The Bumblebeez (DJ Set), Fire!Santa Rosa Fire, The ShinyBrights @ HQ, Adelaide(13/08/09)

Mon 17th Aug, 2009 in Gig Reviews

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The Shiny Brights

And as for WHY I’m putting myself through all this hell on a Thursday night? Well apparently it’s for some wackyarse product placement promoting V Energy Drink”thinly disguised as a “free gig” showcasing four of Adelaide’s finest “indie bands” headlined by The Bumblebeez. Aaaah fuck I love HQ! I mean how I could possibly miss a conflicting headfuck like that!? A statement made no less ironic thanks to me arriving two hours too late and missing two of the opening acts ( The Killgirls and The Touch) fuck damn! I’m completely fried, I’m surviving on less than five hours sleep, circling the drain fast with nothing but a strong hit of caffeine from three hours prior propping my eyelids open and… wait, why the FUCK am I still here again!? Oh yeah The Shiny Brights!

Yup, if ever you were looking for a band to encapsulate the very essence of an energy drink (or better yet an energy drink thrown into a microwave) look no further than the hysterical stage antics of these idiots. Everything about them screams heart palpitations, hallucinations, mass hysteria, muscle spasms, panic attacks, the explosive need to urinate and ultimately spontaneous human combustion. They’re not so much a “live act” as they are witnessing every one of your body parts being demolecularised and shat all over the ceiling. Most of this is thanks to their lead singer Wolfgang who treats every live set like a toddler would react to having all of their Christmases at once crossed with someone being thrown into an electric fence. It’s downright disorienting to watch as he throws himself about: arms flailing, jumping off speaker stacks, drum platforms, into the crowd, smashing the fuck out of his tambourine and shrieking erratically in the space of five minutes; but it definitely sells the performance. And with the rest of the band whipping him into a killing frenzy in kind and the shitstorm of stage lighting in accompanyment, I’m half surprised the entire audience hasn’t collapsed around me in an epilectic foaming mess on the floor (although they sure as shit are dancing like that). Yup as far as “indie” goes they’re definitely more about the psychotic “shock and awe” and not so much about anything that approaches artistic depth.

Still if you’re the sort of trigger happy hyperactive who loves hearing a chaotic connect-the-dots mashup between Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm, the first two Kings Of Leon albums, Just Ace by Grinspoon and Lost Valentinos Man With A Gun fronted by what appears to be a busted up car alarm crossed with Robert Smith from The Cure? They’ll definitely do wonders for your raging sex life (just as long as you can find a place to dump all the “smoking corpses” afterwards). Yup I may’ve been sleep walking when I got in here mere moments ago but now thanks to The Shiny Brights: I’m wide awake, screaming obscenities and gunning to destroy!!

Fire! Santa Rosa Fire

A few short years ago our following act weren’t all that dissimilar to The Shiny Brights. They shared that same clownshit insanity and that same retarding delivery hammered to a drillbit intensity. I believe whimsical terms like “spastic disco” and “hummingbird shitstorm” were often used to describe them, comparisons frequently made with bands like The Rapture, Bloc Party or the Klaxons (ie: simply name checked any of the usual suspects everyone was ripping off at the time) and I mean who DIDN’T love that Justin Timberlake cover!? that shit was extreme! and then somewhere along the way they finally learnt how to play their freaking instruments and they’ve never looked back (yeeeouch!).

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t to say they WEREN’T ridiculously awesome as a throwaway “buzz band” at the time (and I’m not having a dig at The Shiny Brights here.. I swear!) I fucking LOVED that shit! In fact I often feel the need to apologise profusely to next to every one of their oldskool fans who had to put up with me making a complete dick of myself, drunk dancing front of stage, at all their shows circa 2006 to 2007 (I swear Freya from Bing Goes To Monaco still hasn’t forgiven me for that shit). Still with that being said it’s truly inspiring to see how far they’ve come. Fire! Santa Rosa Fire! have developed their own unique sound, rare in a city reknown for its “cover bands” (literal or otherwise). They’ve built a name for themselves on the merit of their own artistic integrity, even rarer in a scene increasingly reknown for its crass disposability. In fact when it comes to describing them now: it’s not so much about making fun of their stage antics (despite how hilarious Art their keyboardist may be whacking the shit out of that tambourine) or their unabashed geekiness (ie: see every joke I’ve cracked at the expense of their guitarist Dave), but more about the strength of their songs. There’s a wealth and a range here that goes past the indie cliché of “four on the floor thrashed fast as fuck”.

