Humans are such simple, simple, stupid fucking creatures. Don’t play dumb, you know you are! Get off that couch, pull that finger out of your arse (no, don’t sniff it!) waddle your lazy arse over to the mirror and take a good hard look at yourself! You think you’re SO smart don’t you! You’ve conquered the Earth, planted flags on the Moon, landed your robot on Mars and flung your dung whizzing past the orbit of Uranus. You’ve built glittering ant hills coast to coast, surface to air, cold concrete, steel and glass. Every frequency of the EM band is all buzzing, whirring and mouse clicking with your incessant chit-chat. You think you’re SO proud don’t you! Your cutting edge technology and your blunt infallible logic. Your petrochemical smog, your xmas tree lights, your wondrous toys all beeping and vibrating 24 hours of the day. You invented fire, the wheel and the lightbulb. You invented the internet! You threw together all your collective wisdom, all 5000 years of it since the invention of the written word, a grand suppository of all your carnal worth, all access, all day from every net and node, all that spam, piracy and porn!? Awesome! Fuck, you even invented the particle accelerator (aka: “the biggest scientific experiment ever”) that some of you claim will either create a mini blackhole that’ll swallow the Earth or will create a vacuum bubble that’ll negate nearly all of cosmic existence!? Genius! And yet for all your mastery of the mundane to the metaphysical, all it takes is for something as simple as a stupid fucking change in the season, a simple ten degree increase, and BAM! you’re all about as dumb as doorknobs!? Fuck I love humanity! So simple, so stupid, so ever so utterly predictable..
Yup you can taste it, you can smell it. Spring has sprung! It’s sprung a leak and it’s pissing all over us. The streets are overrun. We’re all crawling in it. We’re on our hands and knees sniffing up each others crotches to the mad thrill of it. We’re done, we’re finished, it’s all over! This is what it is to be human, prey to the seasons, a simple shaved simian with nothing left to lose but all that’s left of our reasoning! Here at Jive and knocking ourselves unconscious to the blind cacophany! the stench of depravity! OOOOH FUCK is this night going to get messy!
Femme Fatales
And here’s the ONE opening act tailor made ripe for such sweet stupidity: the Femme Fatales, or as I like to call them: “The Three Point Fives”, as invariably and without fail THAT is the score I always seem to give them. Beats me why, I mean it’s not like I actually keep a running record, it’s not like I plan it this way, and yet everytime I bump into their lead singer it’s the ONE triviality (beyond all my other dick and fart jokes) that bugs him to no end: “Three Point Five!? awwwww maaan!? what will it take to give us FOUR stars!? sure we NEVER rehearse! but C’MON!!”. Yes, clearly I’m evil, clearly this amuses me to no end, and clearly now that I’m actually aware of it, OOOOH AM I GONNA MAKE THEM PAY! Still, when you consider I used to call them “Shit Disco” when we first crossed paths a year ago, they HAVE come a long way since (and there’s so much MORE to make fun of yet.. squeeeee!!). The Femme Fatales. They’re everything you love about “nu-rave”. They’re pogo dancing with glowsticks, flouro, oversized sunnies, “Choose Life!”, “Frankie says Relax!”, v-necks in shitcrazy geometric patterns, hoodies, bottled water, funny little pills, red bull, date rape and metrosexuality. They’re the Klaxons meets Crystal Castles meets SEGA Genesis pulled apart with pliers. They’re badly photocopied faces with neon laserbeams shooting out of their eyesockets. They’re 8bit crusty, monotone and mashed with fists. And curiously enough even as an opening act (ie: hours before anyone’s pills have had a chance to kick in strong) they’re actually surprisingly coherent. Wow! maybe they’ve rehearsed afterall! Here I am, I’m dead sober and they’re STILL rocking it!? Sheeeiiiiiit!
So why the “Three Point Five” then? Well granted, things get off to a slow start. You know one of those mindblowingly awesome TV shows you loved in the first season, only for it to come back in the second season, the first few episodes blow goats and everyone’s got ridiculous new haircuts? Yeah me neither, I never watch TV, I don’t even own a TV, I live in a cardboard box! but, still it rather effectively describes the start of their set tonight (seriously dudes? what the FUCK is up with the blond!?). It’s slow, dark, dour and awash in white noise. It sounds like a cross between A Place To Bury Strangers (good) crossfaded with a shrieking Adam Sandler from The Wedding Singer doing “the breakup song” (bad). Teeth are grinding and not from all the uppers, but from the sensation of intestines in knots. It’s awkward, I’m aware they’re trying something new, but they’re not there yet. Still before all hope is lost, the minute they kick in all their usual dumb shit again!? duuuude it’s nothing but candy! Reach for the lasers maaan! SAFE AS FUCK!
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Fire! Santa Rosa Fire!
