The support act Please the Trees deserve a bigger audience. These guys are simply too good and too ambitious to be stuck in such a small music scene. They should follow their musical roots and decamp to the US for a while. Let the hipsters there get over the notion that Eurorock means the Scorpions or...well Europe.
As solid as the boys were tonight, there were still swamped by the unholy deluge that was the Drones. The Drones are at the confluence of two streams of Oz music, the discordant destitution of the Birthday Party, the Scientists and Crow and the narrative and lyrical sparseness of the Triffids, Ashley Walker and Ed Kuepper.
The band's sound bucked and brayed through the performance. And while singer-guitarist Gareth Liddiard and guitarist Dan Luscombe do all they can to urge the savagery on, drummer Michael Noga and bassist Fiona Kitschin reign in the malestrom - without ever smothering the intensity. In a single song, the group can evoke the solitude of Australia with a restrained guitar strokesonly to storm forward in an instant, all instruments ablaze. The group can do mid-tempo 4-4 rock but they never let it become stale. They just rip the guts of it out or let the song decay mid bar, hen Liddiard sings, it's as though he's pleading for his life. That his head is cocked and arched a bit upward makes me doubt that he's asking this of the audience.
The crowd started to get into it about half way through. The mild rhythmic approval became a lot more bold - arms up, bodies rocking with the violence. I take back what I said about the Birthday Party. Those guys had the aggression, but not the instensity. This music envelopes. It takes you back to birth of rock - when it was bloody, screaming and kicking its limbs. Then after an hour and a bit it was over. But not in my bones, where this band still throbs.
The Drones - The Minotaur
