365gigs-blog

[365gigs-blog]

#59 Duo Tángalo

10 Mar • Summer Hill Folk Festival • Sydney, New South Wales

Duo Tangalo are having technical difficulties.

There are some challenges that an engineer expects to face. A mic pointing at a foldback wedge causing feedback. The sudden appearance of a guest vocalist. A keyboard DI suddenly dying and needing a quick on stage replacement. These are all normal problems.

Duo Tangalo have rocked up with twin bandoneons, a kind of Spanish concertina, only way bigger than you think of a concertina being. I’m not sure anyone told this poor soundie what he was going to have to do, or even what kind of instruments these were. Where does the sound come out of a concertina? It’s not that obvious.

So, they sit and wait patiently while this guy tries to assemble something that might have had a hope of catching the sound. I wonder if he would have been better off just letting them go acoustic - the space isn’t that big and they make a lot of noise. There’s maybe a hundred people here - do we really need two mics per bandoneon?

In the end, the sound is decent, though the noise of button clicks is probably higher than he would have wanted. The music sounds rich and full, and a handful of couples even get up to dance a proper tango. It’s all very authentic and European.

Probably would have been more authentic and European if they’d just played acoustic, actually. And it would have saved us from a tense forty minutes of silence.

[365gigs-blog]

#58 Nic Cassey

10 Mar • Summer Hill Folk Festival • Sydney, New South Wales

I’m not a churchgoing person. I went to Catholic school, briefly – my last two years of primary school – so I kind of know the appropriate level of reverence and the various bits and bobs and rituals and such, but I always find them to be an odd place to just be. Not attending a service of any kind, just hanging out in there.

Or, as in this case, watching a band.

Nic Cassey is the kind of act that works in a church. “Churches,” he reminds us during his set, “have really good acoustics.” They’re designed to make one person be heard by hundreds, or in this case, a couple dozen. And that voice can’t be harsh or muddy, it must be clear and sweet and enticing. Nic Cassey has soul to his voice, and a kind of gentle softness that reminds me a bit of Sufjan Stevens.

I’m not going to make a habit of watching bands in churches, but I’m glad I saw Nic Cassey in one.

[365gigs-blog]

#57 Queen Porter Stomp

10 Mar • Summer Hill Folk Festival • Sydney, New South Wales

I suppose it was inevitable. Sooner or later, it had to happen; if anything, it’s amazing that I got this far before it did.

Queen Porter Stomp wrote their name in the wrong spot on my shirt.

She was so apologetic, and I reassured her that it was fine, really, it doesn’t matter; and the whole band were lovely people and excellent musicians and very entertaining.

But she did fuck up my shirt, dammit.

[365gigs-blog]

#56 Jess Locke

9 Mar • Factory Theatre • Sydney, New South Wales

Get you a man who looks at you like Jess Locke's drummer looks at her. I don't know if there's something actually going on there, but the chemistry between them is just heartwarming to be around. Every time he looks at her his face lights up, like he can't believe how lucky he is to be on a stage with this amazing woman.

Fair enough, I say. I'd be pretty stoked to be up there too.

[365gigs-blog]

#55 Brightness

9 Mar • Factory Theatre • Sydney, New South Wales

"You’re all so attentive," she declares to the tiny, quiet room. This is band-speak for "silent". Still, give me a quiet, attentive audience over a talkative, bored audience any day. At least we can all hear the music.

[365gigs-blog]

#54 Jack R Reilly

9 Mar • Factory Theatre • Sydney, New South Wales

We ran into Jack after the show at the Vic on the Park. I'm not usually one to harass artists out in the wild, but I did really enjoy his set and thought I'd say so. Well, it turns out he was very interested in the 365 gigs project and we ended up talking semi-drunkenly for about an hour, ranging over topics from tonight's show, the music industry, the politics of hospitality, mental health, and probably a dozen other things.

