The Church – The Blood of a Poet – 21 November 2014

The Church play The Blood of a Poet

ACMI

Friday 21 November 2014

$38

Deep Without a Meaning

The Church have just released their 25th album, Further, Deeper, which, amazingly, lives up to its title by delving further and deeper into the sub-strata of the band’s lush and mesmerising sound. Meanwhile, lead singer Steve Kilbey has just published a memoir titled Something Quite Peculiar that delves just as far and nearly as deep into the sub-strata of his own murky inner life.

Significant as these two works are, the performance I attended this week as part of Melbourne Music Week related to neither of these projects. Instead, The Church were setting up their effects pedals under the big screen at ACMI (Australian Centre of the Moving Image) to perform their soundtrack to Jean Cocteau’s 1932 surrealist film, The Blood of a Poet. Talk about ‘further' and 'deeper.’

There is a natural marriage between The Church and Jean Cocteau; The Church’s music has a shimmering dream-like quality about it and Kilbey’s lyrics have always had an impressionistic, surrealist bent. Really, the coming together of Kilbey and Cocteau is an arty-farty type’s wet dream, like Brian Eno scoring a David Lynch film, or Laurie Anderson marrying Lou Reed.

I've read Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles, but I’m no cinephile and I’m not familiar with his films. All I know is that they are surrealist in nature and synonymous with cinematic wankery. But you can't be a Church fan without having the 'w' gene so the chance to hear the band play live as the film was projected above them was too good to miss.

I decided not to read up on the film in advance, thinking I'd just experience it free of any intellectual pre-conditioning. Now that I've seen the film, I'm not sure it would have helped anyway. 

Between Mirages

"Just play Under The Milky Way - they'll love it."

According to the ACMI host who introduced the event, The Blood of a Poet is Steve Kilbey's favourite film, or at least the film he immediately nominated as the one he'd most like to score. I can see why some people might find the film interesting, but 'favourite' seems a bit far-fetched. ‘Incomprehensible' is probably the most common reaction on a first viewing, but of course such a view probably just illustrates why Kilbey is an artist and most of the rest of us aren’t.

The session wasn’t sold out but there was a good crowd in by the time the band ambled on and the screen flickered into life. ACMI cinemas are big spaces and the screen is suitably large, meaning the band could set up beneath the screen and not impinge upon anyone’s view.

I won't give a precis of every scene, not because I have any qualms about spoilers – after all, the film’s been around for more than 80 years – but because such an approach would be boring. Plus it probably wouldn’t clarify an awful lot. Besides, this type of surrealist cinema made up of dream-like sequences, conceptual ideas and metaphysical happenings doesn't lend itself to a coherent synopsis.

However, the first scene, in one aspect at least, had a nice echo in the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition that I had just seen at NGV. In the film an artist sketches a portrait and notices that the mouth on his portrait is moving. After much melodramatic emoting – it's a silent film after all – he hurriedly rubs it off, but only succeeds in transferring the talking mouth onto his palm, where it continues chatting away. The artist then wipes his palm across the face of a statue – one of those classical sculptures of a woman with no arms. The statue, played by photographer and model Lee Miller, comes to life and begins talking to the artist, coaxing him to pass through a mirror into another realm.

At the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition, mannequins wearing Gaultier creations had facial features projected onto their faces, complete with blinking lashes, roaming eyes and talking mouths that described the outfit they were wearing as well as the circumstances and inspiration behind the collection in question. Like the better scenes in the movie, it was at once disquieting and effective.

Finding inspiration

'Tantalised'

As the film began, Kilbey read the preamble as it appeared on the screen, but other than that, there was no vocal, save for some heavy breathing at one point. Only Kilbey on bass stood, while drummer Tim Powles and the two guitarists, Peter Koppes and Ian Haug (ex Powderfinger, who replaced the self-exiled Mary WilsonPiper), opted for seats from which they traded guitar harmonics. 

The music was haunting and atmospheric without being doodly and dull, with Kilbey's throbbing bass and Powles’ thoughtful percussion driving it along. The guitars provided a sort of ambient dreamscape wash from which occasional motifs emerged. They resisted the temptation to match the unreality of film's action with abstract dissonance, but chose their moments to up the tempo to illustrate the action unfolding on the screen – most notably in the scene when schoolboys have a snowball fight, which ends with the death of one boy, and another scene when the dead boy’s African guardian angel enters the film.

