The Sleepy Jackson
Laneway Festival, Sydney

What price do you put on consistency in a live band? If it’s guaranteed commitment and no-frills application you seek, the likes of Dallas Crane and Peabody are what you are after. However, if you’re willing to take a gamble on Australian music’s equivalent of a mad scientist, an artist whose wont for experimentation and artistic restlessness mean you never know quite what you are going to get, then The Sleepy Jackson are your band.

I’ve seen Luke Steele and company play shows ranging from an eccentric, brilliant set at an in-store, perversely full of songs the frontman had “written the night before”, to a frightfully poor dirge of a set on a festival stage that sounded like a Pearl Jam cover band having a bash at the Sleepy Jackson back catalogue. Their set at the Sydney leg of the Laneway Festival was thankfully closer to the former, despite drifting mid-set through an indifferent crowd and lengthy, unfocused jamming before rallying to a triumphant finish.

A dreamy, swirling ‘Good Dancers’ saw the six-piece reach an early peak, but later, as the crowd thinned and the weather becomes very weird indeed, the gulf between the meticulous, symphonic beauty of the group’s recorded output and their live show became apparent. During ‘God Lead Your Soul’, one may well wonder why they don’t simply use pre-recorded backing music when they play live, a la obvious inspirations The Flaming Lips. It’s not over yet, though, and after an energetic ‘Glasshouses’ and a positively venomous ‘Vampire Racecourse’, they had earned the collective bow they took at the end. The Sleepy Jackson: still riding the highs and lows, then, even in the space of a single set.

by Daniel Herborn