Pikelet, The Twerps, TheParking Lot Experiments @ TheNorthcote Social Club,Melbourne (10/04/2010)

Sun 11th Apr, 2010 in Gig Reviews

Melbourne likes Pikelet a whole lot. And with plenty of reason: it’s easy to like the quirky, intelligent, beautiful music that makes her important to the city. Evelyn Morris has been performing under the guise of a mini-pancake for several years now, gradually garnering the admiration of many with the loops that spin and a voice that soars. Having now acquired a complete – and talented – band, she has released her most impressive effort yet, a new album by the name of Stem. It’s a piece of wonder, thoughtful and effortlessly complex, like little else around at the current time. So the love and admiration grows, and on a Saturday night at the Northcote Social Club, all was set for a happy and lovely celebration of this impressive new record, and so it happened… for the most part.

First to join the celebrations were local popsters The Parking Lot Experiments, and few could say they weren’t a great way to begin. There were grins spread across the stage, lots of long hair bouncing around and enough “wa-oh” choruses to fill a very large garage. Sometimes time wasn’t quite kept, sometimes it all fell apart, but it was carried through with such earnest recklessness that the crowd couldn’t help laughing along with them. They lived up to their ethos of happiness and fun times, in a big, honest way.

Surprise Melburnian Jens Lekman DJed throughout the night, keeping up the happy fun with bales full of recent 60s and 70s throwbacks, including the likes of Girls’ Lust for Life, which is just about impossible not to be happy around.

It was a tough job to systematically destroy those feelings, song by song, but The Twerps managed pretty well. Passable songwriting was the only redeeming feature of this ultimately depressing set, punctuated with such charismatic interludes from the frontman: “Me and Steve have been drinking beers since 3”, “I’ve had a couple o’ beers, I don’t care what you say”, and then later, “Do you like having a couple of beers?”. The six or seven claps which followed their performance spoke of the crowd’s goodwill tested.

Certainly all were ready for a Pikelet love-in, and as the curtains parted, the crowd warmly welcomed her to the stage. The set was slow to begin with, as they treaded through their first few: Morris told us later she was particularly nervous about playing to her hometown again, and because of this, the beginning of the set was formed with an absence of the wonderful personality in her music, which should be even more present live.

Always impressive was the dynamism of the current line-up: the three burly males she now plays with (see the chesty promo shots!) are really great musicians, working fluidly together. When they met, Morris said she was “very impressed with [the] musicality and general air of awesomeness” of synth player Shags Chamberlain. The same could certainly be said for Tarquin Manek and Matt Cox; all three add creativity and strength to Pikelet, and this comes across powerfully on stage. The entire band elevated with current single Weakest Link, which pulled the set to its most exciting point of tension and from there the music really energised. The moody Endurance Hunter kept the momentum, and the new song which followed, with its sliding melodies, sounds like just about the best Pikelet has written.

On the waves of these wonderful songs Morris’ mood seemed to lift up, and by the encore, she was smiling her way through the final two, which she completed solo. At these moments, the mood was warm, and electric, just as we’d hoped. The sparkling personality that Melbourne has come to love shone through, and the show finished like it started. We like her a whole lot.