O Positive

Not only was this a fantastic day of music, run by excellent people, the review was an absolute blast to write.

OH, COMMUNITY! FESTIVAL, Florence Park Community Centre, 7/11/21

Oh, yes please! This wonderful all-dayer is perfectly named, being not just a chance to catch some new music, but also an opportunity for the almost forgotten before-times practice of hanging out, chatting about sets, and buying merch from friendly faces. Fittingly, many performers are also present for the other acts, not least half of new duo The Dumplings, who runs the desk for the rest of the day. Their chirpy, punky bulletins are scrappier than Scrappy-Doo on Scrapheap Challenge, and they have a micro-song celebrating Divine Schism founder and local lynchpin Aiden Canaday: O, Captain! my Captain!

Fortitude Valley and Fightmilk are muscularly melodic indie bands providing tuneful oases early and late in the running order, the former giving classic jangle an invigorating shot of grunge-adjacent energy a la The Breeders, whilst the latter spring from the less theatrical end of Britpop, and balance serious lyrics with extra brut wryness between songs. Both have albums mere days old for sale: oh, don’t mind if we do...

Local favourite EB delivers her intriguing unrap in the hugest tinted glasses, like a cross between Su Pollard and Horatio Caine. Musically, though, she’s more a mixture of Peaches and Gwen Stefani, and “Rodeo Queen” manages to revel in the pleasures of urban pop whilst acting as feminist satire on the culture: O, tempora! O, mores! Yay Maria also rides the laptop rhythms, and if there’s sometimes more reverse reverb than songwriting on display, the set has the unpretentious cabaret vibe of early 80s underground New York. We imagine Grace Jones, Keith Haring and a pre-record deal Madonna bopping at the front: oh! you pretty things.

Chunky emo-flecked rockers Junk Whale deliver a strong set, too exciting for one reveller, who smashes the venue’s delightfully old-school mirrorball whilst leaping, fist-aloft, across the dancefloor: O Superman. Things calm down for Alice Hubble, a synth duo (meaning there are two members, but happily more than two synths) who proffer slow, bleakly buzzing but oddly euphoric songs in a style we christen Giorgio Moroser, making one want to become a heartsick cyborg: oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt.

Shake Chain’s set is approximately Birth Trauma: The Musical. Whilst the band plays the sort of taut, psych-fuelled aggression-rock that Fat White Family promised but never quite delivered, performance artist Kate Mahony crawls slowly from underneath the stage, wrapped in a coat, limbs sticking out like the Isle of Man flag gone Cthulhu. She slowly grows into an astonishing howling vortex of bemused rage which is half Chuck Schuldiner from Death, half Moaning Myrtle, and by the end she’s raging behind a Beuysian totem built from the venue’s furniture whilst the band imitates military munitions: oh! what a lovely war.

Only Codex Serafini could follow that, a quintet enacting high-octane ritualistic space jams in black masks and bright pink robes, like the Squid Game guards jamming after hours to exorcise the horrors they’ve witnessed.  This is as close to witchcraft as one can get with a saxophone: oh, oh, oh, it’s magic! And they evidently summoned something impossible from an indescribable dimension (or Amsterdam) in the shape of Personal Trainer, equal parts LCD Soundsystem, Talking Heads, funk revue, art happening, shirts-off hardcore communion, and pep rally. There are abstract passages suddenly coalescing into ultra-tight backing vocals, there’s a bassist on a singer’s shoulders, there’s percussion played standing on a table because...well, frankly, by this point, fuck “because”. Sounds like a horrible mess? O ye of little faith. And then, suddenly, we’re out in the strangely silent suburban streets on a chilly Sunday night, wondering when the next bus is: oh, Christ is that the time?

Drinka Pinta Milk Affray

I'm listening to brass band music.  Why aren't you?

Happy Christmas, etc.

FIGHTMILK/ SUGGESTED FRIENDS/ PET SEMATARY, All Tamara’s Parties, 6/12/18

Although, if she ever gets the success she deserves, it will doubtless be with a full band in tow, we always enjoy Gaby-Elise Monaghan most in a stripped back format, such as her Pet Sematary project.  Tonight she is joined by a guitarist who bolsters her bewitching bluesghoul wails with picked notes enshrouded in misty reverb, or sheets of disquieting ambient noise, creating textures that recall Daniel Lanois or Angelo Badalamenti, but it’s the voice that commands your attention, sometimes frail and intimate, like Jeff Buckley without one eye constantly on the mirror, and sometimes sweeping epically on tumescent waves of sweet bleakness. 

Suggested Friends prove that, when it comes to pop music, a tight, sprightly band will always win out over mere good taste.  They bombard us with a string of buzzing punked up versions of songs that would fit neatly into some hideous drive time AM radio show, in which Split Enz rub shoulderpads with late 80s Fleetwood Mac, and Counting Crows lend some safely grizzled guitar licks to the bombast of post-reggae Police.  But, as if to prove that the magic comes from the chef not the recipe, they play with such wonderfully taut abandon – especially the drummer, who just looks ecstatic to be alive and allowed to it stuff - it is impossible not to find the whole experience intoxicating.  New song “Turtle Taxi” was written two days ago, and rehearsed once, but sounds like the band have been playing it all their lives.  It also sounds like Men At Work.  Glorious.  And slightly awful.  But mostly glorious.

We’re not often fond of the term frontperson, as most bands are a collaborative effort, and the one with the mic is no more important than the one with the sticks, but sometimes you see an act where the singer is so mesmerising, you couldn’t pick the rest of the musicians out of a police line-up ten minutes after the gig.  Lily from Fightmilk is just such a performer, a fizzing bomb of guitar-wrangling and yelping, her slightly prissy indie outfit making us think of a grown up version of Hermione Granger, or Rebecca and Enid from Ghost World, or perhaps even Wednesday Addams, mixing fearsome intelligence with astringent superciliousness, dishing out lyrical putdowns to ex-partners like a laconic teacher (and her request for those who want an LP to “see me afterwards” is just too perfect). Musically it’s all decent enough, a melange of the less theatrical end of the Britpop spectrum and Johnny Foreigner’s playground scrap pop, and although we’re hard pressed to recall much about the songs, we know we’ve witnessed the sort of unforced star quality that can only truly be experienced in a small live music venue.