As the film reached its finale the band’s playing intensified, enhancing the climax of the narrative and adding drama to the symbolic denouement. 

The ACMI cinemas boast enormous screens and clear, balanced audio, but by far the best thing about them is the high-backed seats. They are extremely comfortable, particularly after a couple of after-work beers. With an abstract film showing and an ambient soundtrack washing over me, it would have been easy to nod off, and given the disjointed narrative, I'm not entirely sure that I didn't.

For all of its avante-gardery, I thought the film contained some intriguing scenes and images, and the simple act of trying to work out what was going on kept me involved. Besides, it was a pleasant change from the super hero movies that I’ve been taking my youngest son to watch.

The music may not go on to become central to The Church's oeuvre, but it was still good. It was probably more to my taste than whatever soundtrack originally accompanied the film. If nothing else, listening to The Church added to the experience, which was the point after all, and watching them play also offered a welcome distraction to the film’s more incomprehensible moments.

There was no post-film mini gig and the audience was well enough behaved that no one shouted out for Under the Milky Way half way through. However, to quote from that song and the title of Kilbey’s autobiography, The Blood of a Poet was indeed ‘something quite peculiar.’

Bjork Biophilia Live - 27 October 2014

Bjork Biophilia Live

ACMI

Monday 27 October 2014

$17

Bjork, In Absentia

If the best gig I attended in 2014 was St. Vincent at Howler, then the best gig I didn’t go to was Bjork’s Biophilia show. The reason being of course is that she didn’t tour Australia, let alone Brunswick. Perhaps she doesn’t like flying, or perhaps the cost of carting a 25 person choir across the hemispheres was too prohibitive. Happily ACMI (Australian Centre of the Moving Image) was showing a film version of the concert, so that was just going to have to do.  

The concert was filmed at Alexandra Palace in London on 3 September 2013 – the final show of the tour – and was directed by Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland. Had I been there I might have missed the 2013 federal election three days later when Australia voted in a right wing government led by arch conservative, Tony Abbott. In which case I’d have been tempted to stay in London.

Bjork is a true artist and musical innovator. The fact that we live in a world in which she commands a mass audience is a sign that things aren’t all bad. Of course the fact that Elton John still sells millions of records cancels out much of the hope that Bjork’s relative popularity might otherwise have engendered. I just wish Bjork realised that part of her mass audience resides in Australia and that she would tour here one day.

Natural Wonders

Like St Vincent’s concert, Bjork’s show was a highly stylised, tightly choreographed performance. Staged in the round, it was a visual, musical and theatrical feast from the moment of David Attenborough’s recorded introduction at the beginning of the concert to the performance of Sacrifice featuring Henry Dagg and his sharpsichord – a massive stainless steel sculpture with pipes, knobs and a perforated cylinder – at the end.

Despite what you might think, ‘biophilia’ has nothing to do with people who like to engage in intimate relations with plant life, or indeed, with biologists – a fact that possibly disappointed David Attenborough when he found out. In Bjork’s world, Biophilia is where nature, music and technology interconnect. This was partly illustrated by images of microorganisms squirming and mutating in larvae, maggots devouring sea creatures, lava flow, forking Tesla coils and the like. The imagery was never didactic, but the relationship between the visual and the song being performed was generally discernible.

For those in the audience, the visuals were projected on large screens ringing the stage. In the film version, these images were interspersed with concert footage, interrupted it and bled into it, but never intrusively.

While the images were effective, the audience’s focus, whether at the venue or in the cinema, was always on Bjork.

She appeared wearing an orange afro wig like a fiery fairyfloss mein and had a ring of blue paint circling her face. Her dress, at first sight looked like it was made up of a dozen or so breasts, which I realise reveals more about my obsessions than it might about Bjork’s couture. In reality her dress was probably meant to reflect a shell or cocoon of sorts – some life giving carapace in any case. So at least I was on the right track.

Army of Bjorks

The main feature of the concert however, was the music and how it was made. There were just two musicians on stage playing instruments, Matt Robertson on ‘keyboards knobs and stuff’ as Bjork put it, and Manu Delango on percussion. Although the word ‘percussion’ seems somewhat inadequate to describe the sheer variety of things he hit, tapped and pummelled during the course of the show. One such instrument that he used in Virus and One Day looked like an upturned tortoise shell or a landmine. Perhaps that’s why he tapped it so gently.

