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THE AMCATS
This is our opening act, and yes we’ll ignore the bleedingly obvious and move right along (I know you’re all thinking it but I promised). This is The Amcats. They’re like nothing else I swear. Or perhaps they’re a little like the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Black Keys, The Vasco Era, The Fiery Furnaces!? “Hey I know! let’s just throw up any two-piece band we can think of, and see if that’ll stick for a live review!?” The Ting Ting? The Presets!? shit.. what!? no, we’re smarter than that, let’s look for that instead. Let’s look past that surface, past the ever so familiar, past the jokes we’ve cracked a million times before (dude you SO should see their music video when they pull a “Michel Gondry”) and see what truly defines them here. There’s a lot to like about The Amcats, especially tonight. It’s the mad buzz, it’s an energy, you can’t escape it, you wanna do bad bad things with it. It’s like a whiskey town tornado. It’s like a jukebox blown to shit with machine gun fire. It’s a car wreck that’s been left to gather rust since the 50’s and 60’s, with its bubble domes and swim fins, flying high through the air to a spinning dervish of devil dust. It’s such a simple dynamic too, but it’s genius in its delivery. You feel it in the elephantine thump thump thump of Renee on the kit, complete with her whimsical head tilt, cute as a button, smashing that four to the floor like she’s ten feet tall. You can hear it in the rapid fire yammer of Shane on the vocals, babbling incoherent like a speedway commentator running hell for leather, running on nothing but gasoline and adrenaline, all fed through a megaphone, guitar strings cut loose like a barking dog dialtone. You can see it in the epilepsy of lights that accompany them, mad flashing lights, making it just about impossible to photograph them without collapsing on the dancefloor in a foaming fit (thanks Strangelove Azz, no really.. genius work there!). It’s an all encompassing frenzy, you can feel it in your teeth, rattling in your ribcage, hammering your heartrate like a defibrillator, as the beat kicks on. The Amcats. They’re part cheese mating ritual, beaming smiles like the closing scene of Juno with an acoustic guitar: only sped up like a cartoon speeds and fed through a leaf blower crossfaded with a flamethrower. At this rate they could outgun the devil and win ALL our souls back. It’s oh so simple, yet oh so fiendishly effective!

SHAMAN SON
One may wonder from title alone, just how Lady Strangelove and The Amcats came to be at the same gig, how they can both make sense in the same sentence. Chalk and cheese right? what the fuck were these spaced out hippies thinking!? but they’ve truly thought of everything tonight. They’ve provided a missing link here that bridges that divide. You heard it in the 60’s, you heard it resonating ever louder in the 70’s. It’s the soundtrack to the Vietnam War, it’s the despair and dysphoria that our ancestors felt, that heart of darkness leading to an escape plan in all that dizzy decadence, that energy and euphoria we call home tonight. Little do most people realise, but psychedelia? it came from the blues maaan! Its crazy I know, but you can hear it in our second act, you hear it loud and clear and screaming like the blood curdling and coarsing in your jugular vein. Shaman Son, formerly known as Jarvis Jay, formerly known as just Jarvis are that “missing link” that we needed now in more ways than one. They come from a primordial swamp, a primal rage, or quite possibly somewhere in the vicinity of Melbourne (damn.. there seems to be a LOT of this shit happening of late, maybe its worse over there than we thought?). You can see it all unfold in front of you, that predator to prey relationship at play: that shock of blond hair flailing and screaming in front of you on a mic, dorsal fins shooting forth, teeth digging into flesh, the taste of blood lingering in the water, then torn apart and spat assunder under flickering lights. Wow! It’s hard to keep focus on all their movements like this, they DO run around a lot: but you feel it. This is our potential, this is what we’re all capable of when those leashes let slip. It’s Jimi Hendrix warming his hands over a freshly lit guitar. It’s Robert Plant gnashing and wailing those Led Zeppelin blues. It’s The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” and Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. It’s Nick Oliveri back when he was in Queens Of The Stone Age: standing there naked, screaming and on fire, egging you on. These are the bleeding edges where blues meets liquor and hard drugs and open those doorways into the savage beyond. Shaman Son. Fuuuck.. it’s one helluva mad trip!

LADY STRANGELOVE
Which brings us here to the climatic culmination, this witches cauldron, this psychotropic blend 43 which rapidly boils, bubbles over, and eats through the walls. Yup, if this is still a search for intelligent life then it’s becoming less literal and more like a spirit walk in the desert fucked up on peyote, or a hysterical head exploding metaphor mixed up with the closing scenes of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Who knew that a few chimps banging rocks right back in the beginning could have brought us so far? Lady Strangelove. It’s always been like this, ever since day one. They’re a mischievous lot, they’re criminally insane, they walk onto a live stage and everything goes black. They control the horizontals and the verticals, they work the crowds like puppets, they kill all the lights like a sensory deprivation tank and then they flood all the frequencies with a screaming weaponised attack. It’s hard to keep a clear head in a shitstorm like this (and believe me I’ve tried!). What to you (as an outside observer) may sound like a freebase concoction between The Chemical Brothers, Led Zeppelin, The Music (their first album.. never the second or third!) and Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd: goes out the window the minute you’re in the thick of it. They press a button, there’s spinning blades, bits of you splatter every which way, and before you know it you’re writing review after review of sanctimonial gibberish like: “Lady Strangelove are like a pod of whales passing through the anus of an ostrich!”, or “they’re an amazonian rainforest full of tropical birds shot like a frisbee into the far reaches of outerspace!”, or “woweee.. I can finally understand every single word that Brendan is singing!”. You can’t, you have an inoperable brain tumour the size of an eggplant and you only have months to live.. it’s been nice knowing ya! Still it’s an awesome sendoff if ever we saw one! It’s not just the same old psychedelic gibberish that you see everywhere else. You may be familiar with the psychedelic childlike innocence of a Tame Impala, or the comatose release of a Wolf & Cub but this is Lady Strangelove: they’re as cynical as they come. They’re a call to arms, they’re a psychotropic blues, they want NO part in this reality that has become unfit for human consumption, they want to transcend all that and disappear into the stars, or further still where the laws of physics can’t fuck with them; and tonight we want nothing more than to join them. You can see it all around you: a thousand final solutions reaching critical mass, detonating all at once. Mind, matter, everything around us as one, as pure energy. A shockwave blast exploding ever outwards, washing those city streets clean with a white hot heat, then sprouting thousands of little rainbows refracting in their wake. Yup, maybe that’s the true sign of intelligent life? knowing when you can party hard, and then knowing when it’s best to leave.

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