Zeal, We Grow Up, The WarsawFlowers @ The Jade Monkey,Adelaide (24/10/08)

Wed 5th Nov, 2008 in Gig Reviews

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS HERE

It happens to everyone. You have one of those moments. You have, dare I say it a moment of clarity, when you stop, you wake up and you wonder: “why the FUCK am I still here!?”. You begin to doubt shit. You begin to consider your career options. It’s last Saturday: you’re knee deep in the dead, a littany of shattering glass, broken bones and spitting teeth raining down upon you. Dickheads are everywhere, sweat and stench, they’re climbing the walls. Your ears are ringing to their retarding screams, they’re swarming like bees, they’re armed to the teeth. Guitars cutting like chainsaws, you’re holding back the stampede. It’s every weekend for you. It’s a flight or fight, kill or be killed, zombies and their clawing fists flying out at you from all angles. You have no one to blame but yourself: you chose this, you live for this, you’re a combat photographer! Point blank range and frontline infantry. You have a teeny tiny compact camera. Now it’s broken. Now you’re fucked. Damn. I’m surprised I didn’t quit this shit years ago. But here I’m at it again! I’ve found my niche, I’m living the life! I don’t care how much I toil for so little. I’m living the scene! Like Caine from Kung Fu: walking from venue to venue, meeting people, getting into adventures. It’s the thrill of the hunt! And then I break a camera. FUCK! I take hundreds of photos, I take videos. I download. I sort. I tweak. I upload. Hours upon hours. Days well into the night. I write like a madman. I publish. I take pride in my work. I make it my own. I sacrifice all else. And this is ALL I have to show for it!? $400 spent for a replacement unit!? I have trouble sleeping. I wonder if it’s a lost cause. I laugh hysterically. I start it all up again. Why the fuck am I still here!? This is Adelaide, I’m doing this for nothing! I’m pissing my life away! I consider giving it all up. I choose to get real paid. I’m no combat photographer! I’m shellshocked, curled up in a corner, rocking back and forth, wondering when it will all end. Guh! it’s just too much for one person to handle!

I probably shouldn’t be back so soon. I probably should have spent some time to “process”. Wait, what am I talking about!? it’s just a fucking camera and I’ve already bought a new one! I don’t “process”. I don’t take holidays. Ha! I laugh at holidays! I can’t be killed! I’m the last one standing! Everyone else has given up, they’ve all moved to Melbourne. I see those tumbleweeds blowing right past me; fuck ‘em all! more for me! Still I admit I’m hanging by a thread, I need to run and hide but I know a place. I could turn it all around, I have the Jade Monkey! This fairy light sanitarium for misfits and broken toys. Hidden away in relative seclusion down Twin Street. Far away from the baboon screams, the breaking glass, the cacophany and the waking dread that haunts me still. I don’t care if you’ve never heard of these bands before. I don’t care if you never read this blog. You’ll find me in the corner with the IV drip cunningly disguised as a brown bottle with a green label. You’ll find me sinking below these waves with a smile. Plug me into that socket. Wait till that red light turns green. Tonight my faith in insanity will be restored!

The Warsaw Flowers

Which in my fragile state of mind either makes this first band the best possible choice in opening act to inspire me, or the worst possible choice: right up there with listening to Iggy Pop’s “The Idiot”, being married to Courtney Love, or dropping a toaster into the bathtub the minute “White Rabbit” peaks. The Warsaw Flowers. Not to be confused with It’s Warsaw! (who are yet another reason to kill yourself and everyone around you) they’re a band that reminds you of everything that is awesome about Christian Slater’s acting career, or most notably his 1990 film “Pump Up The Volume”, or a name that’s clearly inspired by the early years of Joy Division, oh and an entire review that’s brought to you by ouiji board from two confused guys called Omar and Cedric. The Warsaw Flowers. They’re the slow burn of Johnny Cash, Beirut, Okkerville River and Elliot Smith laced with the post punk desperation of The Smiths, Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen with a deranged Elvis sneer. They’re black clouds, black walls, black fingernails and scribbling black thoughts in iambic pentametre into a tiny black book moments before your vision fades to black. They’re songs about winter. They’re songs about breakups. They’re songs that inspire a few too many pills and a bottle of red. They’re your nearest and dearest given the onerous task of carrying you in a pine box, moments before you wake up, screaming and clawing at the upholstery under six feet of compacted dirt. And they’re all my sadsack friends in the early 90’s swapping rare 12’’ vinly Japanese imports of The Cure and wearing metal and plastic dog tags around their neck if ever their mortal remains needed to be identifed in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. They’re The Warsaw Flowers. The happiest, grooviest sunshine party band you’ll ever damn hear!

