If Marrickville is the new hub for the Sydney DIY scene, how long will it take before the lifestyle elite shove in, erect their pastel juice stands, and stake a claim? In Sydney, the stability of these outlets appears as fragile as ever, though on a night like tonight you wonder if there is a collective clique in motion.

Tonight’s crowd was ample and assorted – much like the line-up. Most insistent on attention was The Dead Farmers, the brattiest, most obnoxious yet defiantly locked in trash punk band of the week. They thrash out their three-piece wall of rhythmic noise with seldom a moment for oxygen, though available moments were typically spent swigging from an audience member’s bottle of vodka, or heckling the sound guy. It’s unclear whether the Farmers’ songs are actually about anything: one should hope not, because most of their appeal is that they appear completely at service to their instincts, unable to rein themselves in, just riding bareback through passages of breakneck speed-punk, free from the frivolous constraints of melody, concerned wholly on the thrashing and occasionally – refreshingly – the grooving.

The fact that bands like this release music – a 7-inch in this case – seems somewhat absurd, because not even a scuzzy Dictaphone-documented recording could capture how tastefully anti-music the Dead Farmers are. Despite all these statements having been made before, there’s magic when a band manages to lucidly render the violence and the hedonism often claimed to be dead in punk rock. At the end of their set, when the bassist heaves his instrument over his head and gleefully throws it onto the ground, it doesn’t even register as something anti-social. That bass guitar probably deserved it, you know, for being too musical.

by Shaun Prescott