There’s a little patch of Melbourne indie-experimental bands that all seem to have grown up together and are the bestest of friends. When you go to their gigs, the crowd appears to be part of this massively loved-up underground scene where everyone has at some stage or another played in a band together, gone op shopping together, worked together or dated. Not that I eavesdrop, but two girls at the bar discussed how most of the crowd featured on their Facebook friends list, and every time someone walked in into the Evelyn it was like hugs all around.

The Parking Lot Experiments’ Dave Connor proved this intimate connection by individually thanking every single musician that played that night – a difficult feat when you have six bands. So when Love Connection decided to launch their I Know You’re Real single with the help of their friends, you can rest assured that there was some of Melbourne’s finest indie-experimental musicians on show. Buddy bands *Milk Teddy*and Psuche opened the night at the Evelyn with a good dose of progressive, minimalistic tunes to warm up the crowd.

Second band of the night was trio Tantrums who played at Fermez La Bouche seven days prior at the same venue. While their great set at the mini-festival did garner them some new fans with an eerie performance, their solid set a week later really showed why the city’s experimental scene really adores this three-piece. The back bone of the band is Sarah Phelan, the onstage whiz at digital percussion and programming that sets the frame for Jade McInally and Nicolaas Oogjes to express their wild musical selves. Main vocalist McInally lent Tantrums a Banshees vibe, with Siouxsie Sioux dirtiness and carelessness in her vocals. Oogjes’ inventive and eccentric use of the trumpet has also helped this writer overcome her insane phobia of the instrument. Their excellent set included Crisis Is, Her Bones, Overseas, Sticks and Stones and Beat The Happy Pavement.

Rat vs. Possum are essentially a group of percussionists who every once in a while go away and play another instrument, like say the guitar, for just a brief moment of time to accentuate the beats. Every single band member played percussion at some point, and every song was heavily doused in delicious tribal beats. It almost felt like there should have been a giant bon fire in the middle of the Evelyn for all of the punters to dance about. The band played War, River, Jungle, Temple_, Africa and Binti Jua. Rat vs. Possum may quite possibly have the coolest band name ever, but if they ever need to change it they could call themselves – œFireworks’ because watching them play was absolutely explosive and their music is pretty much the most exquisite thunderous noise imaginable.

Following them were The Parking Lot Experiments. Watching these young lads is like grabbing a bunch of really avant-garde preschoolers and giving them a bunch of instruments and seeing what happens, and I mean that not as an insult but as the highest compliment. The boys tip the stereotype of the arrogant, swaggering musician with pretentious ideas about their art, for The Parking Lot Experiments just seem happy to share their music. Their indie-pop music has this childlike innocence to it, and even when the odd vocal calls for a bit of screaming their sound never ever ventures towards angst-ridden. You can’t help but smile when The Parking Lot Experiments are nearby.

While the previous bands had Metropolis playing in the background, The Parking Lot Experiments had better ideas and instead played some kids’ feature film with puppies. They all seemed to be over the moon at this, and started shouting out random things: “Do we have puppies? That’s all I wanted for the whole show!” yelled out one band member. “Let’s not play until we see a puppy.” “This is the only movie I’ve ever cried to.” “Now we don’t have to play good anymore, because we have puppies!” Fortunately for the crowd, The Parking Lot Experiments didn’t get too distracted by the assortment of cute fluffy animals in the background and played Please Don’t Be Mad, I’m Not Scared, Airship Parties, Interests and Year 12.

Love Connection are best described as an indie trance band, not because they resemble the awful dance genre in the slightest but because they espouse the true meaning of the word trance. They opened their set rather flatly with I Know You’re Real (which is actually the single they were launching) and Dean’s Keys. While both tracks were actually quite awesome songs, there was something in their performance that was lacking. Perhaps just stage nerves at the packed out Evelyn , but they changed this with their third song Trilogy, which totally immersed the crowd in the atmosphere.

Starting off quietly, Love Connection slowly built up the sound gradually until there was this overwhelming musical noise coming from the stage. Some of the guys from The Parking Lot Experiments and Psuche dragged out some of their tom toms to the foot of the stage, and the three of them gloriously added to the already hypnotic trance beats. There was an entire row of dancing alt-kids doing the indie-equivalent of raving, and one of the musos grabbed the smoke machine and started to pound it like a bongo. I never knew that smoke machines could blow smoke rings, but apparently they can if you hit them hard enough. They followed up with a host of other excellent songs, including Movement!, Shapes, Lost City of Gold and All Over, and the energy in the room was hyped up.

Just before their last song of the night though, they hit some technical difficulties and it almost seemed like they had lost their momentum, and some of the crowd started to wander off. But as soon as they started playing Ages (Braincloud) the whole room swung back in to a fine frenzy of skipping and jumping around like Mexican jumping beans (some took of their shirts, or their shoes, or both to get into the action better) and danced the night away to Love Connection.