I arrive just before 9pm to Bloc Party pumping through the stereo – an unusually late start time by Arena standards. The room is already half full with young, uber-trendy things; a lot of boys seemingly dragged along by their Grates-loving girlfriends.

Displaced from my usual stage-left mezzanine perch due to VIP area expansions, I take up camp bang in front of the sound desk and hope that all the 6ft men loiter at the bar behind me.

The John Steel Singers start their set with little fanfare from the audience or themselves but set about grabbing our attention with their music from the get go. They open with Toes and Fingers – exuberant tunes that wouldn’t go astray on a Vampire Weekend album.

Drummer Ross Chandler is animated like a toy in a Christmas display during the introductory Toes but in the depths of Fingers is frenziedly driving the group with tempo changes. Guitar washes out the end of the track: a fittingly psychedelic introduction to the night ahead.

Rainbow Kraut is a driving, bass and guitar affair enhanced with Elton John-keys and vocals like a choir of Midnight Vultures–era Beck.

The group is evenly dressed in three plain business shirts and three plain Bonds shirts, but if they were to literally wear their influences on their sleeves one would imagine The Beatles, The Beach Boys and perhaps Dr Dog displayed proudly across their chests.

The John Steel Singers utilize a range of volumes deftly throughout their set, although their rollercoaster-like tempo changes can at times feel a little overdone. Whilst vocals are a tad muddy, their sound is the best I’ve heard from an Arena support in a long while.

For a split second my wingman and I think we’re being treated to a cover of the Queens Of The Stone Age track Make It Wit Chu, but it is in fact The John Steel Singers’ very own The Staged Intervention Of Poor Rich By His Righteous Peers and has a joyful chorus owing more to Paul McCartney than John Homme.
The John Steel Singers capitalise on out-of-the-box melodies with a line-up that teeters on the brink of too much but manages to flesh out their sonically dense tracks without overcrowding them. Cramming two keyboards, trombone, trumpet, and three vocalists on top of bass, drums and guitar, the Brisbane six-piece expand on the quirky indie pop that groups like The Boat People first brought to the fore of Australian Independent music in 2000.
As the carefree crowd bobbed and swayed to Unearthed feature track Strawberry Wine, vocalist Trimmington Morrissey took happy snaps of the crowd for J-Mag. The John Steel Singers are an incredible band and this is yet to be fully realized in recorded format – so you best catch them soon at a venue near you.

The Vasco Era sound like an audio train wreck. The Melbourne-via-Apollo Bay trio’s set is one great big rollicking blues jam, like a ride on a derailed locomotive with a few elusive scenic glimpses in between the harried moments before the inevitable end.

Regardless, the crowd are cheering more and dancing less. Vocalist Sid O’Neil cradles a beautiful hollow body guitar and dons a wifebeater, while brother and bassist Ted O’Neil sports a shirt-vest combo that looks like the groom’s best man stayed partying on 12 hours after everyone else bailed.

The third track is the first semblance of something I recognise and unfortunately it is a butchering of The Grates’ Sukkafish. Calling it a blues rendition is a stretch at best, but the toastiest of punters are clapping along and yelling with the fervour of a remote country town receiving its once-yearly concert.

Beside Kingswood from their 2005 EP Miles, The trio showcase much of their almost universally lauded 2007 debut album Oh We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside, of which all ten track titles begin with When…. The Vasco Era only seem to make sense on this bill in the last few tracks of their 40 minute set tonight, which incite the same energy in the crowd that The Grates are most certainly going to.

Soon enough The Grates burst onstage to the delight of the sold out room and smash their way through Science Is Golden. Two rotating shiny stars loom over the band, who are touring with a fourth member to fill the bass and keys void that has sometimes been to the detriment of their earlier shows as a trio.

The globe that adorns their new album cover is projected against the back wall and jerks around as haphazardly as frontwoman Patience Hodgeson does. After ¬_Lies Are Much More Fun_ she announces “We’ve got lots of new songs to play tonight”, and the band kicks into Aw Yeah. John Patterson, Alana Skyring and the mystery fourth member are the geetar-strummin’, time-keepin’, keyboard-tappin’ business end of the band, allowing Patience the freedom to shimmy and pogo around the stage wielding a skull-topped totem pole whilst never compromising her singing performance.

Seek Me suffers a little from the dodgy use of ill-timed echoes on Patience’s “with you” refrain, and new track Let It Die loses some of its depth with a faster tempo and a few slip ups in the verse to chorus transitions.

Rock Boys is met with such enthusiasm that the crowd starts singing before Patience joins in. Her signature ribbon-twirling appears here as the band does their best to ignore a drunken hooligan clambering onstage.

Carve Your Name is a set standout, along with the poignant Storms And Fevers, despite bowel-rumbling synth-bass. Trampoline gets a huge crowd response, Earthquake is dedicated to The Grates’ “very own mothers”, and before Milk Eyes, Patience announces that “it’s unfair I get the best seat in the house and I didn’t even buy a ticket!”

Sukkafish appears for the second time tonight – this time with the mandatory banjo – and takes yet another beating. Howl has great vocal effects (echos and barking!!) and Patience’s quirky vibrato is beautifully evident on Two Kinds Of Right.

Burn Bridges, the song that introduced new album Teeth Lost, Hearts Won earlier this year has everyone clapping, and John’s vocals on Feels Like Pain give the track a grungey undercurrent and gets the kids up the front moshing.

Inside Outside is the ‘last song but not really’, and is rad. The aptly titled The Biggest And Longest Adventure Ever spells the end of The Grates’ exhaustive set, and as expected the song that started it all 19, 20, 20 takes encore position and ushers the crowd, spent and happy, out into the night.

The Grates live sound remarkably like they do on record. Tonight’s set holds no nasty surprises revealing studio wizardry or a penchant for auto-tune. What an incredible set from an incredible band!