Midnight Juggernauts

Mess+Noise’s favourite sons blithely wandered onto the BDO’s main stage, the outsize logo and spreadeagle backdrop belying such humble hometown airs. They were fixed, today, with a mid-afternoon slot in which to offer up their synthy melodrama. Similar to their Meredith appearance in timing and role as genre-jumbler (i.e. breaking up the rock), they seemed rather more torn today about who they wanted to be: acceptable outcrop of 2005’s fading dance-rock fusion or 80s-rock mining balladeers. Playing to this many skate-shoed and Cronulla-caped audience members, they lent heavily on the rock in the first half before settling into some dancier material later on. One particularly windy synth section – and not as in woodwind – echoed something from the more troubling, less subtle end of the 80s soundtrack oeuvre. Any future marriage along these lines could be truly horrifying.

Their dual tendency to rock and/or dance, coming at this juncture, suggests an impending decision about their future direction. It’s a fine line between irony and unsmirking embrace – this, like fellow crossover hipster Muscles, is an act that started as something of a lark, after all. But where Muscles gives it his all – up to, and including, the point of sounding like gravel-throated grunge never went away – Jugs, at least vocally, hold back. On a day when the weepy vocal tones of The Cure’s Robert Smith continued to ring out (see Cut Off Your Hands, Faker etc), the somewhat cold vocal delivery of the Juggernauts was one of their stronger links to their house-rock past. That aside, the Big Day Out set, in front of thousands of people, felt more like an embrace; the vocals, too, belying some growing ambitions.

It was a set unfortunately marred by some odd acoustics – depending on where you stood, the set variously sounded like a fudge-coated bassfeast or a glass chandelier breaking on your head. Such are the perils of the main stage.

by Ben Gook