Ohana
The Pitz, Sydney

Perched on the bill between the intimacy of Fulton Girls Club and the insanity of Aleks and the Ramps, last-minute additions Ohana stand out for a similar reason: they sound like nobody else around. Though they’re ploughing a patch that’s crowded with bands all trying to seed something in the fertile soil where math-rock, post-rock and hardcore meet, the result is tangibly different. You can taste the urgency behind your teeth and feel its pull as your feet lift, trying to keep up with their syncopated rhythms on the room’s bare concrete floor. The word for this Wollongong quartet is nimble: they can decelerate to a delicate instrumental filigree or switch into a howling attack before you’ve even registered the change. They make the loud-soft-very loud dynamic of countless post-rock pedal-stompers seem so leaden and clumsy by comparison.

An excited perusal of their album Weak Wrists confirms their sparking, idiosyncratic ambition: they have songs called ‘Foucault You Diabolical Genius’ and ‘The Auteur Takes All’. This is seethingly intelligent music, poised at that alchemic place where political despairs and frustrated hopes turn to glittering, knife-sharp creative action. Their singer – impossibly thin – twists across the stage in his pointy shoes like James Brown, and then bends from the waist up and down like a clockwork toy, enmeshed within the sound. Their drummer drops his sticks in the dying seconds of their set and keeps time with his fists instead, unwilling to miss a beat. He doesn’t – neither do his bandmates. They are absolutely impressive.

by Emmy Hennings