These days you descend the steps to the Mandarin Club’s basement band room with the distinct feeling that you’re entering a catacomb. Much has been abandoned, and has abandoned, this venue, once a flourishing staple for local and international left-of-centre music. Nowadays the punters are scarce, the stage is dominated by rent-a-crowd hard rock ‘up-and-comers’ and indeed, it feels like Sydney’s nightlife has completely abandoned it.

Tonight was a tempting anomaly. Ohana – the headline band tonight – at this point have a modest fan base willing to follow them anywhere. For Melbourne’s Bachelor of Arts, Sydney at least isn’t as emphatically convinced, though for most of 2007 tempting whispers have trickled up from the south. The hype – no matter how miniscule – is deserved, if not a little understated. The three-piece rock ensemble sound like PiL if that band had desired to climb out of their self-imposed rhythmic constraints to make a ridiculously aggressive racket on the outskirts.

At a time when the most menacing local punk seems to spawn from the partial abandonment of musical proficiency (see Naked on the Vague), the elastic snap of Bachelor’s precision oriented music recalls why My Disco were so surprisingly visceral when they first surfaced. Like that band, Bachelor of Arts’ fairly minimal means lock together into an obtuse mechanical crunch, where repetition provides for a dazzling disorientation, leaving one unclear as to which beat dominates a sequence.

All this, and we only have half of the picture. Due to the notoriously questionable quality of the Mandarin Club’s PA facilities, the vocals were virtually mute throughout the entire performance. Given that the band delivered a scathing and inspiring set anyway is pretty damn exciting: not even the Mandarin Club could fuck with this band.

by Shaun Prescott