Dan Kelly
Laneway Festival, Melbourne

Standing alone on stage, his trusty Alpha Males elsewhere for the day, Dan Kelly cuts a slightly nervous figure. He sways with the comfort of a well-travelled showman, but his self-deprecating and lung-shakingly hilarious banter gives it away. ('Summer Wino', he informs the crowd, is about being somewhere between the two poles of feeling that red wine induces: artistic and autistic; the track is introduced as “another medium-rotation smash.”) So too do the rock & roll solos he slots into an otherwise tender acoustic set: heavy chords and hot licks are plunged into a bath of distortion, like J. Mascis in ear-desecration mode. The audience, in kind, chat at a level that drowns out Kelly’s subtler guitar work.

But it’s during 'Drunk on Election Night' that the oddest things happen. Here at a festival that involuntarily celebrates late-capitalism and all its inner-city, ‘creative industry’ accoutrements (t-shirt designers, laneway bars, small-print magazines), Kelly’s paean to end political apathy and disengagement is drowned out by a hundred conversations about the latest collection of $350-a-pop black pants at Fat clothing stores. Kelly, for his part, plays well and demonstrates the craft of his songwriting. Yet the pitch-perfect wit and irony of his lyrics drift away from the audience today like so much useless background detail.

by Ben Gook