One Thursday Night of Ice-Bitten Worry and Wonder

Aleks and The Ramps 7" Launch w/ Halal, How Are You?, No Art & another missed act.
30th April - Hopetoun Hotel, Surry Hills

Me and my man Francis pulled up to the Hopetoun around quarter to nine looking a little worse for wear. The second day of a meth binge is when your eyes look like dry red holes in your face. Our lips were chapped and we bent towards the floor after having spent a very happy hour in a nearby city bar. And things got worse before they could get better. I thought I had a plus one with my Reviewer’s Pass and I told Frank he could have it since he’d spent the last of his dole money on a bottle of scotch, some of which he had hidden in his hip flask. My presumptions were wrong though - it was just me on the door list. Francis didn’t take it well. He flew into a rage, screaming at everyone about all the shit he’d done for FasterLouder in the past, how they owe him at least a night out. I tried to calm him before he could start swinging his fists and wrestling the patrons:

‘Hey, Frank man, just cool down for a bit. Look, you’ve already made me miss the first band. The second one’s about to start. I’m gonna go watch them, take some notes. I’ll buy you a beer and let you have a honk on my pipe if you just chill here for a bit, OK?’

Frank, still shaking, mumbled a terse, ‘Yeah, orright.’

I moved away from him towards the stage to check out No Art who were well into their set. The band comprised two girls up front, drummer dude behind. The girls looked fucking gorgeous. The guitarist was blacked out in leather and was pulling this incredibly dreamy late 80’s wash out of her pink heart guitar while the bass player, swimming in a psychedelic poncho, was making super slow runs down her massive axe. The drummer had it all worked out - he was actually interested in making the songs sound larger by arranging himself around the girls’ tunes. The songs themselves were fully formed and they were lucky enough to get an excellent sound on the night as they roared through their dreamy jams. The bass player stood back during their last - and best - song with a blissed out smile on her face - a smile I’m pretty sure I saw mirrored by most of the audience.

Still clapping as they packed away, I turned round to see if I could spot Francis. He was stood nest to the door bitch, bugging out and making a meal of his fingernails. He looked raw. I moved to the bar, grabbed two beers then took him to the toilets. Locking ourselves in the cubicle closest the window, I pulled out my pipe, dropped a rock in and fired it up.

I was still pretty pissed off that Frank had made me miss the first band, Yae! Tiger, and I told him so.

‘Aw, man. You said you’d already heard them and they sounded like a third rate Ben Lee with a Belle and Sebastian backing band.’

‘Yeah, I know but I still wanted to catch them. Hey, go easy on that.’

Frank was still pretty nervous and I could see getting a little too excited over the pipe, sucking up a little too much smoke. That’s the thing about smoking ice, you never know how much you’ve got in your lungs until its too late. Frank blew a grey cloud of sweet chemical stink towards the window and, by the look of it he was already way, way gone. He started to freak, accusing me of locking him in the cubicle to leave him there the rest of the night. He started bashing at the door, fumbling for the lock. His beer fell from the wall above and smashed all over the toilet floor. Frank found the lock, swung the door and bolted out of the bathroom. I took off after him. He’d made a break for the front door of the pub but by the time I got there all I could see was his lamp-lit, drug-fuelled frame tearing down the darkness of Foveux Street. No one has seen Francis since.

At a loss, all I could think to do was stay out the show and worry about Frank later. I went back to the toilet, grabbed my own, unbroken beer and made my way to the stage where Halal, How Are You? were about to begin.

Every now and again you catch a band who are so hilariously over-the-top, so perfectly, purposefully outrageous they can restore your faith in the Sydney Rock Band. Three guys on stage ripped into some superb garage riffage while a voice appeared in the speakers behind. But I could see no-one singing on stage. Did they have a tape I followed the band’s gaze and turned behind me to see a ferocious looking dude standing on a table at the back, clad in a dark and garish Hawaiian shirt and screaming in Jagger-horror, then in a throaty metal catarrh. I could see parts of the audience staring dumbly, not knowing what to do as the singer tore through them, up onto the stage; as he writhed in his own sweat on the floor, as he dived onto then back off of the bar. All the while the band kept up a tight, staid, fast and furious backing blast. Two well chosen covers from the British charts of 1965 and some solid guitar work kept us all rapt, almost in expectation of the singer’s impending injury. You couldn’t help but dance or scream back into the singer’s face as he we about his crowd-taunting. Something this dangerous, this daring is such a rare, refreshing scene in this usually safe city.

Waiting, waiting for Aleks and the Ramps while the between-band music sounding like some caterwauling Gun Club gone crazy over their warm mexicola; swapping acid stories with your favourite drunk friends . . .