In addition to the two musicians, there was a 25 strong female choir. They used their singular and separate voices to good effect, not just adding to the soundscape, but defining it. Even though they were dressed in orange, blue and brown cassock type garments, they were not the po faced choral accompaniment you might encounter at mass. Instead they danced and bopped about in loose formation, coming together and separating into choreographed groups. Bjork may not have performed Army of Me on the night, but through their supporting voices, the choir represented Bjork’s battalion or army yet despite their number, somehow they didn’t seem to crowd the stage.

In the course of scanning across the stage, the cameras also picked up other oddities such as a self-playing harpsichord and a massive scaffold with swinging pendulums. Whether this was powering something or adding to the soundscape I couldn’t say. It’s Bjork after all – you have to accept that you won’t always know what’s going on.

Biophile

Unsurprisingly the setlist drew mainly on Biophilia. In fact it was not until Hidden Place, six songs in, that the show departed form its parent album. The music itself, while sparse, was perfectly attuned to Bjork’s singing and the choir’s accompaniment. Crystalline ended with an explosion of live percussion and programmed beats, while Virus was played almost solely on the treated tortoise shell instrument.

Possibly Maybe received a cheer of recognition form the audience, despite being played at a slower tempo and with a new arrangement of percussion, farting synth and disjointed beats.

Two songs from Medulla, Mouth’s Cradle and Sonnets/Unrealities showcased the power of the choir. In the former the choir closed in around Bjork, both vocally and on stage, while the latter was sung in a beautiful a capella arrangement.

Isobel was also greeted with a cheer of recognition as the choir formed a circle around the outer ring of the stage, with Bjork in its centre. The cheer, while no doubt a genuine sign of affection for an old favourite, also had a hint of the ‘at last, a song we know’ sentiment about it. The screen, meanwhile, projected time-lapse footage of mushrooms sprouting and blooming.

The concert concluded with Solstice from Biophilia, which Bjork sung accompanied by a solo stringed instrument of some sort. As it concluded she said a simple “Thanks for tonight” and skipped off the stage, smiling as she had done throughout the gig.

The logistics of moving 25 people off the stage and then back on meant that they didn’t bother to enact the charade of the encore. Or possibly they just edited that bit out. In any case Bjork returned and performed a slowed down version of One Day accompanied by soft percussion and her own lilting whistle.

Nattura, in contrast, was a virtual wig out with the choir members head banging to the song’s wild beats and spasmodic rhythms. Maintaining the intensity, Declare Independence – dedicated to the Faroe Islands – erupted in a storm of atonal noise and discordant synth screeches, along with Bjork’s ever more manic exhortations to “raise your flag…higher higher!”

Bjork’s singular vision came through in the staging of this show, and the central message of Declare Independence to "make your own flag" could just as well serve as Bjork’s personal mantra. After all, she is operating not so much in her own country but in her own universe.

Perhaps illustrating this, the final song, Sacrifice, was performed on a separate stage with Henry Dagg and his bespoke instrument, the sharpsichord. The sharpsichord resembles two or three giant tubas caught in a compromising position with a trombone. Thankfully it doesn’t sound like that – more like a harpsichord really. Hence the name I suppose. Playing it involves rotating a giant cylinder while systematically plugging a variety of holes, so not entirely dissimilar to a menage-a-trois after all. What it might lack in portability, it made up for with theatrical presence.

As a concert film, Biophilia is enagaging and intriguing, but live the show would have been a truly transcendent concert experience. The filmmakers did a fine job to convey at least that much.

My friend Kath says she likes the idea of Bjork more than she actually likes Bjork’s music. I understand her point – I feel the same way about jazz and having sex in cars. However, it might be that ‘the idea of Bjork’ as depicted in film, or perhaps even hologram, is the only chance I’ll ever have of seeing her perform. If anyone is going to work out a way of making a hologram concert an authentic musical and theatrical experience, then it is probably Bjork. And as this film demonstrated, virtual Bjork is better than no Bjork.

