No Through Road, The ModelSchool, Blood Ones, SouthernUncomfort @ Pony, Melbourne(08/08/09)

Sun 9th Aug, 2009 in Gig Reviews

Southern Uncomfort, otherwise known as Simon Connolly, apologised to the crowd: ‘They’re all kind of sad indie country rock songs. Sorry to start off your night with these.’ And while he shouldn’t have been sorry for playing some really beautiful tunes, it did sound like he was missing something. Turns out that he was, because all the songs he played were from his band Potential Falcon, and should really be played with the rest of the band. His set included Bride, Cab, Midnight, Fronting The Band, Valentines, Heart Beats, Melinda, Monkeys, Old, Dogs.

Blood Ones are a new band with plenty of potential and really great bold ideas, but most of their set fell flat on its face. The largest problem with the three-piece’s sound was their vocals, if you could call them that. Someone had the idea of putting digital reverb over the vocals, which is fine in moderation for effect, or perhaps for the backing vocals or for an intro. Instead, they had an all out reverb-orgy, with the effect turned all the way up on all the vocals for every single song. During the very maturely titled River of Shit, keyboardist Monica starting wailing with the effects, and the overall result was like listening to a bunch of crows die a really, really violent death. It was the same overdone vocal effects that completely killed their cover of ABBA’s Knowing Me, Knowing You, and it sounded like we were listening to an Abba tribute band with water in our ears. They also played Young One, Aftermath and Trouble Mountain.

Another issue was that all their instruments were rhythm: drums, bass and keys that mainly focused on dark, heavy chords and simply rhythms. No melody whatsoever. As Monica nervously pointed out at the start of their set, this was Blood One’s first ever live gig, and while this review may sound completely negative, they certainly did have their moments of unspoilt minimalism and drummer Jim had the most excellent, inventive and eccentric beats. Hopefully Blood Ones will get their act and sound together as time goes along.

Sydneysiders The Model School had so many influences that it is hard to pin them down to a genre. Songs like One Way Ticket were most definitely country songs, but others like Sweet Tooth had funk beats. They opened boldly with a indie-country cover of Prince’s Controversy, but the definite highlight of their set was Indie Rock, a whimsical pop piece with lyrics on the music industry like: ‘We’re not going to sell out, but we’re open to sitcom, commercials and video games, yeah!’ It was really clear that the Sydney band really loved being in Melbourne, with singer and Ben-Lee-doppelganger Brendan Wixted dedicating This Is Not My Town to Melbourne, and temporarily renaming Bus Stop as Tram Stop. Other songs in their eclectic set list were Legs On Fire and Pepper Sprout.

The stage at Pony was so tiny for the five-piece that someone had the brilliant idea of putting Brendan’s mic stand on the floor off the stage, meaning that it was near impossible for him to adjust it taller without climbing offstage. ‘This mic’s getting shorter as the night goes on… or am I getting taller? Who knows?’

I had always thought that Adelaide was a very boring place, and that therefore Adelaidians would be very boring people. No Through Road turned that stereotype on its head. They were entertaining and alarming, funny and scary, joyous yet frightening to watch all at the same time. The crowd didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when frontman Matt Banham jumped up on the rigging, spun around, fell over, chugged down beer and threw it at a female punter (admittedly, he was aiming for the floor and it bounced back up at her). He was a strange mix of charismatic frontman, children’s drama teacher and crazy man standing at the side of the road muttering to himself. He was so full of weird and wonderful, nonsensical banter that there was never a dull moment in their set. His wacky side came out whilst singing Cops: ‘Kill all teenagers and cops, kill all cops and robbers too…’ He leaned into the mic, made a face and whispered, ‘Because robbers just steal your stuff!’

Even if they didn’t have such a psychotically entertaining singer, No Through Road bring music that is grungey enough to have street cred, catchy enough to sing along to and loud enough to jump around to. They started off their set with the awesome Steph’s Song, before Matt enthusiastically explained Explosions to the crowd with lots of child-like sound effects (‘Booooosh! Kaaaapow! Bang!’). They ended their hectic gig with Die For Something and the absolutely crazy fun song Party To Survive, during which Matt ran through the crowd, shouting ‘Surround me! Surround me!’ It took a while for us cool Melburnians to get used to a massive, hairy Adelaidian yelling at us to get cozy with him, but in the end some kooky punters showed him some love. Matt best summarised his band with the statement, ‘We’re from Adelaide, we’ll stab ya!!!’