set that solidified them as the giants of the current improv/noise scene. Six guys, guitars, mixers, mics and whole lot of huge swirling sound, waves that battered and burst forth from their tortured tangents. After the pyched-out onslaught of the first half of the set, they seemed loathe to quit and unleashed a pulverising industrial-punch that confounded any prettiness that may have appeared earlier. Quite simply the best performance of theirs I've ever witnessed.

From there it was back to the quiet, dreamy pop that seemed the proper flavour of the evening. The Bowles are a group that have only been together a matter of weeks, made up of Mathew from Naked On The Vague and couple of friends of his. They played in sort of circle, facing each other and only rarely the audience, drums, guitars, keys, all swapped around after just about every song. I grew a little sleepy part-way through the set; it was so slow and dreamy but tinged with a soft gorgeousness that seemed trapped in solitude and sadness.

Alps jumped up between the next act. Unbilled and impromptu, he wailed low to his organ drone and conjured the spirits of lo-fi loneliness.

The last act that we saw was a couple of kids from Brisbane who played damaged acoustic pop under the moniker Kitchens Floor. The name comes from a song by Look!Pond another Bris-band of which the 'Floor front-dude was a key member. With this new group he's roped in tiny girl-drummer dressed decades too late who provided tapping beats and soft harmonies to Matt's griping ballads. Something about the softness and touching tales in the songs somehow managed to enrage a couple of drunken Castings boys who took it upon themselves to begin ripping up a cooling-fan and kicking around bags of bottles. I think I remember one of them pulling a paint-stained door from the outside hall and put it on the floor/stage as a backdrop. So rarely do you see such raucus reaction to music that is so quiet and damaged. It suited the performance perfectly though, the kids going even wilder when an old Look!Pond song was pulled out.

I didn't stay for the last band. Haven't listened to the recording yet either. Maybe you can grab it for yourselves and tell me what its like. For my part, the sleepy songs and wasted nature of the night carried me home through the cold at once both sad and elated.

With Thorns Attached

Another late late late live review. This is from last week, Thursday 17th July a show at the Annandale Hotel. Three bands: Naked On The Vague from Sydney, Baseball from Melbourne and Snowman from Perth.

This is not - though you might be forgiven for thinking so - a Naked On The Vague fan site. I do love the band, they're a staple of a lot of my Sydney live show experience, couldn't count the amount of times I've seen them. But their wonderfully woozy, choatic noise thrills me still as they keep growing and getting better and better. Tonight I guess they kind of played a pop set: more songs than warped improv. They played "God Nor Devil" and dedicated to the Catholic pilgrims who had invaded the city that week. I always love seeing them at the Annandale too. Just cos they get huge red and yellow glowing lights and smoke and really awesome sound.

Baseball were next with their frantic Middle Eastern-inflected punk thrash. Frontman Thick Passage sawed at his violin, screaming manic with this wild stare he shot deep into the audience. The rest of the band riffed and plucked and smashed around it all. For some strange, pathetic reason I had never caught this band live after having first heard of them a good five or six years ago. I had always wanted to but unnatural forces seemed to prevent me from doing so. So, I finally did get to catch them. It was the highlight of my night. We started off quite shy in the audience but then the wine warmed us and the songs pulled us closer and closer to the stage and eventually into silly, flailing dancing mode. Sublime.

Snowman are a band from Perth who apparently have gone dark and dreary with their current album. My only experience with them up to this night had been glancing briefly at an article in a local music rag, half-hearing a recent song of theirs on the radio and rather liking it and being recommended this night's show by a friend of mine. What to say, though, about a band that seem to act so independently from the other group members, a band that make massive, energy draining epics without a core to any of the songs? The set was huge, like I said: huge songs, long and heavy and arranged, apparently, around a sense of apocalyptic dread. But their was something terribly affected, massively put-on by the band themselves. Everything from the gorgeous bassist who could barely move she looked so bored to the tiny Indonesian keyboardist who kept throwing himself into spasms, running around, hitting random instruments - none it seemed to fit. I'm all for cartharsis, going all out in pure expression. But only when it can be channeled, harnessed and used properly with the performers around you. Unfortunately these guys just could not bring those elements together. That coupled with one of the most awkward encores I've ever seen a band award themselves made for a curiously disappointing performance.

Last Week's Marauding Noise

Ah, noise. Coming at me like masses of rolling, thundering swathes of thickening grey and black. Oh fuck, this is no place for poetry. Any poesy that could be rhapsodied out whilst being slammed back against a wall by some other sickening aural wall could only be filled with bile and roaches and stinking, horrible clouds of suffocating gasses.

This is a week late review of a small show in the Hellen Rose Schauersberger Labratorium, a concrete room above a concrete car-park tucked away inside a tiny street on the side of a rise in Surry Hills. Last Saturday four acts, namely Naked On The Vague, Absoluten Calfeutrail, Defektro and Onani, all rocked up to this above-ground bunker (don't question it, you know it makes sense) to run through a series of massive, marauding sets centred around as much harsh texture as their speakers would allow.

Onani began a while after nine with their set of swirling, spooky processed keys and effects. I don't get to see these guys nearly as much as I'd like considering they're one of my fave local noise acts but tonight proved why they haven't become the monster act they had been moving towards. The set itself - improvised, droning, doom-laden - hasn't gone through that many changes in the last couple of years. Occaisional instruments will be picked up, processed and abondoned from show to show (tonight's choice was a banjo, that should have looked out of place but kinda wasn't in the psych-y context of the show, that tore mid-range holes in the air as it was plucked and rung out) with out much over-reaching thought given to expansion, retraction or release during their sets. Still, its always great to catch 'em.

Next up was Defektro, who I only knew before as the guy who makes and sells effects pedals in the foyer of the weekly Spanish Club shows in the city. The dude is a constructivist of the highes degree. Tonight he played a guitar that looked to be made of metal rods, an old film cannister that he spun as he plucked and thwacked a long steel spring strung along the length of his instrument. The set shifted between sharp attacks of blasted noise, cold rumblings of thunder and quiet breaks in between made up of ringing coils and what could have been the inside of an industrial warehouse as all the lights are going out. At the end he turned the knob on a gas bottle he had sitting on his table of effects and smacked at another metal spring he had stretched across a huge metal tube, the end of which shot bright blue and orange flame at each random hit. Fucken superb.

I know nothing and know still less about the next act, Absoluten Calfeutrail. One guy; tall, late-twenties, bearded and facing side on to the crowd with simply a table of effects and a microphone. He screamed and shook his way through some insane, maddening curse-ritual while waves of sordid tones swarmed around him. Inside the stage area, under some stairs, lit up by a single bulb the man called upon an evil I only thought existed in the nightmares of some haunted murderer. He shook a tiny wooden box that could have only housed trapped spirits, maddening them further, the force actually going towards making flakes of paint drop from the ceiling above.

Naked On The Vague, in perfect connection with the mood of the night and its previous acts, eschewed any of their actual 'songs' in favour of an extended, improvised spooky-psyche session. All the pent-up, moody zombie rage was still there as well as what felt like a freer, possibly even lighter, feel to the entire set or maybe thats just from setting against the harsh arena the other acts wallowed in. Woozy keys, wounded guitar all swirling above the surface of swampy shades of yellow-muddied mood. First time I'd seen them since they arrived back from their US sojourn and a most welcome return.