My Disco
Black and Blue Warehouse, Sydney

Welcome to Sydney. It’s the Friday after the weekend before, and the APEC security fence that locked residents out of their own city has been “decommissioned”. But My Disco’s first two songs make me feel like it could be going back up again, out on the street, three floors below the band’s glittering backdrop – a city skyline framed by a wall-sized window. Aside from the free view, the venue is utterly bare: a concrete floor upon which an enthused under-age crowd has congregated two inches from the stage. A smattering of twentysomethings hang further back, arms folded. I can barely see the top of the band’s heads as they play, so I concentrate on the city behind them, and a sound that manages to explain the city to me.

My Disco’s newest material is brutal, brutal to the point of – well, I’m not sure. Exhilaration? Cruelty? ‘001’ is a single guitar chord slammed out like a series of concrete bollards, with a bassline that hits you in what might be called the thorax – somewhere hard and not quite human. Another new song is similar in effect. How much further they can take this unblinking precision I’m afraid to hear, but if they continue at the same pitch it’s going to be awesome, in the old sense of the word. That is, terrifying.

Cancer favourites ‘Perfect Protection’ and ‘Measure Wait’ elicit big cheers, and I wonder how a sound so blunt can be pleasurable, and what celebration this largely teenage audience might be finding inside of it. But, moving compulsively to their final song, wanting its artillery tank ferocity to go on forever while simultaneously praying for it to end, I think I understand. This music is both a mirror of discipline and its inversion. In here, the change from one note to the next can promise a space the size of the world.

It’s all over in half an hour, well before the clock strikes twelve. People move downstairs, where two cops are already waiting at the door, and suddenly, the audience is a gang. ‘Move along, move along!’ they yell, calling for backup, and three carloads more come screaming up the street, sirens blazing. Twenty cops now. They have one kid up against the wall for daring to photograph them. The batons come out, raised in threat. It’s clear now that the music we’ve just left behind was in fact a place of safety, however challenging, and out here – well, you don’t dare make a move. I want to punch walls in frustration and anger. Welcome to Sydney.

by Emmy Hennings