I admit this isn’t the first time I’ve seen them. I saw them about this time last year. They had a different drummer back then. He wore a dark hooded robe, rode a pale horse and made some wickedarse balloon animals. He later went on to become vice president for the Bush administration. Of other notable difference tonight: (a) they’re not limping about making weird moaning noises and snacking on people’s brains (except for maybe their bass player Angus Stewart), (b) someone appears to fed their lead singer James Stewart at least ONCE in the interim. Trivial I know, but worth noting. The Warsaw Flowers. They may have gained a new appreciation for vitamin C and sunlight, they may even have written a whole stack of happy songs since then (like this one below) but they’re no less brilliant in their ability to suck the life out of your cold cold bones and make it dance a slow shuffle. So when you’re next finding trouble hitting that vein or tying that knot to the ceiling fan: give them a shot! Weepingly melancholic. Fun for the whole family!

If you can’t see this video window click HERE

We Grow Up

Our second band tonight hits a live stage quite like a ray of sunshine after a cold winter’s night: all fluffy, bright eyed, and chasing their own tails, blissfully unaware of the littering corpses piled up around them in The Warsaw Flowers’ wake. Or rather like the sudden impact your clock radio makes smashing through the bedroom window on a Monday at 6AM moments after one of those morning show announcers beams with a “and isn’t it a wonderful morning?”. Or everything that is awesome about having a younger brother lose your prized Stone Roses CD at a party when he was 16 (sorry Dave!). Or the bluebird of happiness being clubbed to death at a My Chemical Romance concert (if only they weren’t too weak to wield the cricket bats over their heads). Yup, that’s We Grow Up, and true to their name they’re a band that lives in cheerful denial over ever having to do just THAT despite being well into their second album. They’re the whimsical clunkiness of The Shins and Death Cab For Cutie mixed with the blissfully hungover sounds of Tapes N Tapes. They’re bouncey castle melodies, happy go lucky grooves and high spirited singalongs. They’re about weird gang harmonies that sound rather like a hive of drunken bees. They’re about buying clothes that are five sizes too big, leaping off roofs, skinning your knees, using up all your pocket money to buy lollies and still believing in Santa Claus well into your teens. They’re every movie Tom Hanks did in the 80’s. They’re We Grow Up. For everyone who say that rock & roll is nothing but a pissy excuse to extend your childhood well into your adulthood: this band is your poster child!

We Grow Up. Despite being about as cheerfully complimentary to our opening act tonight as the explosive decompression you’d experience between sets by Sigur Rós and The Grates; they’re still JUST the sort of alt-country and indie fuzz pop my shellshocked carcass craves so desperately. From week to week I find it’s ALL about enjoying the contrasts, that and laughing hysterically at all the five inch policemen that live on the ceiling. Where was I? Oh yeah! We Grow Up! It’s all in their lead singer Jonathan Mortimer and how he hams and quirks about on his microphone like a long lost member of The Wiggles. It’s in their guitarist Anthony Golding and how he shrinks nervously behind HIS microphone like The Edge from U2 doing a grade five book report. It’s the beaming Kindergarten smiles of Prudence Hart on bass that makes you half suspect she’s a serial killer. It’s Jakub Tengdahl hiding behind them all on his teeny tiny footstall playing the keys like he’s all of eight years old. It’s Tom Mackay on drums secretly hoping nobody notices that puddle on the floor after he got a little too excited in the last song. We Grow Up. They’re dorks, they’re dweebs, they’re characters straight out of a Charlie Kaufman movie but they’re no less welcoming!

