Snowman
Laneway Festival, Melbourne
Sunday February 25, 2007 with 0 Mess+Noise champion in attendance.
Featuring: Midnight Juggernauts, Peter Bjorn & John, The Walkmen, The Sleepy Jackson, Youth Group, Love Is All, Camera Obscura, Archie Bronson Outfit, Curse Ov Dialect, Macromantics, Ground Components, Snowman, The Temper Trap, Bumblebeez, Holly Throsby, The Crayon Fields, Dan Kelly, Fionn Regan.
Pegged with a prime-time slot, Snowman lost much of their potential audience to the unlikely Swedish blockbusters Peter, Bjorn & John. Never ones to shy from a challenge, however, this Perth-based quartet play their songs with a frightful energy. Relishing the club-like setting in the Lounge – rather than the terrible-sounding outdoor number in the laneway out back – the band plays as if they’re headlining the festival.
With well-liquored audience members up-front, the band threw themselves around the stage in a relentless, cathartic and captivating performance. It’s art-rock through and through: their final track tonight begins with tribal drums and percussion, peppers this with some primal yelping before shifting to a 60s R&B groove, later diverting for a brief saxophone-led bridge and then ending with an R&B shakedown. Operatic vocal interludes crop up throughout the set; violinist and guitarist Andy Citawarman barrels around stage like Jerry Lee Lewis released from behind the piano; Joe McKee plays guitar from the audience at one point; Olga Hermanniusson plays from behind her fringe. The whole thing – the sound, the theatricality – can lend the band the air of Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It was the bemused stragglers lining the walls of the venue, on respite for the coming hours of music, who provided some perspective on the mayhem: the songs, for all their performance spectacle, can manage to yield surprisingly little of interest. It was an impressive set, but the musical elements, for all their consummate performance and genre-hopping smarts, deny deeper engagement.
by Ben Gook