Setlist

Thunderbolt

Moon            

Crystalline      

Hollow            

Dark Matter 

Hidden Place

Virus                

Possibly Maybe

Mouth's Cradle

Isobel               

Sonnets/Unrealities XI

Mutual Core

Cosmogony

Solstice

- - - - - - - - 

One Day

Náttúra

Declare Independence

Sacrifice          

Encore: There was another significant concert event that I missed in London in 2014, when Kate Bush returned to the stage for the first time in 30 years. Kate Bush concerts come around even less frequently than Halley’s Comet, so she is even less likely than Bjork to ever our Australia.

I also missed some big concert events in Australia in 2014. Bruce Springsteen returned, but I’d seen him play a concert at Hanging Rock just 18 months previous, so I saved myself the expense this time around.

In the same week that I saw Bjork’s concert film however, The Rolling Stones commenced their tour of Australia. The tickets of course were prohibitively expensive. They were priced at a level that is possibly fine if you’re a baby boomer who has just received a bulk superannuation payout, which may indeed be their demographic, but pretty much out of the question for everyone else. I’ve never seen the Stones and am unlikely to, unless of course they mount a hologram concert. You’d consider going perhaps if it was the 1970s Stones, and not the 2014 (re)incarnation.

St. Vincent – 24 May 2014

St. Vincent

D.D. Dumbo

Howler

Saturday 24 May 2014

$55

A Living Saint

St. Vincent at Howler - a religious experience
photo by Bryget Chrisfield, published on www.themusic.com.au

According to Catholic protocol, the prerequisite for becoming a saint is to have performed two posthumous miracles. Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is still very much alive, but on Saturday night at a small bar in Brunswick she delivered a performance so dynamic and mesmerising that many in the audience viewed it, if not as a miracle, then certainly as something close to a religious experience.

If she didn’t already have the honorific ‘saint’ as part of her name, the vast bulk of the audience would have petitioned The Vatican to waive the petty bureaucratic requirement that saints be deceased and demand her immediate canonisation.

St. Vincent was in Australia for the Vivid LIVE Festival in Sydney, a light and sound spectacular that features a series of concerts at the Sydney Opera House. The Pixies were the headline act for Vivid LIVE playing exclusively in Sydney, but the other acts were all playing shows in Melbourne as part of their visit. So instead of seeing St. Vincent in a vast auditorium, we had the good fortune of seeing her in the back room of a pub in Brunswick.

This was the third of a three night residency. I hadn’t been to Howler before, but I was reliably informed by someone far younger and groovier than me that it was the latest ‘it’ venue. The queue of people waiting to get in – just to the pub that is, not even the show – attested to this.

Brandishing our tickets, my friend John and I were waved through the queue and into the first bar and dining area. The din was incredible and it was just the sound of people talking loudly as they imbibed. This led through to another large, but slightly less loud space, then through to a club at the back where St. Vincent would be playing. It was a medium sized space that probably held around

300-400 people.  There were a few booths at the back but a nice large stage and reasonably funky décor.

D.D. Dumbo

A quiet bar to the side of the stage gave patrons a view of the performer and piped the sound in through normal bar speakers, allowing people to socialise while still hearing the band. It was from here we took in support act D.D. Dumbo. He performed solo, commencing each song by setting up a loop on a drum or guitar, and then adding layers progressively as he went, creating an intricate and intimate sound. You know, like Ed Sheeran, but without the tatts or the 10 million fans. He was pretty good actually – I bought his EP on iTunes when I got home. He was also quite handsome, and as a one-man band who can multi-task, he would be quite handy to have around the house.

The audience filtered in throughout his set and it was noticeable that people were making a sartorial effort for St. Vincent. Boys wearing lipstick and smart jackets, girls with new hair-do’s wearing their very tightest gear. In one such group sitting near us the gent, probably aged in his early to mid 20s was busy expounding authoritatively to his female companions that REM was essentially an EMO band. In retrospect I wouldn’t say categorically that he was wrong (or that it matters), but it was interesting if only because I don’t think the term EMO existed during their heyday, and certainly not when they started in 1982. Also because the speaker himself wouldn’t have even been alive at the time I bought my first REM album, Fables of the Reconstruction around 1984 or so. Even if he was I doubt that he was attuned to the nuances of alternative music micro genres of that era. I equate EMO with Goth, and REM were certainly not a Goth band, though the black lipstick brigade weren’t beyond dancing to “It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I feel fine” at Thrash and Treasure, a late 80s Goth club in Richmond.

