Titanic The Third @ VictoriaStar, Melbourne (02/04/2011)

Wed 6th Apr, 2011 in Gig Reviews

With a healthy crowd gathering at Docklands’ Pier 1, boarding for Titanic The Third is thirty minutes behind. As the Pizza Hut delivery boy waits to de-board, we’re all treated to a bit of pizza- a nice way to start the night. Unfortunately, a wander downstairs reveals the bar prices for the night, with a single bottle of beer returning a gold coin from a tenner, and another $2 needed for a small bottle of water. The lack of food (only tiny packets of chips were for sale) would also be a slight downer as the night went on.

Downstairs, DJs spin novelty and indie hits like any other party. Upstairs seems to be where most of the action for the night is, with the main bands playing inside the upstairs area.

With the withdrawal of Carnation, opening rights are left to The Solomons, who bring a familiar mix of past Britpop legends for most of their set. Their influences are blindingly obvious, with Oasis and Kasabian showing strongly (though the latter may be put down to lead guitarist James Harding and his West Ryder album cover looking jacket). Yet this doesn’t seem to rid the band of any success, despite most punters hanging back from the makeshift stage. A few of the small crowd hesitate forward after being invited to do so (“We’re not playing another song until we see some more people up here!”) in a trick the band must have learnt in Crowd Management 101 at one of their recent battle of the bands competitions. Though this isn’t entirely a criticism; as a young band they are showing plenty of promise and enough enthusiasm to be simultaneously nonchalant and eager. Close enough to famous Britpop bygones and contemporaries to be warmly familiar, but not too close so as to turn anyone off, it’s a line the band will tread carefully until they fully realise their own sound.

With no set times posted around the boat, it’s anyone’s guess as to who’s on and when. Most punters hang around outside with their expensive Coronas, the only heater fighting against the chilly breeze. Bizarrely, Eagle and the Worm emerge as the second band to play- despite being billed as headliner and being the most popular band on the bill. Having just completed a successful run of shows on a triple headline bill and being ‘unearthed’ by triple j to play the Big Day Out, one would think that they would have a better claim to headline than Northeast Party House, who have barely graduated from inner-city ‘indie’ club nights.

Regardless, the Worm went on, with the eight-piece squeezing into the area we now knew as the stage. Both tracks off their Futureman/ Goodtimes double A-side are aired, while set closing duties are left to the first song they ever penned- All I Know. We’re all on hands and knees as the finale to the set closer builds, and as premature jumpers spring up we’re told to “get down… What the fuck?!”. Mastermind behind the band Jarrad Brown is strangely affable, with his nerdy presence like that of Rivers Cuomo giving a nostalgic 90s feel.

Musically, his band travel far further than that era, bringing back the pop music the world is now devoid of. The octet don’t hold back in their compositions, and Brown is visibly thrilled when his ideas all come together. The three-piece horn section somehow manages to never get lost amongst the one and a half bass guitars (Brown plays with a modified half-bass, half-electric concoction), guitar, keyboards and drums. The band struggle with sound issues through the entirety of their set though, with Brown stopping mid-first song in the breakdown to ask the crowd if they can hear each section of the band. A well-chosen cover really kicks the set- and the night- into gear, but after a few minutes of silence post-set (the downstairs DJ’s tunes don’t get transmitted upstairs between bands), it’s hard to feel anything but disappointment that EATW didn’t close proceedings.

The wait for Northeast Party House is longer than it should be, as Neon Knights play downstairs. With a simple but moderately effective light show, bass and samples/synth come together fairly unimaginatively. For most, it’s not enough to be worth being inside. Instead, most are still hovering the outskirts of the boat, playing ‘Spot where the Melbourne skyline is now’ and looking up at gigantic shipping containers and their transporting vessels. The lights that outline the docks look oddly pretty, while some abandoned-looking warehouses are just plain creepy in the cold, dark night.

Once the boys of Northeast Party House are ready to go, no one else is. It seems as though they start playing, but it might just be a quick full-band soundcheck. After all, there have been sound troubles all night- especially with EATW’s almighty set-up. Regardless, the band stops suddenly, but there are only a handful of people who are there to notice. Thankfully, as the they start up their set-proper, a selection of punters manage to navigate themselves up the increasingly difficult-to-climb stairs. With them they bring a little dancing, but the fact that there’s an absolute maximum of thirty people in front of the band at any point during their set deters from a bigger sense of occasion.

The Party House boys don’t really hit their stride until later in the set, with one particular number in which singer Zach Hamilton-Reeves takes to his sample pad showing a more interesting IDM-like sound. The set finishes casually as what’s left of the punters head downstairs to get their last serving of tunes from the DJ. An acapella chorus of Champagne Supernova ends the night as the boat returns to Pier 1, as several worse-for-wear band members are spotted in the crowd gathered downstairs salvaging the last drops out of their beer bottles. Disembarking the boat more or less on schedule, it’s hard to feel that the night reached it’s full potential.

With a reasonably solid line-up, an increasingly hyped (assumed) headliner and an unusual gig location, Titanic The Third unfortunately didn’t deliver as it might have. A majority of the crowd was uninterested in the bands and seemingly unaware that they were even playing most of the time, presumably much to the annoyance of the select few who were actually there to see the bands- not just to be on a boat. The novelty of being afloat for a gig was enjoyable, and just surveying the never-ending docks of Melbourne was almost entertaining enough. But as a concert, Eagle and the Worm were thankfully able to steer this Titanic away from the iceberg of sound problems, pricey drinks and a lack of food.