My Disco

Since 2006’s Cancer, My Disco have flatly refused to play any songs from preceding releases. Instead, with each new record, the band move on entirely with their sets, presenting to audiences only their current incarnation. “Isn’t that the ‘you, you, dah, dah’ song?” my perplexed friend keeps shouting into my ear as he tries to mimic Liam Andrew’s spare, stuttered vocal delivery. “No,” I calmly tell him. “It’s a new song.” Whether this belies his unfamiliarity with the band’s catalogue or the possibility that it all sounds the same is disputable.

But not too questionable, because if one thing is clear tonight, it’s that there is a real sense of change in My Disco’s material. It’s subtle, sure, but in a sense that’s what makes it so delicious for fans. The band are similar to that other much-loved Melbourne institution, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, in their commitment to a singular sound.

But whereas a new ECSR release is never little more than a holding pattern of some unfulfilled promise, My Disco ceaselessly sharpen, refine and then explode their chosen aesthetic, which consists simply of a trio playing their instruments with machine-like precision as they try to surmount the paradox of constrained menace.

If anything, the new material on show – from their third album due out this year – finally puts to rest the ridiculous notion that My Disco are a “minimalist” outfit, even if it were nurtured by 2008’s ascetic Paradise. Instead, tonight’s show is full blown maximalism.

Rohan Rebeiro’s drums, which have strangely always supplied texture while the Andrews brothers’ axes deal mainly in rhythm, have achieved a new tribalism. His percussion as serpentine as it is danceable. And the band as a whole have (re)learnt how to rock out, to loosen up even.

No mistake, there’s still that unshakeable control, but it’s in service of an altogether more liberated mood. A new song with cryptic lyrics, “Two lives/Between us/Half-lived”, is almost their party number, replete with rising chords that are allowed to coalesce and bounce, rather than simply clip or squall. And ‘Young’, the track they came here to launch tonight, sprawls into an wailing, unstoppable epic.

Maybe it’s down to being at the Nash, a highway’s stretch from all that big city expectation and pretension, that sees the band so clearly enjoying themselves tonight. Or maybe they’re not the arcane disciplinarians their mid-career music suggested, but three men having an unbelievably good time testing the borders of their self-imposed musical paradise.

by Lawson Fletcher