St. Vincent

'Stairway to Heaven' - St. Vincent at Sydney Opera House
photo published by www.tonedeaf.com.au 

John and I had seen St. Vincent on her previous visit to Melbourne when she performed with David Byrne at Hamer Hall, playing songs from their Love This Giant collaboration. As long-time Talking Heads and David Byrne fans, we’d gone to the show primarily to see Byrne but came away obsessed by St. Vincent, both her music and her striking stage presence…okay and her beauty; we’re only human. So we were looking forward to see her perform her own show.

By the time the electronic buzzing intro of Rattlesnake pulsed through the speakers to open the show, the crowd had packed out the room and a raucous cheer greeted the newly platinum blond St. Vincent as she glided onto the stage. She was wearing black crop jacket with 80s lapels that she teamed with a short black pleather skirt. We knew immediately that we were in for as much a show as a concert when she posed and bent herself into a series of stylised choreographed movements before launching into the song. 

The sound was clear and the mix distinct and the music thumped along. Halfway through this opening track she took her guitar from the roadie and launched into a loud, volcanic solo, her blond curls in stylised head-bang. It was glorious.

The early part of the show was an exhilarating run of tracks taken from her latest, eponymous album: the guitar led funk of Birth in Reverse, Regret and the dynamic marching rhythms of Digital Witness, broken only with the smooth club grooves of Cruel from previous album, Strange Mercy, all up tempo dance tracks that got the audience bopping and moving.

To our left, one trio took to the dancing like Baptists discovering it for the first time. One of the guys jumped up and down pogo style, the woman swung extravagantly from side to side while the third guy hunched in behind them and edged them forward. Clearly they were trying to push their way to the front and it worked, because whoever was standing directly in front and either side of them soon got sick of their deliberately provocative jostling and let them through, if only so they could annoy someone else.

If I wasn’t throwing myself about with the same abandon as others, it was because I was simultaneously following the scores in the final minutes of the Hawthorn v Port Adelaide game that was finishing just as the gig began. Sadly the Hawks lost, an outcome that would normally have me moping about disconsolately, but St. Vincent was so mesmerising I was able to shrug off the loss quickly, or at least postpone until later my devastation.

Laughing with a Mouth of Blood and Year of the Tiger from her second and third albums respectively changed the tempo, but not the intensity, which remained strong and absorbing.

She performed I Prefer Your Love while draped across raised steps at the rear of the stage. Clearly it was too obvious a motif to adopt while performing unreleased song, Pieta, however, she stood atop it to elevate herself for the dirty funk of Every Tear Disappears and the grandiose Cheerleader.

On a few occasions she paused to address the audience. These were practiced monologues of quirky observations about what we share in common. They sounded like they could have been scripted by David Lynch.

Marry Me

The band were tight, not just musically, but performance-wise, with Toko Yasuda on keyboards and guitar joining St. Vincent in her choreographed stage moves, and adding a few of her own. There was very much a performance art element to the show from the two leading ladies, while Matthew Johnson on drums and Daniel Mintseris on keyboards provided solid grounding at the back.

All eyes, however, were on St Vincnet who was utterly transfixing, especially when she executed her tiny Geisha steps and appeared to glide back and forth across the stage, while staring fixedly at the audience.  Like one of those paintings in which the subject seems to follow you around the room, St Vincent’s stare seems to be directed personally at each member of the audience.

Such was her spellbinding allure that the man next to me actually moaned with lust at one stage, and eventually shouted out, “I wish I wasn’t gay!”

I felt his pain, but before you accuse me of being shallow, or just a dirty old man, remember, she started it. St. Vincent’s the one with the predilicition for undressing in songs. Not on stage as such, but lyrically she gets her kit off fairly regularly. In the first song she performed at this gig, Rattlesnake, she takes off her clothes in the second line. In Surgeon she’s ‘dressing undressing for the wall,’ while in Dilletante she asks Elijah ‘what is so pressing that you can’t undress me anyway.’ In Cheerleader meanwhile, she claims that ‘I’ve seen America with no clothes on’ – whether it is herself or America that is without clothes is unclear, but in basic communication theory, the listener has the right to interpet it as they wish and make their own meaning. If the more susceptible audience members weren’t already whipped into a frenzy of desire by such blatant exhibitionism, in Birth in Reverse she reveals that for her, an ordinary day involves taking out the garbage and masturbating. So you can understand people getting excited.

