Soundwave Festival @ SydneyShowgrounds, Sydney(27/02/2011)

Mon 28th Feb, 2011 in Gig Reviews

Oh, Soundwave. While other festivals come and go in a world of diminishing returns both financially and creatively, you seem to survive in your own little space. And how appropriate that space is: like the Mardi Gras for the black-clad, tattooed and pierced crowd, you’re the celebration of the music often shunned as unimaginative by critics, anti-social by authorities and just not cool by everyone else.

AJ Maddah, like any good party host, has always strived to make things bigger every year; a fact supported by simply looking at this year’s headliners Iron Maiden, the band whose sheer mention brings connotations of Spinal Tap-like bombast. And where personnel cannot dictate size, he has also pushed for bigger and better, opting for a venue change, albeit a supposedly temporary one in Sydney Showgrounds.

While the layout for the Showgrounds are familiar to most attendees already – this is has been the home of the Big Day Out for the past decade – noise restrictions in place due to having two other large events nearby took their toll throughout the day. Volumes and levels had to be readjusted often mid-set, meaning a lot of bands either became a sea of reverb or fought for instruments to be heard.

But it’s one of few complaints (another being the unnecessary police presence orchestrated to coincide with an election campaign, but that is neither here nor there), especially when the bands themselves seemed to power on like such issues were all familiar territory. Case in point: The Gaslight Anthem. Sounding and looking younger than their lyrics suggest, they seem like a bit of a paradox at first. Surely another Blink 182 sound-a-like can’t be playing music more suited to John Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen? But something in their tight delivery, or in the way their small crowd of devotees reacts, or maybe just the smirks all around that speak volumes for the type of people they are off-stage, pulls the whole thing off. Consider a new fan made.

Sum 41 also has fans, but I’m finding it hard to tell whether they are legitimate followers of the band or just here for the ironic shits and giggles. The banter amongst the crowd of them being has-beens suggests the latter but the huge sing alongs to relatively new tracks suggest the former? In reality the answer is “who cares”. The band themselves seems happy enough putting smiles on people’s faces, and have a tent spewing with people all in the palm of their hands. Only when forced off stage by curfew does the act end, but it’s too hard of one for Millencolin to follow, even with cute ESL accents.

One of the astounding things about Soundwave I found, compared to most other festivals, is the respect people have here for the music they’re listening to. You get the feeling that most of the crowd isn’t attending because they want to keep tabs on the latest buzz band, they went last year or they know a guy who knows a guy who can get thing “something”, but because they actually have an appreciation for who is onstage. When you see the crowd pulled by a band like Stone Sour, a putrid hard rock act playing the same three power chords over and over to some sort of mainstream-Americana bassline, your blood doesn’t boil the same way seeing shirtless bros slamdancing to Pendulum at another festival might. Instead, you feel that the sort of appreciation, obsession even that Soundwave valiantly fosters might just be what is missing from most other festivals. And in Stone Sour’s defence, at least it sounds like they are playing well together.

And maybe that’s why Primus, probably the most un-festival-friendly act since Joanna Newsom, fit in so well amongst the line-up. They’re psychedelic but they’re not psychedelic. They’re hilarious but it seems rude to laugh. They’re groovy but it seems wrong to dance. They’re definitely a rock act but doing anything mildly akin to usual rock and roll acts seems out of place. All this, but Les Claypool continues to hold an audience of thousands on the main stage in awe, strumming away at his several different basses in a demonstration in the type of unclassifiable skill that earned them their own ID3 tag on Winamp. Primus provides one of the most indescribable sets, but also one of the most entertaining and classy shows of the day.

Likewise, Gang of Four seems out of place amongst the Soundwave backdrop. One of Britain’s pivotal post-punk bands and the catalyst for about half of the acts that inspired half of the acts on the bill, it’d be a fair call to see them playing the Beck’s Festival Bar instead. In any case, a quarter-full stage three tent is treated to an insane Jon King, ripping his shirt and throwing himself across the stage as the band plow through their hits with the sort of intensity most of the crowd had never seen before. “I’m like your dad” said the reserved original guitarist Andy Gill, “And Jon’s like your dad after five gins”. If you’re not seeing them soon as a history lesson into Every Band You’ve Ever Liked, at least see them because their live show is awesome.