Kes Band

Kes Band - Meredith Music Festival

Sunday morning at Meredith is never a pretty sight. After two days of partying, and a big Saturday night that saw DJ sets wind up only three hours earlier, people emerge dirt-encrusted and sticky-eyed from their tents and shuffle aimlessly among the detritus of exploded couch cushions, abandoned gazebos, crushed beer cans and lost clothing. Some queue up in interminable lines for a much-needed caffeine hit, while others cradle their aching heads in their hands while dejectedly chewing on a piece of (admittedly delicious) vegetarian pizza.

But what is this? On stage three shambling musicians assemble, not looking any more lively than the stragglers below, and proceed to create some kind of unholy racket. In a gesture bordering on perversity, someone must have thought that putting Kes Band on at 10am would jolt people out of their self-inflicted stupour. They were right.

If eerie, off-kilter guitar music in weird timings is your bag, this was a close-to-perfect display of idiosyncratic composition and technique. If not, it might have seemed like the musical equivalent of the mother of all hangovers; a migraine-inducing cacophony, interspersed with brief lyrical interludes, before being usurped again by animalistic yelps from virtuoso guitarist Karl Scullin and bassist Lehmann Smith. Julian Patterson thumps his way around the drum kit in approximation of somebody kicking bricks down a flight of stairs. The bass has the gravity of a pair of concrete boots, and the sounds Scullin conjures forth from his guitar these days is closer to the fake-jazz screech of No Wave than any recognisable form of indie rock, thank you very much.

In front of me a fluoro-shirted raver, still pilled out of his head, attempts to dance to Kes Band’s fractured rhythms. He looks like a squirrel that is being administered electric shock treatment until finally he ends up squirming in the dirt on his back, arms and legs twitching spasmodically in the air, brain fried in either ecstasy or existential despair – it's hard to tell. As a reaction to Kes Band’s music it was beautifully apt.

by René Schaefer