I'll still stick to my policy of treating artists like regular private citizens outside the venue, but also need to be mindful that they're still normal people, and still enjoy the occasional chat with a stranger at the pub.

[365gigs-blog]

#53 Ah Mer Ah Su

4 Mar • Manning Bar • Sydney, New South Wales

Ah Mer Ah Su is working pretty hard up there. She's singing and dancing, then rushing round the other side of the decks to mix some tunes. I remarked that she needs a DJ, then someone said no, she is a DJ, but she just also likes to get out and sing and dance.

She doesn't have to be working this hard for Heaps Gay. It's Mardi Gras, it's Gay Christmas, it's the biggest night of our year and we'd be happy for her just to play Young Hearts Run Free six times in a row. But she's got a work ethic that won't let her slack off even for this extremely pliable audience, and even in my slightly inebriated state I make sure I give her a proper round of applause for going the extra mile.

[365gigs-blog]

#52 Mansionair

1 Mar • Oxford Art Factory • Sydney, New South Wales

I don’t like phones at shows. I’m a hypocrite in this regard, because I have a photo for every show, and I take them on my phone. I don’t feel like too much of a hypocrite, though, because I try to keep photo time to a minimum, and during quieter passages if I can.

I’m not alone in this opinion, of course. People love to hate on dickheads sitting on their phones filming the whole show and as a result completely missing the entire thing. I’ve sometimes got quite annoyed with people holding their giant phones directly in front of my face, and if they do it for more than a couple of minutes I might say something about it. That’s about as aggressive as I get.

It turns out some people get more aggressive than that.

There was a dude in front of me and to the right who was filming on and off for about thirty seconds every couple of minutes. Not a huge deal for me - it’s not in my line of sight - but the woman standing next to me (and about a head below my height) was getting very exasperated at him. Cursing him, yelling at him, trying to get people around her on her side. Which I was, nominally, but not enough to get involved.

Someone else was apparently willing to get involved though. Out of nowhere, from the murky depths of the back half of the Oxford Art Factory dancefloor, a missile – a beer can, mostly but not completely empty – perfectly nails this guy's phone, bounces off and hits him square in the forehead.

I instinctively applauded, as did the woman with the blocked sightlines. He was less amused, but still put his phone away. I didn't see him get it out for the rest of the night.

[365gigs-blog]

#51 NYCK

1 Mar • Oxford Art Factory • Sydney, New South Wales

One of the side effects of doing this project is that I am getting very familiar with certain venues around Sydney. And I think I can say with confidence that NYCK would feel more at home at the Petersham Bowling Club than the Oxford Art Factory. I love both venues, but they are very different spaces. NYCK would enjoy the more reverent crowd, the longer set times, the patience and hunger for stories. The OAF wants to dance to music; the PBC wants to listen to songs.

[365gigs-blog]

#50 Enerate

1 Mar • Oxford Art Factory • Sydney, New South Wales

Think of a romantic comedy. The couple have had their meet cute and it’s time for them to run into each other a second time, this time at a rock show; the man is a hardcore fan of the main act and the woman is just there to support her friend in the opening act.

So obviously the opener need to be painfully, awkwardly weird, right? That’s how you extract maximum comedy out of the situation. If you were casting such a movie, there’s a real chance you would just pick up Enerate and drop them in totally unchanged. They’ve got it all; oddly sincere twee pop duo singing over what sounds like General MIDI keyboard. A handful of unusually passionate supporters. They’re not deathly serious, but they’re not joking either.

And yet - once I get past the peculiarity of the whole thing - it really works. After a couple of minutes the weirdness has faded, and the genuine pop songs shine through. These might not be intricately crafted synth sounds, but the melodies they’re playing, the harmonies and counterpoint, those things can’t be obscured by even the harshest Casio.

You never see the band in the movie for long enough to start liking them. I’m glad I stuck around while the boring romantic leads hooked up in the green room.

