Schvendes + Baseball
The Amplifier Bar, Perth

The bow-played string instrument theme ‘Love Like Violence 6: String Theory’ felt a little tacked on, but it did raise questions about the role of violins and cellos in rock and pop music. Namely, do they have one? Sometimes they don’t, they play some airy-fairy bullshit that, if you can hear it, you’re totally bored by. But in Schvendes the strings – the cathedral shaped and sky bending strings – are vital. They add meat to stark song skeletons, they beef them up, make them effing huge and fat in the gut. Singer Rachael Dease threw us all onto our backs in a total ‘I’ve-just-paid-for-dinner-so-let-me-have-my-way’ way, barely moving except to grimace on the tense notes, yet completely commanding our attention. We were like, “Ooh! Okay,” and went along with it. It was kind of scary, but also kind of sexy.

Cam Potts, Baseball’s escaped convict who has traveled forward in time from the 1830s to be a bandleader, has a similar approach, albeit less coquettish. Instead of Dease’s approach of wearing a pretty dress and a flower in her hair and seductively tapping her toes, Potts knocked up a brickie’s singlet and shorts outfit and brusquely thrust up his pointed groin. That fatness of the string, though, he duplicated completely. Baseball in full flight, in the middle of one of their frenzied songs, is an entrancing trick. It entirely removes one’s sense of self. The players threw themselves around like rag dolls and beat their instruments silly and the effect was that of a watch dangled in front of the face of a chicken. Such a dangerous ride can become tiresome, as Schvendes’ lulls can wear on, but tonight Baseball and their support were stupendous.

by Matt Giles