Big Scary, Cabins @ Spectrum,Sydney (21/05/10)

Mon 24th May, 2010 in Gig Reviews

With this being their virgin headline gig outside of their hometown of Melbourne for their first seasonal installment Autumn, Big Scary can be forgiven for feeling apprehensive early in the evening, this duo is surely on the rise so it was seemingly a pleasure to catch them in the intimate surrounds that is Spectrum.

The nights music began when local Sydney band Cameras enveloped the room in a kaliedoscope of textures. An impressive opening to the evening, Eleanor, Fraser and band were captivating with their sound, switching the vocals back and forth, not allowing any essence of boredum to prevail.

Sound aside, Fraser could learn to look up at the audience a tad more as he moves well and has potential to own the stage. Eleanor needs to stop crooning and howling every single time she isn’t lead vocal. This worked well the first time, but began to grate by the end of the show, spoiling what would otherwise have been a solid and enjoyable performance.

To an untrained eye one would assume a full complement of a band has turned up on stage to perform. This would normally tend to be a safe assumption. Many a band would cancel a gig if they were usually a four piece band and missing a guitarist, but Cabins had other ideas. An impressive start to the gig saw this somewhat stressed frontman jumping back and forth between guitar and organ for the first song, and though looking rushed, he somehow managed to pull this off.

For the rest of the set the keyboard was sadly done away with which, although a shame, may well have been the optimal decision as Cabins went on to rock Spectrum. The set clearly stood up without the organ and Leroy certainly was not lacking on guitar, though perhaps understandably a tad rusty, he did not fail to impress. This was an enjoyable performance with the rest of the band holding together what was an unfortunate situation and failed to disappoint.

Big Scary went for the smooth approach to pronounce their attendance, Kicking off with the keyboard led Deep Freeze. This was followed by Clouds in which both members Tom on guitar and Jo on drums kicked back to an even greater depth of mellow, lulling the crowd into a false sense of small friendly before exploding into an intense display of their garage/folk rock. This was a truly infectious performance, you could tell how happy they were to be performing to a well filled room and this joy flowed outward.

It is perhaps difficult to avoid making a partial comparison between Big Scary and The White Stripes especially during their bluesier tracks later in the set, though Jack White could only dream to have a drummer of this calibre. This performance built onward and upward as it continued and The Apple Song really brought a rise from the audience with Jo, the smiling assassin, massacring her drum kit.

When Tom took to a snare drum front of stage and jammed with Jo they had the house in the palm of their hands. This was a great intro into their toured single Autumn which, followed by Falling Away, rediscovered their melodic side from earlier in the show. Impressively Big Scary maintained their intensity thru to the end of what is a must see set.

Check out the photos from the gig