From the slow keyboard build of Merchant Ships in the opener, the gunning bass grooves of Dogma Don’t and Haystack Rumble (channeling the urgency of Interpol’s PDA), to the distinctive slow burn of Cold Star (comparing quite favourably to the funk jam of Pink Floyd’s Money). The real quality here is in how they’ve built that off kilter rhythm, that angular attack, layered it with a swinging guitar pattern, a keyboard flourish and an offhand lyric and then change it all up on the turn of a ten cent piece. They’re songs made memorable by taking all the routes less travelled: ecclectic, introspective, off in their own little world. It’s like Battles getting together with Broken Social Scene and having a mad ‘ol jam: there’s all these details you can totally bug out to! And to think all this inspired genius is coming from Fire! Santa Rosa Fire!? Yeah I know, when I first heard that these dweebs were recording an album last year, I too wondered how the fuck they’re going to pull it off. But they’ve been taking their time, they’ve been toiling away on some truly mad science creations, and with tonight’s set the quality shows: this shit truly keeps on getting better and better!

The Bumblebeez

I admit I knew very little about our headlining act save for a few throwaway hits thrashed on Triple J high rotation (gee I wonder if we’ve heard THIS line before?) and that their “main offender” Chris Colonna was solely responsible for either producing or butchering the second Wolf & Cub album (depending on who you talk to in The Ed Castle beer gardens on a Friday night). Granted that was enough to pique my interest when I first saw them receive top billing for this event, but to be honest I WAS expecting something altogether different from what I got. In my head I had it all figured out. I pictured a slacker rap-rock act featuring Chris Colonna with a sideways baseball cap on, wife beater and baggy trousers about his ankles, brandishing a microphone and ripping into nonsensical lyrics about getting blown, getting wasted, and wasting a whole lifetime on the dole. I was also expecting a crowd fuck full of fat fuckers in puffy white jackets and gold chains, skanky chicks wearing nothing but hankerchief dresses and stripper heels and I was half expecting to get stabbed if I went anywhere NEAR them. Or in other words I was expecting the ultimate Aussie hiphop cliché. Maybe if I was real lucky there’d even be a full band: bass player, guitarist, drummer, some dude flipping burgers on a Technics 1200 and it’d be a ripe barrel of laughs! Instead what we got sounded all too much like a cross between a Chris Colonna DJ set and dare I say it a fucking covers band. I mean sure you COULD call it an expert mashup, a remix medly, a creative reinterpretation, a whatever-the-fuck all-star tribute and you’d be dead right (you could also argue there were some original songs in here somewhere) but the minute you get your female MC singing lyrics that ain’t yours for what appears to be every second song? let’s face it, it’s a covers band!

So why am I still reviewing this!? Well surprisingly it wasn’t all that bad. Sure they were hammering that tired “Rocket Bar” schtick to near ear splitting levels (I swear everything from Justice, M.I.A. to Santagold got an airing, or in other words: every other song you’ve ever heard thrashed to death in the past two years at Rocket Bar featuring cut-up electroclash, grime and hiphop overlaid with gangsta girl lyrics yawn) but performed “live” it still pulled me in. In fact in no small thanks to that cute-as-all-hell female MC bouncing about the stage: the very epitome of vapid “club bunny” with a rapid fire delivery and a devilish grin, you couldn’t take your eyes off them. I know, it annoyed the piss out of me too knowing I’d just been bought by the OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK but hey to their credit: it still worked brilliantly. Chris Colonna also displayed some fiendish deck shredding ability bridging the generational divide between Daft Punk and Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock and arguably there was some real artistry shown in cutting it all up, and maybe if I’d heard this over ten years ago at the height of “big beat” and “punktronica” I’d love the shit out of it (it was definitely heading in that territory). Still I couldn’t help but feel that our headlining act was just a covers band and that I’d been “ripped off” somehow. And when you couple that with all the sub speakers throwing me about like a punching bag combined with my total lack of sleep from last night, a growing headache and general foul crabbiness? Yeaaah.. let’s just NOT complete that sentence and pretend we left this on a high note shall we? awesome!

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