I readily admit that sometimes I don’t know whether I’m coming or going with this shit. I don’t know whether I’m going around in circles. I don’t know whether I’m simply making it up (or whether any of it ever existed in the first place). I’m utterly unqualified, unjustified and mentally unhinged. I’m having way too much fun, and everything I say will eventually come back to haunt me (and yes, if I had any sense at all I’d quit now before someone kills me!). Granted such is the way in a world without gravity, in a world of endless night. There is no reality here, there never was, and I’m more than happy right here in the eye of this storm, whiling away the hours, unravelling it all and going ever so slighty batshit insane. No really it’s awesome! Partying through the night and sleeping through the day? Living in clubs, pubs and venues, pissing my life away!? fuck yeah! where do I sign up!? But I’m sensing a change in the wind, a disturbance in the ether, and it has me on edge. It’s getting crazier out there, it’s getting crazier in here, it’s getting crazier everywhere I go, the colours are intermingling, there is no black and white, no day and night, and there is no escaping it now. I’m living in the twilight zone, the eleventh hour, everything is up in the air and everything’s in doubt. It’s a million angels and devils are dancing on the head of a pin, pissing on our graves and the worlds we see are intersecting as one. Still, there is a time and place for everything, and it chooses this moment well. If ever there was a time to have an existential meltdown, the end of November, at the precipice, is the best moment to share the joy. I may be barking up the walls insane but there’s a good chance that we’re ALL barking up the walls insane so I’ll just blend right on in! It’s the silly season, we’re in bat country, we’re just passing through and the minute we find that exit sign the fuck out of here it’s happy times for one and all!
Yup, nothing about this should be all that unusual. It always happens this time of year. Everyone goes completely loses their shit with the stress, the studying, the deadlines, the chaos, the burning, the flailing and the screaming and then, just after New Years Eve it returns to normal once more. It comes and it goes. You go back to your world and I go back to mine. Only this one feels different. This may very well be the eleventh hour of the eleventh hour to the eleventh hour of it all. This may be the big one. We can all sense it. We’re just a few chapters from the end. All those interweaving plot threads are now dangling like knives. We’re neither here or there. We’re stuck between worlds, conditions borderline, a fine line between, clawing at the door and begging to let be out. We’ve been deep fried, tested, measured and all the votes have been counted. We’re lame duck presidents, bankrupt bankers and citizens alike wondering just how it will all end, whether there’ll be a sequel, whether it’ll be worth seeing, and climbing the walls in mad anticipation for what’s yet to come. The compass is spinning. Past, present and future are colliding as one. The dead are rising from their graves. Some of us won’t yet live to see the dawn!
So where do we go when it’s THIS insane? Where everywhere you turn there’s another portent and imminent peril all pointing to the end of the world? Oh wait.. shit you mean I’m meant to have an answer to that!? Well actually I don’t but by chance coincidence I stumbled upon one anyways (as quite frankly it was the closest “bomb shelter” I could find moments before all the flaming bat wings came crashing down around my ears) here at the Ed Castle. Where they’ve been redefining the furthering extremes of mental dysfunction all year long! Where being a yammering headcase, short of shoes, scruffy hair, unwashed, missing buttons and pissing into the breeze gives you the golden ticket to the high life! Oh yes, you’ll be amongst friends here, drinking yourself to oblivion in this sanctuary to musicians, illbient miscreants and creatives alike; they’re fuck full of crazy! Sure they’ve only inhabited this place for little under a year (and prior to that the sight and sounds within these walls would’ve surely sent anyone screaming into a rubber room jacked on white noise and glassy-eyed smiles) but even so it’s good to see that places like these never change! Here tonight is where I’ll call my own. Here tonight is where I’ll weather the storm!
