Less than 24 hours after their last show, CRAIG MATHIESON laments the loss of Blueline Medic.

When a band breaks up publicly to an announced schedule, there’s a tendency to use the occasion for fulsome eulogies that make a last ditch claim for importance and precedence. But if you believe that a departure should be met with the very same qualities that characterised the journey, then Blueline Medic’s final gig (at Melbourne’s Arthouse on New Year’s Eve) requires the following: a tender sense of inquiry, a refusal to abide the bylaws of any genre, a fearsome energy and a feeling of revelation that shades and ultimately deepens the immediate pleasure.

That’s a helluva way to have to start a year.

The Melbourne quartet ended roughly a decade after they began, finishing up at the same battered venue that first hosted them. Blueline Medic sprang from indie/punk roots and that twisted strand of ’90s American hardcore (Jawbreaker’s Blake Schwarzenbach once mattered greatly). Vocalist/guitarist Donnie Dureau, his implacable foil guitarist Adrian Lombardi and bassist Dave Snow were there from the get go, while drummer Shaun Lohoar set up in 2000.

In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that many years ago I actually tried to sign Blueline Medic to a major label. I was so taken with the group that I almost derailed them. Not surprisingly, my corporate career was short in length. Afterwards I was still so taken with this band and the way that their songs would sweep you up but refused to pummel you into submission (they leave you feeling younger and wiser), that I managed them for two years. For the last five years, I’ve been a confirmed fan.

Despite my efforts, Blueline Medic was always productive. They released three albums and a handful of EPs and split singles, they played where and when they could. If that initially meant opening for Superheist (the Berger-era line-up, natch) on a Tuesday night, so be it. They chipped away, per the protagonists of Dureau’s lyrics, who so often were everyday people who couldn’t shake the private discord that followed them through seemingly banal social interaction. Or, as he put it on ‘Swan Song Swan Dive’, from the group’s 2000 EP A Working Title in Green, “I can’t help being static.”

That lurking unease was one of several defining themes that were magnified in the band’s final show. They got through 21 songs in around 75 minutes and the set was so strong that it worked equally well as a goodbye for fans and a welcome for initiates, and despite kicking off in the wake of midnight the show never became a sloppy New Year’s celebration.

Blueline Medic always sat uncomfortably between genres. They were too ferocious for most indie kids, too melodic for the punk brigade. As songwriters, they were too inquisitive to find a marketable rut. Slower, melancholic tunes peppered their releases and gigs, often serving as a vehicle for Dureau’s acute depictions of the casual cruelty visited on the working underclass. ‘They’ll Let You Know’ was one of those songs, with a lyric and mood that told you everything you needed to know about who “They” were without ever having to name them.

Their final gig held to that diverse approach, but it was hard to deny the sheer adrenalin that underpinned the performance. Lombardi perpetually nailed stun gun guitar chords, creating wave after wave of amplified coercion while the rhythm section were as obliquely connected as ever: Lohoar’s powerhouse fills were cushioned by Snow’s sympathetic bass. If power in the best musical sense is the ability to overwhelm the audience without lessening them, then Blueline Medic was a very powerful band.

Were they successful? Probably not by the coarse standards we all use. But they have a song called ‘Shuffle and Scrape’ that features on their first long player, 2001’s The Apology Wars, and it’s a staggering outpouring of existential fear – you could reference some Russian cats – that has a rare cumulative force. The peak comes with a pair of lines that are coolly evaluative even as the band slams into the tune: “Some things are forgotten, other things matter/ Something else is always proving far too strong.”

Every time I hear that song, and specifically those lines, it’s as if the world is momentarily clearer; one person’s belief in what they’re expressing cuts through the static. There were around 200 people pressing towards the stage during the set and I believe that each of them has a song, or even just a fragment of one, where Blueline Medic left them feeling the same way. On those terms, terms that matter, yes, Blueline Medic actually was successful.

The band came to an end for logistical as opposed to creative reasons. Their final album, 2007’s 42:19, has some fascinating new creative strands, but the march of time is taking them to different countries, which is a fitting outcome for a band that repeatedly touched on the way we’re marked by the cities and architecture we dwell amid.

So that’s that. The band is gone but the music remains. It’s there if you want it. All I know is that Blueline Medic ceased to be 18 hours ago and already I miss them.

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