Returning to Jive, I arrive just in time for act two, a few steps further down the sobriety scale and infinitely more appreciative of the sounds of THIS band: Fire! Santa Rosa Fire! the epitome of what the Adelaide music scene means to the rest of Australia: “superfluous”. It’s right there in the superfluous band name that’s a few too many names, two exclamation marks (and a comma between the third and the forth if we’re really splitting hairs). It’s the all kinds of superfluous that is having two singers up there (sometimes more) sharing the mic, wailing their sinuses to a nasal shrill. It’s in having two guitarists. It’s in every one of them whacking sticks and beating the drums. It’s in having five now six members on stage running amok (wow so THAT’s where Tyger Tyger ripped their gimmick from!?). All needlessly superfluous, all integral to their sound. Y’know that chick from the Dandy Warhols who apparently does nothing on stage but look aloof with a tambourine? (Zia McCabe.. fuuuck she’s hot!). They’ve got one of those too! She’s Caitlin. For the most part she just sways about and looks totally useless, but damn she’s awesome! Fire! Santa Rosa Fire! they’re fast becoming the Broken Social Scene of the Adelaide scene. They’re a mad party and everyone’s invited! I think I might audition. Sure I can’t play anything for shit, but it doesn’t matter! get 50 or more people up there, space the fuck out, play everything reaaal slow, sing and shout along, dance like hippies.. FUCK YEAAAH! what’s not to love!?
Fire! Santa Rosa Fire! They’re a mad jumble of a band on stage, not a lot of it makes a lick of sense and I’m pretty sure the rest of it is just a collective injoke that Dave and Art cooked up inbetween shooting shit and playing videogames: but over the years they’ve built a free spirited flow, a geek aesthetic and an assured maturity. Gone are the days of the frenzied sugar fueled scenster guitars, like Happy Tree Friends meets The Rapture and in its place they’re cooking up a slow cooked angular groove: equal parts LCD Soundsystem’s “Sounds Of Silver” meets Gerling’s “Children Of Telepathic Experience”. They’re an ecclectic cool, an antigravity cocktail party and a soundtrack to a Sophia Coppola film (and they’re also fucking insane) but I reckon they’ve just about got it nailed. Superfluous? maybe. Superlatives? I could give you plenty!
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Grafton Primary
And speaking of a few too many (and a few shy of all your fair weather buddies dumping you at the front door of the emergency ward in a shopping trolley and a hand written sign), that’s about as much as you’d wanna be dropping just in time for this band, our headlining act, our freebasing ode to bleeding from both sinuses that is Grafton Primary! Yeah I didn’t know what to expect. I went into this gig cold, never having heard ANY of their music before, but a sure sign I was in for a world of whacky in more ways than a “business trip” south of the Columbian border would’ve been the one skinhead, dressed like a reject from the Berlin Love Parade, who stood ahead of me all exciteable and skin crawling twitchy as I walked in tonight. That, a surgical mask, a fist full of smilies, both your hands up in the air following by an extended stay at the “Bangkok Hilton” is what this band was all about. They’re Grafton Primary. They’re an acid house, 8bit, tetrix blox dropping monochrome rinse out. They’re Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, The Human League and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. They’re The Shamen, Underworld’s “Second Toughest In The Infants” and Digitalism’s “Idealism”. They’re the androgynous, android future in pirate shirts, eyeshadow, neon lights and shitcrazy hairgel that the 80’s always predicted would happen but (some say thankfully) never came to be. They’re two shirtless men wrestling in milk! They’re cocaine making you do CRAAAAZY things (“I’m Rick James Bitch!”). And they’re me wondering just what the FUCK I’ve got myself into. Still despite being one leatherclad gimp short of a night out in Sydney’s Kings Cross. damn could these mad cats bang out one meanarse groove!
Grafton Primary. It’s all in the appearances. It’s in Joshua Garden (their lead vocalist) pulling tai-chi shapes on stage looking like a cross between an emaciated Christian Bale from the “The Machinist”, Sacha Baron Cohen as his Austrian alter ego “Bruno” and Meryl Streep’s dancing skeleton in a dapper waistcoat. It’s in Robbie Mudrazija (on drums) looking like a cross between Mark Renton (aka: Ewan McGregor out of “Trainspotting”) and a chihuahua. And it’s Benjamin Garden (on synths and yes the keytar! OOOH FUCK YEAH!!) doing his very best impersonation of A Flock Of Seagulls working the day shift. It’s a seamless mix of banging 4/4 beats, soaring strings, monochrome synths, monotone vocals, and a chunking grind that works the floor like coffee machine. It’s anthemic, epic and utterly po-faced in it’s delivery. It’s a crowd tonight absolutely lapping this shit up by spade, by shovel and by rolled up $100 dollar bills. And as insane as it all sounds, I couldn’t help but join in, cause duuude this shit freaking rocked!!
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super-fantastich
said on the 17th Sep, 2008