The Melbourne band, touring their brand new 7” release, ’Antique Limb’ arrived onstage at the Hopetoun in glittery fantasy masks, short shorts and sequinned cod-pieces. It was like a glam band had recalled all the fun of their childhood picture books and animal stories and had got together to make music to freak out to in the cutest, most colourful way. Their tunes moved through such strange places, everything based around a twee orgy of florid funk and crazed psych-pop collusion. Its hard to know how to move to a band like this: you start to dance for a bit then have to stop and wonder just what the fuck is going on. They hardly stopped for applause and instead opted for long songs of impeccably arranged freak-pop; everything from screaming at each other like chimps and off-stage choreography to forgetting the words and just singing ’meow’ to pulling the best rock moves with a banjo I’ve seen in quite a while. They closed with their single but not without prefacing it with a bit of Belinda Carlisle, reminding us that heaven indeed is a place on Earth. But as I sung along and looked around me the audience had thinned to the devoted few, all of us having paid witness to a strange melange of skewed tunes by some twisted kids who simply adore the art of performance.

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.

Bonniwell's Musical Mess

I got this album the other day for my birthday and gave it my first listen last night. Its a collection of the Bonniwell Music Machine's songs that have fallen far from anyone's attention. And for quite obvious reasons. The music is a fucken mess. Its garage rock from the late 60's, all those sounds are in there - fuzz guitar, farfisa organs, thudding drums - the ideas are in there, the voice is there but not a single one of these elements seem to fit together in any way, shape or form.

The Music Machine had a hit in September 1966 with the song "Talk Talk", breaking into the top twenty and making a television appearance that showed them wearing - according to Sean Bonniwell, the band's lead singer/songwriter, to avoid all gimmicks and to embrace their originality - matching black suits, mop-tops and, to really stand out, a single black glove on either their right or left hand. Fucken wild, hey. Their next single flopped, Bonniwell blaming industry clashes and the band put themselves through years of hard touring, presumably on the back of the one song. They refused to play covers or, apparently even listen to any form of advice. The band would play hour-long sets without breaks, rather than stop to have requests shouted at them which smacks of some weird and confused egomania rather than some highly original or progressive musical tract.

After a while, the original Music Machine parted and Bonniwell put together The Bonniwell Music Machine, recorded some songs for Warner Bros that probably didn't see the light of day until this CD release.

The disc is basically the musical equivalent of one guy's strange, deluded insistence that he force his overwhelming originality onto an audience that existence nowhere but in his mind. An odd, maniacal journey into a pop-garage sound with not a single clue about hooks, harmonies or cohesive musical arrangement. Its astounding that this man was even allowed near a recording studio. No one could have been that hard up for bands in the late 60's that they needed to spend time on this confused mess of ideas. From the liner notes (credited to Bonniwell and written in the third person) to the untracable sounds that pop up clueless and erratic this music isn't, as is claimed, a forerunner to punk or progressive rock, its some insane, gloriously confused mess of mashed ideas made inside the supposed shape of 1960's garage rock.

And its not Beefheart messy either. Beefheart at least had something you could tap into, had enough of a flow and awareness of its own insanity that it was something you could tap into. But this . . . this is simply . . . impenetrable.

To quote Bonniwell in his description of the song "Absolutely Positively", which is about: 'Demanding that you get what you don't have without knowing what you want, is the same as wanting what you haven't got - then not wanting it after you get it." Right . . .

Now, I've met people like this - I know that they're real and that they're out there. People that are so enthusiastic and so brimming with ideas; people that are so convinced of their own originality that they loudly proclaim it attempt to draw others into audience. Unfortunately, though, these are ideas are often so confused, so lost, so misdirected that they are lost on anyone who happens to come into contact with them.

Which is why Bonniwell's music is so fascinatingly, fantastically broken and messed up. In a way, he does fit in with the idea of punk and, indeed, with anybody's ideas about freedom of thought and expression; the idea of creating your own world, of making evrything around you your own and yours to own. Its just that its such a terrifically garbled and inarticulate mess that no one can get properly inside of it to take away something for themselves. As Bonniwell sings in the opening line to "Talk Talk": "I got a complication/And its an only child." Thanks Sean, couldn't have put it better myself.

Pat, You Are A Pillar!

"A lot of women singers today seem to be saying, ‘If you love me and then hurt me, I’ll die.’ I say, ‘If you love me then hurt me, I’ll kick your ass.’"
-Pat Benatar (June 1979)

This is a little of the fallout from a mild brain lapse that occured last year. I got this job where myself and my fellow employees would come to blows over what radio station should be playing. One guy refused to listen to my choice of "yoof" music and I threatened to blow up when a song was played for THE TWENTIETH FUCKING TIME THAT DAY on his commercial puke-choice. So, for the sake of everyone's sanity we made a comprimise.