Lumonics
Which brings us to our opening act tonight, and a band that is more than familiar with the twilight realm of blurring edges, and of the many shades between light and dark. Not so much through any obvious face melting psychedelics, insane colours, additives, preservatives, a littany of “madchester” freaks dancing about with maracas on stage to 12’’ mixes of “Kinky Afro” (or any manner of other illbient substances otherwise prescribed by the shoeless hippies who congregate out back cough) but more so from the many curious shapes they interweave to form their soothing sun dappled gloom in blacks, whites and lightly tinted greens. Lumonics. They’re a band that connects the dots between New Order, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Stone Roses, Interpol and Kasabian to form an ever shifting articulance that’s years beyond their time. They’re a band that defies all observed laws of physics in any way that would otherwise bind them to this plane of reality. Its in the freakish baritone of Alex on bass and how it comes from what looks like a cross between a string puppet and a twig of asparagus reading out a school report. It’s in Cosi and how he squints into the light, like a World Of Warcraft player seeing sunlight for the first time in months yet conjuring up every aspect of it glinting and reflecting off from his guitar. It’s in all the coin operated moves of Adrian and the equestrian trot of Maguerita holding it all together ever so seamlessly on guitars and on drums. They manifest a songwriting that doesn’t quite belong to this (or any other) decade, yet one that ever so effortlessly flits between them all. They’re Lumonics. They’re the sound of the sun setting low over the horizon. They’re the sound of a world without light. They’re the sound of a band that’s forever forging a path through it all.
And it appears that after many months of all my dribbling gibberish and hyperbole bordering on hallucinogenic that speaks no end of praise for this band (yeah I know, I swear I’ve been trying to make fun of them all this time but short of Alex’s insanely “oversized” head I’ve got nothing!) they’ve started to attract a rather sizeable following from far and wide in awe of their ethereal sound. They’re the “Maguerita cheersquad” cheering her on between every song as she plays the drums (quite possibly in between shots of her alcoholic namesake that only make them ever more rowdy as the gig wears on). They’re the flailing idiocy about the dancefloor to their awesome cover of New Order’s “Crystal”. They’re all the piss heads colliding behind me like dodgems to two of their new songs (making it just about impossible to capture any of them on video). It’s in a crowd that knows that soon their time will come. Oh yes! Sure it might not be now; it might be weeks, months, decades or a thousand years hence when their skeletal remains wash ashore, but it’s there all the same. If ever you see only band before you died, fuckit you should probably go see Radiohead. Otherwise, go see Lumonics. They’re awesome. They’re insane. They’re far from insane. They’re astounding us all in their continuing ability not to suck! FUCK YEAH!!
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Mona Lisa Overdrive
Which brings us to our second act. A band that many of you regulars will be more than familiar with as this is the third time I’ve reviewed these serial offenders for the third week running. Yes I know, it drives me insane too and NO there ain’t a damn thing I can do about it. Mona Lisa Overdrive. Out of all the other bands in Adelaide (with the possible exception of Tyger Tyger) they are THE number one serial offenders to playing at the drop of a hat, the opening of a fridge, the licking of a stamp and knifing of a Sudanese teenager (*cough* too soon?). It’s been a fun ride, it really has, but I swear THIS shit has got to stop! I’m all out of ideas. I’m stumped. I’m stuffed. What the fuck am I going to write about now!? We all know they’re just like Velvet Underground mixed with The Doors and a thousand and one personality dysfunctions that coexist at once in Alex’s head on drums. We all know they play the same freaking songs at every freaking gig they’ve played ever since the day that they started. We all know that in the last two gigs they’ve since added this trippy section at the end where they swap their instruments: Jess on the drums, Dave on bass, Luke pulling shadow puppets on the walls as Alex melts our fucking faces off (and yes I admit it’s ridiculously freaking-arse cool!). And yes I’m also the first one to admit they actually sound surprisingly good now (if their previous gig in support of Children Collide was any indication) but still unless they start fronting up to gigs dressed as clowns on unicycles wielding chainsaws cutting up watermellons whilst screaming perverse limmericks in chinese we ain’t gonna have shit to talk about. Or at least that’s what I originally thought until tonight.