The stylish steady groove of Prince Johnny provided one of the highlights of the set, followed by Marrow that began with a Philip Glass like keyboard motif, but swerved dramatically into dirty funk territory. Huey Newton also took a dramatic turn from a gentle television sci-fi soundtrack to a ferocious and histrionic rock rant, a mood she continued with the strident Bring Me Your Loves with its marching drum tattoo, demented guitars and its fizzing, sparking synths.

St. Vincent returned alone for the encore and performed the slow and tender Strange Mercy solo on guitar, before the band returned for the pounding, discordant repetition of Your Lips Are Red.

I loved it. For me this was easily the best gig of 2014. St. Vincent's performance was stylized, sensual and cerebral, and the music ranged form torrid to tender. It was immaculate and immersive; one of those shows we’ll be boasting about having seen, and in particular that we saw it in a small intimate space like Howler.

Prior to the show a recorded voice warned us against bearing digital witness, and while I refrained from taking any pics, preferring to bear actual witness, I’m glad others captured images from this startling performance.

St. Vincent at Sydney Opera House
photo published on www.theaureview.com.au

Setlist

Rattlesnake

Birth in Reverse

Regret

Cruel

Digital Witness

Laughing With a Mouth of Blood

Year of the Tiger

Surgeon

I Prefer Your Love

Pieta

Every Tear Disappears

Cheerleader

Prince Johnny

Marrow

Huey Newton

Bring Me Your Loves

- - - - - - - - - -

Strange Mercy

Your Lips Are Red

Lost Animal – 11 April 2016

Lost Animal

Jacky Winter

Northcote Social Club, Northcote

Monday 11 April 2016

Free!

Out of Hibernation

Lost Animal’s 2011 album Ex Tropical was something of an inner city indie hit when it came out, but that was five years ago now. Since then we’ve heard nothing. Perhaps he really has been lost, or at least hibernating. Australia’s had four Prime Minister’s in that time, and a looming election might usher in a fifth before Lost Animal gets around to releasing a follow up.

Lost Animal is the nom de plume of Melbourne musician Jarrod Quarrell. Ex Tropical is an album of lush electronica with layers of subtle keyboard and percussive trills, and long, meandering songs. So when a free gig at the Northcote Social Club was announced to preview tracks from new album, You Yang, Ralph and I arranged to go along. It’s fair to say we’re looking forward to the new Lost Animal album with greater anticipation than the election campaign.

The streets were virtually empty as I took the drive across town to Northcote. Monday night is evidently a night when most people stay in. There was very little traffic and only few people on the streets – until I got to the Northcote Social Club that is. Smokers thronged on the street outside the club, while inside, the front bar, rear terrace and band room were all packed. Clearly everyone who had ventured out had ended up at the Northcote Social Club.

‘Monday Night Mass’ the night is called. It features free bands plus the kitchen and bars are open, and the good citizens of Melbourne's inner north had come in their droves to worship.

Jacky Winter or Microeca Fascinans

Jacky Winter was playing when we wandered into the band room. There was quite a gap between the stage and the audience and as we entered this space we soon discovered why. It was extremely loud, but as Ralph pointed out, not in a good way. The sound was actually distorted and quite discomforting to listen to. Ralph and I took refuge up the back where it was a little less abrasive and we could get a better sense of the band’s sound.

The music itself was pretty good and at the risk of appearing old, someone just needed to turn it down a notch so we could hear it properly. From what I could work out, Jacky Winter was the bald bloke on vocals, although it also happens to be the name of a small native Australian bird, the Microeca Fascinans. It looks a little like a grey finch or a sparrow. In this case I presume Jacky Winter to be the singer’s real name, as his singing, while tuneful and proficient, could hardly be mistaken for lilting birdsong.

That said, the songs and the band sounded good. In addition to Winter, who also programmed beats, the band consisted of Erica Dunn on bass and vocals, and Paul Pirie on skuzzy guitar and keyboards.