We eventually settled on an oldies station playing mostly rockin' tracks that re-packaged nostalgia and dreams of past youth specifically for the daily grind. But the station had a love for music which is uncommon for most Australian commercial arse-waves and was pretty endearing.

Oh, and the songs!

I would come home after a large day of nothing and fill my housemate's computer with the massively fake, over-emotive 80's tracks, get drunk and wail along with Flock of Seagulls, Foreigner and - most emotive of all - Pat Benatar.

Pat was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski in Janurary 1953 to a Polish family in Brooklyn, NY. She was discovered at an open mic nightin the late seventies, playing run-of-the-mill songs dressed in Catwoman costume, showered with praise, shown a record deal, won best female vocal grammys for twenty consecutive years in the early eighties and was generally loved by everyone.

Her obvious massive songs aren't the ones that get me, though. Yeah, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" is fun and brash and does deal with the main idea that runs through pretty much all of Benatar's songs: that of, "Try it on if you want guy, but I've been through enough shit to know what you're about, if you fuck with me I'll find something else like you never happened," etc.

The songs that get me are the ones with ridiculously over the top chorus, huge arena rock guitars and straining layered harmonies. "Shadows Of The Night", "We Belong", "Heartbreaker".
All of them paint Pat as this immovable pillar, this tough and world-weary chick that has been fucked over, shat on, spat up but doesn't want anything similar to happen to any dude she meets. She warns us about it but is never out for scalps. She still seeks and strives for love regardless of previous histories.

It seemed a common theme for popular women singers in the 80's. Women no longer striving for liberation; women realising they've found it, have been living that way for years and reveling in it, falling in love with it.

"Love Is A Battlefield" was the soundtrack to last year - the song that best describes all the idiocy of bringing previous history and ill communication into relationships, which of course is impossible not to do but fucks things up nevertheless. Its one of Pat's more relaxed and restrained songs but could be - maybe because its what I want to believe and take from the plasticity of the eighties - her most sincere and heartfelt that I've come across.

I think Pat's doing a bit of TV work these days. "I Was A Celebrity, Now Pieces Of Me Are Being Fed To The Wolves" reality-type swill and selling songs for toothpaste and travelcase commercials. Nevermind. For a good chunk of last year she was a rock when I was a flabby piece of fetid fat being drunkenly blown around. Pat, you are a pillar!

Ineptitude Abounds

The other day I came across two articles both giving a brief rundown of the history of Beat Happening. One was a wonderful, and at the same time critical, analysis of the band, its songs, albums, influence and infamy, the other was an odd and rather deluded rundown of the band's recorded output. One was published in a webzine focussing, generally, on the wierder sides of musics out there, the other was in the corner of the back pages of Sydney's main club and DJ streetpress. The link to the Perfect Sound Forever article is here:http://www.furious.com/Perfect/beathappening.html. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the latter article. A damn shame considering how strange its appearnce in such a publication is and was.

You can read the wonderful history of the gloriously inept and underconfident band wherever and however you wish but I don't think you'd ever be able to say that they were talented musicians or fine singers. They did craft wonderfully basic, naive pop songs holding true to themes of teenage love and all things romantic and bookish. But you'd never be able to accuse them spending too much practising together or (gasp!) learning their instruments.

Which is what the writer in 3d World was attempting to convey: that Beat Happening were a band of incredibly talented individuals who played and sang with wonderful voices and an inbuilt sense of musicianship. The best thing about the article was that I think the dude had actually listened to the albums he was describing. And yet he went on to describe what he had heard as collection of finely wrought and deftly performed indie tunes that everyone needs to seek and fall in love with.

Now, don't let me disuade you. I fucken love Beat Happening. Memories of lying in bed wailing out of tune with Calvin with my girlfriend of the time, dancing and singing around her bedroom during a Melbourne summer was wonderful. My favourite songs of theirs will always remind me of that. The band and their music should be sought and savoured but to deny them their wonderful and insatiable INABILITY would be to miss most of what their doing.

The PSF article says most of what needs to be said about the challenging nature of such a band but I thought it so strange to - in the same day - stumble across two mostly opposing articles. Apparently the article in 3d World was an attempt by someone in the magazine to sell something that the readers might not seek out intially - a grouping of underground guitar bands that the kids are getting into but have missed the dance world slightly. I'm gonna make sure I keep up with his articles and whinge about them to you here later.