Mona Lisa Overdrive. As much as this band is about anything tonight (and by anything, I mean pretty much anything I’ve written in a review before that makes a whole lot more sense than any of the gibberish I’m about to write now) are a band that’s all about the gift to gonzo rock photojournalism that is their guitarist Luke and his all too ridiculous undertaker, black suit bow tie, combo that rather resembles what the hellspawn between Courtney Taylor-Taylor from The Dandy Warhols and Lurch from The Addams Family would look like playing a funeral to all the smoking braincells soon to be since extinguished from inside of Alex’s head (and yes, there’s a good chance that by the time they’re done tonight he’ll have barely enough left to power the pilot light on a stove). It’s Luke playing to the accompanyment of Lumonic’s projected visuals that makes Mona Lisa Overdrive sound ever more creepy and gothic than ever quite intended. It’s Luke hammering that same crazy jangling guitar riff. It’s Luke creeping about the stage like Nosferatu, like a Nightmare Before Xmas, like the awesome Vitamin D deficiency that he is. Sure I could make plenty more jokes about Alex on the drums (and his many spaced out rainman interludes between songs), I could make fun of Dave and the frisbee sounds he’s cooking up on guitar or Jess and all the mad shapes she pulls in between on keys, but tonight it’s all about Luke. That mad freak damn near scares me, but he’s rocking the shit out of this set all the same!
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Lyla
Which (speaking of sights for sore eyes) brings us to our final headlining act tonight. Their name may not be familiar (as I’ve only ever seen this band live once before), but some of their faces will be more than familiar as the lumbering troglodytes you always seem to find snuffling about in Supermild at 4AM. Ever present, part of the furniture, so much so I’ve actually begun to suspect they simply live in the crawl spaces under the stairs like trolls for weeks at a time; I may occassionally jokingly refer to them as the Three Amigos, but you may otherwise know them as Anthony Callisto on guitar, Sam Bruno on bass and Stefan Krcmarov on keys. I see them in Supermild all the time. We cross paths. We talk. We get drunk. We have a laugh. They’d always seem to invite me to all their gigs and I always seem to “accidently” forget to show up. I do this a lot. It’s been a long running joke. It’s probably pissed them off to no end, but hey we all know I’m an arsehole, it’s part of my charm! Still, sooner or later I knew I wanted to return the favour (for all the beers they may’ve been bribing me with) and tonight was no better time to catch them at their best for their CD launch tonight. Lyla. In a nutshell they sound exactly like Jet. That’s pretty much all you need to know. And no I’m not talking about the Jet you know NOW that causes an allergic response verging on homicidal rage as you beat someone’s head into a wall (or in other words ask Mathias Northway about the time he once punched out Nic Cester for being a complete twat), but more the Jet you remember way back in 2002, back before all the commercial airplay, back before they all became wankers. Lyla in their simple rollicking rock ‘n roll good times tonight harkens back to that simpler (some may say more blissful blitheringly naive) age of wonder.
Of course clearly that’s not all there is to them (as I think we all can agree the lazy comparison to Jet really ain’t doing them any favours). So into this mix feel free to throw in Supergrass, Dallas Crane and You Am I. Then chuck in “Physical Graffiti” by Led Zeppelin, “Sticky Fingers” by The Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” (as performed by Michael J Fox at the end of Back To The Future), their spirited cover of “Jumping Jack Flash” (Whoopi Goldberg optional), that scene out of Pulp Fiction involving Uma Thurman and John Travolta doing the wacky dance at Jack Rabbit Slim’s and for some bizarre reason Kate Hudson getting her stomach pumped in Almost Famous (and no I have no idea why). When that’s cranked up on full, inches away from a psychotic honkytonk meltdown you’ve got the essence of what Lyla sound like live (and even more so when you’re as retardingly drunk as I was in which case.. awesome!). They’re Matthew Minucci on leads channeling a 60’s timewarp of whisky stained rock ‘n roll smoking a cigarette, setting himself on fire and doing a spastic dance till he’s nothing but a pile of ashes and a pair of shoes. They’re David Mazzarelli going round for round with a drumkit, losing both his sticks, only to belt the cymbals retarded with his hands. They’re everything that is awesome in retro rock for every reason I’d normally make fun of The Trafalgars for (which granted every one of them finds hilarious except for the bass player who wants to kill me). They’re the genuine article. They totally don’t belong to this day and age. They’d be completely hopeless with an iphone, an ipod, a DVD, CD, VCR or an internet connection, but they’re rocking it out all the same. They’re Lyla. Hardly original, laughably derivative, but drunk as fuck they’re fucking brilliant all the same!
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