Jacky Winter belts out some birdsong

Indie Karaoke

When Lost Animal began his set, he was alone on stage with his Apple Mac and a microphone. As he pressed play on his computer to start the beat and the pulsing reverberations of Say No To Thugs, the band room began filling quickly. Say No To Thugs has had just over 20,000 streams on Spotify and it seemed like most of the people who had streamed it were in the room.

Quarrell was channeling his inner 70s rock god wearing double denim and sporting long tresses of hair. He wandered about the stage singing to the accompaniment of the music emanating from his Mac.

You could argue that it was really just glorified karaoke, with the significant difference being that he had composed, played, recorded and produced all of the music he was now singing along to, which does make it somewhat better than a some pissed dude singing Khe Sanh off key. I did wonder, however, whether the screen on his laptop featured the lyrics and a bouncing ball.

"I am not an animal. I am a hipster"

The vocals were performed live and there was also a keyboard over which he occasionally ran his fingers, but the gig would have benefited form more live sounds, especially some of the brass moments. One song featured a saxophone solo that, performed live, would have added a nice theatrical touch. Having said that, this was a free gig and finding a sax player is perhaps easier said than done. According to Ralph he previously performed with another musician on bass, but on this night he was going it solo.

The set featured three or four new songs along with tracks from Ex Tropical, including Don’t Litter, Buai Raskol and Lose The Baby which received a boisterous cheer of recognition from the audience as the beat kicked in.

Quarrell did announce most of the song titles, but so quickly that I missed them, except for the final track, Too Late To Die Young. This song had a Kraftwerk vibe and featured a fast-paced beat that continued as he danced off stage at the end.

Ralph thought the new material sounded sparser than the Ex Tropical songs, so it will be interesting if that is the case when the record comes out. I’m not sure if the new material is complete or still a work in progress, but the new songs did share a similar structure to the older songs in that they eschewed anything resembling a chorus. And I love the title – You Yang – presumably named after the mountain range between Werribee and Geelong.

One guy singing along to an Apple Mac may sound a tad dull, but it was oddly compelling and after five years of silence, I’m just glad that lost animal has finally been found. I look forward to the new album and perhaps a full show.

Setlist

Say No To Thugs

?

Beat Goes On
?

Don’t Litter

Buai Raskol

Lose the Baby

?

Too Late To Die Young

Encore: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are set to face trial over plagiarism claims leveled against their mega hit Stairway To Heaven. The song, it is claimed, copies a chord structure from the song Taurus by a band called Spirit. The composer of that piece is deceased and as usual in such cases, it is the estate running the prosecution. You can’t help but think that this is an opportunistic grab for money by people who were in no way injured by the supposed theft. After all, if the riff really was a rip off, don’t you think the actual composer might have noticed it at some time in the 40 years since the song was released?  It’s not like he wouldn’t have heard it.

In more heavy metal news, the announcement that Axl Rose will replace Brian Johnson in AC-DC has reportedly been met with anger and outrage by AC-DC fans. Why I don’t know. I’m no Axl Rose fan – I couldn’t bear Guns ‘N’ Roses – and I don’t care how fat he’s become (truth be told we’ve all put on a few kilos since Appetitie for Destruction was released in the late 80s), but he couldn’t possibly be worse that Brian Johnson. At their most recent Melbourne concert in December 2015 (review coming soon to these pages) Johnson’s atonal screeching was less musical than the cannon blasts during Let There Be Rock. Of course, that might have been the appeal to AC-DC fans.

City Calm Down – 7 April 2016

City Calm Down

The Corner Hotel, Richmond

Thursday 7 April 2016

$17

Calm Down and Rock On!

When I floated the idea of seeing City Calm Down live, most of my friends were non-committal. One dismissed them as ‘derivative and pretentious’ while another, on hearing them, said ‘I thought it was The National’. Neither comment is without validity, but equally, neither is necessarily a bad thing.

I had quite liked City Calm Down’s first EP and had picked up their album, In a Restless House several weeks earlier. It is a fine album with good songs and interesting arrangements; give or take the occasional cheesy synth wash. But there are moments in which the criticism of my friends is borne out.  

Rabbit Run could indeed be by The National, while the chorus from Son sounds alarmingly like something from Spandau Ballet’s first album. And lyrical flights like, ‘Consider the windows fractured, spiders won’t disappear, the visions that you’ve distorted, are shaping those you love…’ does rather leave them open to accusations of pretentiousness.

