Gangbusters @ Bar 32, Canberra(30/10/08)

Fri 31st Oct, 2008 in Gig Reviews

After the coming of age party last week, it would have been hard to top the party atmosphere of Gangbusters come Thursday night. Thank the Lord for Halloween!

All dressed up with a giant canopy above the dancefloor, little illuminated jack o’lanterns, and various ghouls painted around the bar, Gangbusters was entering its second year in style, if a day premature.

Having arrived on the later side of the night, I bounded on into Bar 32 as local act Concercet were wrapping up. Having heard a lot about them, i.e. how awesome they are, I was a little disappointed I missed them, but from the song or two I managed to catch, a repeated listen wouldn’t go astray sometime in the future.

After a super short break, …like foxes took to the stage. Not to get all music snob on you, but these guys are quite the Deerhunter/No Age mix, and the best part is that I know for a fact they aren’t doing that intentionally, so it’s totally cool. With plenty of reverb and delay on the clean channel, the guitars were sublime and could easily lull the audience into a nice blissful state of uh, bliss. For those of you who would rather tap your feet and shake that moneymaker, …like foxes drummer, Jono, was hummingbird-like on the high hats and snare, which I think made the room hotter than it should have been, given the amount of heat he would have been radiating. Need alternative energy sources? Drummers in post punk bands. I’ll take my Nobel prize now if that’s ok?

The only thing that seemed to be missing was vocals. I didn’t think that …like foxes was an instrumental band, however it turns out the mic was in fact on, only the vocals were well and truly buried in the mix from what I could, nay couldn’t, hear. However, there’s a very good chance that this was the point, in which case, they did a damn good job of it.

To close the night, Gangsbusters had Wollongong band Ohana. Big on the Sydney-centric indie blogosphere, it was well and truly evident that Ohana were worthy of the praise they have been getting. The first thing that was noticeable was that their sound was dialled in perfectly. For such a small gig, it was amazing to be able to hear all instruments perfectly, with not one of them being buried in the mix, or sounding too muddy or bright.

It’s about now that I would like to declare Ohana the flagbearers of the new genre of Robot Post-Hardcore. Odd time signatures, minimal vocals and non-existant singing, repetitive bass/guitar riffs/beats, and a very disjointed approach of playing to said time signatures gave the band an urgency and foreboding that seemed to transfix the audience. About this time a friend remarked over the noise that the ‘syncopation is stressing me out’, and I still can’t think of a better way of putting it.

Finishing up very quickly, Ohana left the floor applauding the audience, which was a humble gesture not lost on the zombie-like patrons, finally shaking the consciousness back into themselves after having it methodically tortured out of them by Ohana.