[365gigs-blog]

#49 Justice

24 Feb • Sydney City Limits • Sydney, New South Wales

Damn, that is a lot of Marshall stacks. That’s just a crazy amount of stacks. Why does Justice, a French house duo, need this many amplifiers? Is it just for show?

The weirdness about dance music performance is that it’s almost all for show. Think back to Daft Punk’s infamous pyramid, or Deadmau5’ enormous moving cube. Inside the pyramid were a handful of Behringer controllers; inside the cube, a laptop and a mixer.

So yeah, of course these are all for show. They’re almost a parody of the over-the-top extravagance of rock shows, the wall of stacks you might have seen from some glam rock band in the eighties. They’re not even speakers, it turns out, as the boys turn Safe and Sound into a continuous melange of hits past and present. The insides of the cabinets turn a bright red, silhouetting the white Marshall logo to a deep black. There’s obviously no speakers in there. Of course. Why would there be?

[365gigs-blog]

#48 Beck

I ran into an old school friend at SCL, Tom Grealy (the same mate I blanked at Cloud Nothings, as it turned out). Exchanging the usual festival small talk, we hit the inevitable "who are you here for". I always find that a bit of a tough question. I'm rarely one to go to a festival for one act, and it feels kind of disingenuous to say "The Avalanches" when I've seen them half a dozen times or "Justice" when I'm really not that familiar with their oeuvre. I'm here to see them, of course, but on their own they wouldn't have got me out.

Grealy has a different answer. "Beck." Definitive, unambiguous. "I've been listening to him for twenty years," he says, "and I've never seen him live. He was just such a formative artist for me."

I enjoyed the hell out of Beck's set, and there's the handful of songs I knew – probably more than I thought I would – but I thought I'd ask him afterwards what he thought of the set after all that time. Here's what he said:

"Yep thought he was really good. There's a lot of build up being into an artist for nearly twenty years and then finally seeing them. Objectively he played a solid festival set of a few hits and some of his better new tunes. Subjectively it was cathartic and euphoric."

It's hard to sum up Beck's music, but "cathartic and euphoric" does a pretty good job.

[365gigs-blog]

#47 Future

24 Feb • Sydney City Limits • Sydney, New South Wales

"I don't get Future. I just find his stuff kind of boring, you know?"

"I don't think you have to get him. He's for the young people. We're out of touch now."

"Right… but he came up at the same time as Nas. He's like, in his forties. Why is he suddenly super popular with seventeen year olds?"

I wasn't planning on catching Future. His music goes past me like speed metal or opera; it's not that I think it's bad, it's more that it barely interacts with me at all. But thanks to some delays on the main stages, the timetables meant that I caught the last half of his set.

The crowd is young and, predictably, enthusiastic. His twin hype men are doing their best to rile the crowd up as hard as they can, and the man himself has an undeniable stage presence; he spits lines with righteous authority, demanding your attention. Despite my misgivings I find myself being drawn in by his sheer force of personality.

It's still the same music, and I still find it kind of boring. He's not made a fan of me, and probably never will. But for the first time, today, I think I get Future.

[365gigs-blog]

#46 The Avalanches

I’ve seen this show a lot of times.  And by that I mean this specific Avalanches show, which has remained almost totally unchanged since they released Wildflower and started doing live shows again. The very first reunion show in Australia was a bit different, with its ambitious and perhaps misguided Frontier Psychiatrist/Crazy mashup, but since that first time the set list has been more-or-less the same. A quick glance at their page on setlist.fm confirms that theory.

It doesn’t matter, because the show is so damn good. The Avalanches have the benefit of releasing two world-class albums assembled almost entirely from samples, so people are more than happy to hear just those songs. The fact that they mash them up with additional samples, and recreate some of the samples with live musicians, just feels like a massive bonus on top of what is already great music.

