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Static Age

Friday April 24, 2009 at 12:00 AM
Audience:  18 and over
Dirty Shirlows
Marrickville, Sydney
NSW, 2000, Australia.
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Crab Smasher

When bands like Crab Smasher play there’s the tendency for punters to sit cross-legged on the floor nursing their longnecks. It could just be old-fashioned Romanesque sloth, but it might also have to do with the notion that, if you’re seeing an experimental rock band, you’re engaging with something much too cerebral to permit the stupid tribal act of dancing.

Among plenty of other folk, I sat for the first half of Crab Smasher’s set. Their recordings waver between languid atmospherics and subtlety-shirking punk-rock lunacy, so sitting down seemed the precautionary thing to do. Seeing Crab Smasher live brings clarity to everything they’ve committed to record though. They have a fey, bubblegum punk demeanour that belies the type of aural decimation they sometimes indulge in on record, and the group often look childishly proud of the weird riffage they’re emitting, like a child repeating their parents’ profanities to a friend. It’s a big, sloppy morass of unrefined rock textures, cindering noise, and a tom-happy rhythmic scaffolding provided by Marnie Vaughn, who smiles gaily throughout the whole set while maintaining a steady up-tempo.

Crab Smasher plays a very base, vivisected version of rock, where the textures of the instruments and the sound of amplification itself bleed all over the place with the gratuity of a Troma casualty. Hilarious extremes are their forte, but they’re a pop band through and through – Crab Smasher don’t emit the aura that they’re (puts on best revolutionary voice) “pushing forward through a climate of musical mediocrity”. If anything, Crab Smasher just seems determined to get every last goddamned arse off the floor tonight. They succeeded, at least, where I was involved.

by Shaun Prescott

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Aktion Unit

Last time these Melbourne guys played Sydney they stole a trolley, filled it with shit, bashed it into submission, then walked off the stage and called it their set. The trolley bashing was accompanied by guitar and drumming, but aside from Aktion Unit’s apparent disrespect for the trolley wardens at nearby Marrickville Metro Shopping Centre, they also harbour a strong disregard for the fabled rulebook of rock music.

Tonight Dan Lewis and M+N critic René Schaefer are just as insolent. Again joined by Kate Wilson (of the Laurels and Black Ryder, among others) and Leith Thomas (True Radical Miracle), there is a conspicuous absence of trolleys or any other non-musical device tonight, but there’s plenty of blatant disrespect for the way a bass guitar, for example, ought to be played. Bashing it against an amplifier will not a very great song make, but a hilariously stupefying mess of feedback and speaker hiss it most certainly will. Twisting the machine heads of your guitar hard against the stage will not get you very far in the dog-eat-dog music industry, but if it’s a punishingly fried blanket of charcoal noise you’re wanting to achieve, by all means, that’s the way to do it!

Wilson’s sludge-paced drum patterns pulled all this aural fug together into some blessedly “musical” representation, but essentially what you’ve got here is four people beating the constituent sounds of rock into a shape that none of the other kids can play with. It’s a horrendous beast they’re exorcised, but geez, is it not the biggest, dumbest fun you’ve had since those New Zealand infidels The Dead C paid us a visit? No one left disappointed.

by Shaun Prescott

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