If you can’t see this video window click HERE

Zeal

And speaking of pint sized individuals most likely to succeed against all odds (in getting the shit kicked out of them in highschool) here’s our headlining act! A one man band (looking for all the world like a post graduate from the “Seth Green School Of Bucket Bong Puppetry”) by the name of Robert Jarvis, aka: Zeal. Besides being conclusive proof that a mad proficiency in consumer grade electronics and a prediliction for lo-fi ecclectic space jams will effectively stunt your growth to the point of dwarfism, he is also the polar opposite to anything that I could ever have hoped to have lead to the untimely destruction of my camera last week. Least likely to hurl pint glasses at a band during their support slot? check! Least likely to throw up on stage? check! Least likely to throw a mic stand at your face? check! Least likely to pick a fight with an audience member only to leave a venue bandaged and bleeding at the end of the set? check! (although ironically enough he’s also probably the MOST likely to be building a doomsday device in his toilet that will bring about the end of the world). He’s Zeal. He’s my shattered nerves breathing a sigh of relief tonight that nobody’s gonna get killed out there. He’s everything going according to my insane plan, and as long as he doesn’t drop an EMP grenade in the middle of this shit there’s actually a good chance I might get out of this insanity with all my shit intact. Zeal. It’s all about the awesome geek cred he’s rocking on stage. It’s in having a laptop Mac (running Windows XP) supplying all your crunching beats. It’s in incorporating one of those spastic mouth organs with a blow tube as an integral part of your sound. It’s in thrashing about a fucking “Guitar Hero” game controller on stage in the insane believe you’re as badass as Joe Satriani (duuuude.. awesome!). It’s the calculator nerd watch he’s rocking on his wrist. Short of any band featuring Ben Revi, this may very well be, without a doubt, THE most spastically nerdy live act in all of Adelaide!

Zeal. Humming about the stage like an oversized mosquito, throwing his tiny game controller about and tweaking endless knobs to the crunching accompaniment of his laptop beats is Adelaide’s answer to Beck in quite the same utterly misinformed way that Mike Skinner of The Streets could be considered Burmingham’s answer to Eminem. He is the psychedelic sound of The Beatles “White Album” mixed with The Postal Service, he’s Darren Cross from Gerling tripping balls to Radiohead’s “Kid A”. He’s Ben Lee getting the shit kicked out of him in the parking lot by Bernard Fanning to the sound of Unkle’s “Psyence Fiction”. Constantly singing to the looping refrains of his own voice pitch shifting and echoing around him, triggering low-bit crunching angular beats, working a hypnotic hum of homesick alien blues on the organ and joined on stage in the latter half by guest MC Subsketch who rolls out his philosophical riddles and rhymes with understated ease; it’s a mad mismatch of autistic grooves and retrofuturist folk, it’s utterly unlike anything you could ever hope to hear elsewhere tonight and it’s all the more infinitely awesome for it. Zeal. You may’ve found him floating face down and gargling in the toilet back in school, but here in the Jade Monkey tonight, this freaky midget reigns supreme!

At last relenting the cold grip on the half squeezed trigger I had cocked, pulled and aimed at my head all night: I drink the last of the dozen beer bottles littering around me, I breathe in, I soak up all the ecclectic and esoteric insanity I was blessed with tonight, I smile and I breathe out again. All is good in the world once more, I’m happy, everything’s cool, and there’s nothing at all strange about the fact I was about to blow my brains out with a novelty water pistol (unless of course you subscribe to the “conspiracy theory” that it was in actual fact filled with holy water.. duuude!). Yup, once again Jade Monkey has saved the day! (as if I ever doubted it!?). And so satisfied in crisis averted, I step out those exit doors once more, ready to face anything and everything this shitcrazy world could ever possibly dare throw at me..

If you can’t see this video window click HERE

READ MORE FROM SPOZ’S RANT HERE