So even though I know exactly what’s coming, and in exactly what manner, I still jump in the air for the first bars of Because I’m Me. I still belt out Frankie Sinatra.  I still dance dreamily to Since I Left You, recalling that very first show, which to this day is still the happiest mosh pit I’ve ever been in. There’s nothing but love for that song, no matter how many times you hear it. The show might be unchanged but it still works its magic on me.

There’s one exception: the cover of The Clash’s Guns of Brixton. First off, no-one at an Avalanches show knows this song; I only know it because I’ve seen them play it four times. Sure, London Calling was a seminal album and everyone’s listened to it once or twice, but unless you are an actual honest-to-God fan, that’s not among the handful of Clash songs that you know. You know Rock the Casbah, you know I Fought The Law, you know Should I Stay Or Should I Go. You probably don’t know Guns of Brixton, and even if you do, you probably don’t know it well enough to recognise a twisted-up Avalanches version. And you definitely don’t know it well enough to engage in the terribly thought out call-and-response that they try every single time; which fails every single time.

So, my dear Avalanches: I don’t mind that you keep playing the same set. I’ll keep coming to see it. But please, please, play a different cover. This one isn’t working.

[365gigs-blog]

#45 Gang of Youths

I’ve never really understood the broad appeal of Gang of Youths. They always seemed to be a niche band that miraculously achieved crossover success, for reasons that are unclear to me. It’s not that I don’t like them - I quite enjoyed Go Farther in Lightness - but it never spoke to me the way it seems to speak to so many others. In fact, I was starting to feel about Gang of Youths the way many people feel about Hamilton or Rick and Morty: the fandom surrounding the art was detracting from the art itself.

So of course I was going to see Gang of Youths, because I like their music, but I went fully expecting to be apart from the catharsis that would no doubt be happening around me. 

As I predicted, the crowd is gigantic. And, as I further predicted, many are near hysteria with emotion. But that emotion is affecting me more than I thought; it’s coming from the stage, from frontman David Le'aupepe’s heartfelt delivery; his songs recounting love and loss with the raw timbre of a world-weary journeyman, the truth of them arresting me like the ancient mariner.

After The Deepest Sighs, The Frankest Shadows, a couple standing in front of us hugged for a long, long time. I don’t know what was passing between them, but I think I understood why.

[365gigs-blog]

#44 Thundercat

24 Feb • Sydney City Limits • Sydney, New South Wales

Thundercat is proper old school capital-F Funk. That surprised me a bit, because I had thought they were doing the new funk thing, much like Winston Surfshirt; that's the impression that Drunk, and its remix album Drank left me with. But as a live act, it was more like Parliament than Childish Gambino.

That leads to a bit of an issue, though – solos. Funk's lineage through jazz means that solos play a huge part in the performance, but soloing at a festival is kind of fraught: you've only got forty-to-fifty minutes to play, you're playing to a crowd who are more likely than not to have never heard of you before, and you've got to try and get that crowd on-side with catchy tunes. Does anyone go to a festival for a bass solo? At the same time, you can't change your performance up to suit every crowd – no solos would make for a pretty disappointing funk performance.

Thundercat strikes the balance pretty well, but towards the end I can feel the crowd starting to get itchy. They want to get down to some sick funky grooves, and you just can't dance to solos.

[365gigs-blog]

#43 Car Seat Headrest

24 Feb • Sydney City Limits • Sydney, New South Wales

Watching the crowd watching Car Seat Headrest is what it must be like to watch me watching Motion City Soundtrack. This is so clearly their teenage years, the whole adolescent experience wrapped up neatly in the ouevre of a single band: all its emotion, growth, story, nostalgia… it's weird to experience from the outside. I feel like I'm intruding somehow, even though no-one here could possibly know or care that I've barely heard of this band before. I'm dancing, I'm moshing, I'm rocking out, but I'm an impostor, really; these people know every syllable, every chord, every beat. They've been hanging on to them since high school, and they'll never let them go.