My Disco

The prospect of following crowd favourites Old Crow Medicine Show – the recipients of the Golden Plains “shoe-in” for 2009 – would’ve been daunting for most bands. But not My Disco. Right now, they must be one of this country’s most powerful and original bands with their unique mix of minimalism and relentless repetition.

It took me a long time to get into My Disco’s music, but every show I’ve seen since has been phenomenal. With such high standards of intensity to live up to, it was doubtful whether the trio could translate their usual onslaught into a festival setting. A muddy mix for some of the preceding bands didn’t bode well, but from the first notes they had fans and curious newcomers eating out of the palms of their hands.

Each note and drum beat were crystal clear and brutal as whip cracks. Ironically, it was the minimalism of the music that made it work on such a grand scale. Instruments were precisely separated in the mix and never suffered from the washy effect that often defines the “festival sound”.

What continues to surprise me is how much their challenging music is embraced by punters. Apart from the beats and fragments of lyrics, there is often very little for listeners to latch onto. Rather than working on the principle of build-up and release that is crucial to most math- and post-rock, My Disco deal in the dynamics of withholding the pay-off for excruciating lengths of time (if indeed it comes at all). They subvert the cliches of genre, but somehow still rock at the same time.

Technical music that is very simple almost seems like a contradiction in terms, so maybe they have more in common with a band like The Necks than any other “rock” bands. As it was, not only was this the best set I’ve seen from them, but also an absolute highlight of Golden Plains 2009.

by René Schaefer

Deaf Wish

Deaf Wish aren’t really a festival band. Their natural habitat is a beer-soaked stage in a flea-pit venue where they can get up close and personal with the crowd: flailing limbs, microphone stands, wildly swinging guitars and spat vocals all blur into one crazy vortex. It’s true – Deaf Wish fly the flag for everything that is madly and intensely unhinged and loose about punk rock. So putting them on a big stage with a big PA and a big gap between themselves and the audience always had the potential to backfire.

Luckily they don’t just put on a wild show, but they also have shitloads of great songs to back it up. For their maiden Golden Plains performance on Saturday afternoon, they drew on some classics from their 2007 debut LP, such as the manic rush of ‘Green Flame’, with all three vocalists yelling the chorus in unison. ‘Mum Gets Punched In The Face’ and ‘Freeze The Sound’ highlighted their knack for immensely memorable melodies among the scuzzy distorted guitars and feedback. They even treated fans to newer material from their soon-to-be-recorded second album. If anything, these songs are even wilder and more demented.

The band looked like they were having a blast. Pete Seizure made the most of having lots of space to swing his guitar around, while Jensen Tjhung kept leaning into his amp to coax that extra bit of noise out of it. Nick Pratt finger-picked his bass like a man possessed and somewhere at the back, drummer Dan Twomey kept it all together with an impressive display of psychic time-keeping.

Even at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, in an unfamiliar environment, there was no doubt that Deaf Wish could make the stage their own. It was a short, sweet set from a band that has the passion and intensity to get any audience on their side.

Pratt enjoyed himself so much, he continued his performance throughout the rest of the festival, becoming a fixture of bonhomie and contortionist dancing at “Camp Deaf Wish” down the front of the amphitheatre until his voice was nothing but a croak come Sunday night.

Now that’s dedication.

by René Schaefer

Bridezilla

As Bridezilla start their Sunday set, with décolletage and headbands on show and a minute’s worth of aimless droney posturing, I point out charmlessly to a less-than-awake friend that it’s International Women’s Day and this must be the charity set. He doesn’t laugh. My girlfriend glares at me.

As their first song commences and saxophonist Millie Hall starts to blurt aimlessly around the stage, I make a smartass remark about how they must have picked up their first Laughing Clowns record recently. Again, I get nothing. (I’m a funny guy, I know. You’ll be glad to know the joke ends up on me).

If the material on Bridezilla’s self-titled EP is, as my colleague Adam D Mills asserted in his review “meat and potatoes rock”, then the set they showcase at Golden Plains is far removed from such humble beginnings. Their songs, as captured on ‘Forth and Fine’ (their side of a recent split 7-inch with Mick Turner’s Tren Brothers project), have become dense, textured mood pieces.

In complete contrast to their inauspicious beginning, this set is built around stentorian rhythm. Later in the day, Rohan Rebeiro from My Disco will vie for the award for most vital drumming of GP’09 with Pivot’s Laurence Pike, but Bridezilla’s Josh Bush is the unacknowledged competition. It’s his labour over the kit – pushing forward dramatically when necessary, dithering artfully when the songs need space – that gives the band their live vitality. The rest of the band are hardly stilted either.

If their EP at times suggested Daisy Tulley’s violin was an occasional afterthought to Holiday Carmen-Spark’s gamine vocal melodies, it’s quite the opposite live. Her violin work is the focal point both melodically and visually. Both Carmen-Spark and Pia May flesh out the songs with precise guitar parts. They’re economical, but never wasteful. Short, simple progressions dominate, gathering urgency with repetition.

Songs like ‘Brown Paper Bag’ off their EP made gestures towards this kind of layered but punchier songwriting – perhaps patronage from the ATP crowd or the passage from innocence to experience, has made these formative gestures fully realised? Carmen-Spark, in particular, conjures a mood of ominous languor with ease that belies her young age. It never feels false. In fact, it’s disarming in its heartfelt delivery.

There’s not a lot of movement, save for Tulley’s hyperactive laps around the stage. For the most part, they just stand and deliver, which doesn’t matter. The material is so strong it doesn’t need buttressing from wild gesticulations.