But when you think about it, you can’t be an artist of any sort without some degree of pretension, and if you’re working in a musical field where there is a reliance on three chords, a maximum of 12 notes and not many more wardrobe varations, there’s inevitably going to be some crossover with the past. Call it homage if you have to, but like Tori Amos to Kate Bush or Interpol to Joy Division, it is possible for artists to carve out their own ground even if ‘their sound’ is reminiscent of artists from a previous musical generation.

In the end Ralph joined me at The Corner Hotel for the gig. Out of the audience of lively 20-somethings, only we had lived through the 80s synth rock era, so as long as we said nothing, the band’s secret was safe. In any case, the 80s generation was prone to raiding the 60s for musical references, so why shouldn’t the current generation appropriate the occasional 80s musical motif – although I recommend that they steer clear of the blousey shirts.

City Liven Up

Jack Bourke - "The Light Pours Out of Me"

This was the first of three sold out shows at The Corner. We arrived late, missing all but the final two songs by support act Airling. She had a clean, crisp sound with gentle synth pop leanings. I didn’t hear enough of her set to form a view, but she received a good reception from the audience.

The audience was densely packed near the front so Ralph and I took up a spot at the back near the bar. City Calm Down opened with Border On Control, one of the strongest songs from the album, an urgent up tempo rocker that got the crowd immediately on side. They followed up with Pavement, a synth heavy single from a couple of years ago. The lead singer, Jack Bourke has a smooth baritone that invites comparisons with Jim Kerr from Simple Minds, and when you factor in the anthemic synthesizer flourishes and his habit of crouching down on stage and clicking his fingers in time with the beat, you could could be forgiven for thinking that they’re about to bust out Don’t You Forget About Me at any moment.

However, it didn’t take long before the band’s energy and power took over and I forgot about trying to spot their various influences and just enjoyed the music. We even edged our way into the throng to get closer to the core of the sound.

They were operating with an extended lineup. During Son I counted eight or nine people on stage, including two brass players and two backing vocalists. It was a big sound, but it wasn’t cluttered. In fact the band and the mix were flawless. Ralph and I were impressed by how tight and polished they were, particularly for a relatively young band. What ever happened to bands that can barely play and need five minutes between each song?

Purple Rain

Bourke introduced Spanish Sahara, a cover of a Foals song they had recently recorded for Triple J’s Like a Version series. It’s a track that despite its cautious opening, shares similar DNA to a City Calm Down song – expansive, layered sound, anthemic chorus and general emoting – but they added a bit more punch than is evident in the original. It was a good choice and it received a huge cheer from the audience.

What I like about City Calm Down songs is their inherent melodic hook. The hook is not necessarily obvious at first, but once it gets in, it works like an earworm and you find yourself singing along involuntarily. A song like Falling is a case in point. It is in turn, evocative, propulsive and explosive and I found my inner lead singer getting off the leash, or rather the mike lead. Singing out loud is not in itself a bad thing of course, except that unless you have a voice as rich and smooth as Jack Bourke’s, then it’s best not attempted in public.

If Falling was the centrepoint of the show, the run home was equally impressive with a succession of songs that built on each other with increasing intensity. In a Restless House led into the power pop of Your Fix, followed by a dynamic and climactic rendition of Rabbit Run that had the audience dancing and jumping. It was arms in the air stuff.

The set might have ended there, but they added to the ongoing Bowie tribute season playing Let’s Dance, which seemed a good choice given they had a brass section handy. Plus, Bourke is one of the few Australian singers who can legitimately carry off a decent Bowie croon.

The song of course had the opposite effect to the band’s name. Far from calming down, the place was livening up even more. The band took advantage of the general revelry and played Pleasure & Consequence from the Movements EP, a song that ends with an upsurge of swirling synths, blasts of brass and Jack Bourke’s soaring baritone.

This wasn’t a band labouring under their influences so much riding them home with a blistering hour of rock. ‘Derivative and pretentious?’ – well possibly, but who cares when the music is delivered with such conviction, power and precision.

Setlist

Border On Control

Pavement

Wandering

Son

Spanish Sahara

If There’s a Light On

Falling

Dare

In a Restless House

Your Fix

Rabbit Run

Let’s Dance

Pleasure & Consequence