As they conclude their set, Carmen-Spark’s vocals approach a keening wail, May’s guitar surges and Tulley’s violin provides the pull and release of the briny undertow.

“Our situation won’t get any better/Our situation can’t get any better,” Carmen-Spark sings as the band stumble into oblivion around her. The sun breaks through the grimy Sunday morning. If Bridezilla’s “situation” has a future, it’s definitely looking brighter.

by JP Hammond

Dan Kelly and The Ukeladies

Giving us all a reason to get up on Sunday morning and rinse, drink and repeat, were the sultry sounds of Paul Kelly’s most talented nephew. So here’s what was good. When on his own and accompanied by “The Black Shadow” (ex-Alpha Male and current Drone Dan Luscombe) on keys, it was shoe-raising stuff and just what was needed for sore heads and lowered serotonin levels. Gliding through covers of The Kinks’ ‘Mountain Woman’ and Prince/Sinead’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, Danny K shifted between acoustic and ukulele to golden shower the yawners and the still drunk with smiles, wit and charm. Nothing beats the sound of "just the ladies on the left side" joining in with Dan’s falsetto in ‘Drunk On Election Night’, you cocksucker motherfuckers. There was even a brilliant song about being a classical DJ at Dandenong train station, which concerned an ill-fated attempt to scare stabbers and junkies away from the place by piping classical music through the PA.

But then came the storm. The “shit” storm if you will, and it took the ungodly form of the atonal Ukeladies. Not hot, can’t sing, played the recorder, hardly even touched a ukulele. Look, the Salvo uniforms looked okay, I guess, but weren’t a patch on the side-boob bearing ball gowns they donned last time. Perhaps they just needed to run though a few scales beforehand? Or maybe pitting their voices against Kelly’s was about arty juxtaposition – blackboard fingernails versus sweet warm caramel third base – making Dan appear genius-by-proxy?

Anyway all they did for me was make me question Kelly’s taste in older women and pray for the good ol’ days when he was out front of the Alpha Males with a bumper sticker on his electric guitar that said “No Fat Chicks” or something. He finished it all off with an electrified song played to an iPod beat, all about a dream he had about the apocalypse where he had a great time. Kinda like listening to the Ukeladies with Dan Kelly, and also kinda like being at Golden Plains.

by Nick Hilton

Pivot

One of the great things about music festivals is being exposed to bands you may know by reputation, but haven’t actually seen before. Such was the case with Sydney trio Pivot. I was aware that they are highly regarded for their mix of electronic and live sounds, and that they had released their critically well-received album O Soundtrack My Heart on UK label Warp Records, home to artists such as Squarepusher and Battles, the latter of which they sometimes get compared to. I’d even seen the mindblowing puppetry video for their song ‘In The Blood’, but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.

Finally seeing them live on stage was a revelation. Brothers Laurence and Richard Pike and laptop whiz Dave Miller combine glitchy, fucked-up electronic sounds with complex drum rhythms, guitar and bass, incorporating elements of jazz and experimental rock to make music for people with short attention spans. Sure, there are grooves to latch onto, but unlike most song-based music, rhythms, riffs and melodies veer all over the shop. It’s not as disjointed as Deerhoof, but more adventurous and unpredictable than Trans Am (another band that frequently gets cited as a reference point).

Luckily, Pivot’s songs are visceral enough to appeal to more than just music nerds. Like their friends My Disco, they don’t let intellectualism get in the way of rocking out and having a good time. There are rhythms here that are eminently dance-worthy and at the back of my mind I kept thinking how awesome a double bill of Pivot and Mountains In The Sky might be. Both combine complex poly-rhythms with simple melodic elements to make music that stimulates head, feet and hips simultaneously.

As an inclusion in the Golden Plains line-up, Pivot were an inspired choice. They were exposed to a whole new audience who were receptive to music they might quickly pass over in a different context. I just wish I had seen them support Gary Numan on his sideshow date at The Forum. It would have been a perfect combination.

by René Schaefer

The Church

To many people, The Church might forever be associated with the period in the late 1980s that saw them at the height of their creative and commercial success with the albums Heyday and Starfish. But as a band, they have never stopped developing. It takes a performance as vital as their early evening slot at Golden Plains to remind people that the songwriting trio of Steve Kilbey, Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes are in no way ready to let themselves be relegated to the nostalgia bin.

Opening with the classic ‘Tantalized’ instantly showed that the chemistry and intricate interplay between Koppes’ and Willson-Piper’s distinctive guitar tones is still fully intact. The musicians were clearly relishing being on stage and used many of the newer songs for some sweet extended instrumental passages.

Kilbey’s voice is still in great shape. Despite a reputation for being grumpy and cantankerous at times, he came across as amiable and proud of the band he has led through many turbulent times since they formed in Canberra in 1980.

Dipping right back to 1982, ‘Almost With You’ sounded as fresh as ever, while ‘Under The Milky Way’ got a rapturous reception from the crowd. As their greatest hit, it remains a curious number, being introspective and wistful rather than uplifting. But when the amazing guitar solo kicked in towards the end, it was a moment of goosebump-raising beauty.

The highlight came with set-closer ‘Reptile’, with Willson-Piper’s instantly recognisable four-note cyclical guitar riff and a fine melodic bassline underpinning some of Kilbey’s most poisonous lyrics. A thumping, dramatic breakdown mid-way through the song heralded another inspired instrumental passage. Two chiming guitars ducked and weaved around each other as the rhythm section powered straight down the line to the inevitable finale.

The sound throughout the show was almost perfect. Only the bass was occasionally a bit too low in the mix, but it certainly didn’t detract from a brilliant performance by one of Australia’s most respected, but also (strangely) most underrated bands.

More, please!

by René Schaefer