Pajama Club, Glass Towers @Oxford Art Factory, Sydney(13/6/11)

Fri 17th Jun, 2011 in Gig Reviews

With the amount of grey hair and business suits within the venue, anyone under the age of thirty could have feared that they were the youngest person there. Thankfully, Byron Bay quartet Glass Towers shuffled onto the cramped stage before too long and removed all doubts. These are the kind of kids that cannot remember life before the turn of the century, and have had everything they know about music defined for them by Triple J. There’s a bit of Lost Dinosaurs here, some Bloc Party there (they even nip the dual-guitar style of Banquet at one point), even a little bit of Yves Klein Blue – especially considering frontman Benjamin Hannam is the spitting image of Michael Tomlinson, right down to the double denim.

You can act the cynical bastard all you like, but there’s one thing you can’t take away from Glass Towers – the kids can play. Even when they go through a slump around the middle of the set where each song sounds more or less exactly the same, their energy and engagement with the songs never waned once. They clearly love playing, and have some killer tunes in their repertoire that get quite a few heads bopping about the place. It will only be a matter of time before they’re moving on to bigger and better things – once year twelve is out of the way, of course.

The mystery surrounding Pajama Club had been building for the weeks leading up the tour. Here’s what we knew going in: Neil and Sharon Finn have been making music in their jammies, made a band out of it and roped in the former drummer for The Grates. Oh, and it wasn’t going to sound like Crowded House. Clearly, the band were as excited to share their new songs with us as we were to hear them, bounding on stage ten minutes early (a refreshing change from normally having to wait around an extra 20 minutes) and kicking into a trippy, spaced-out groove.

Neil rode the beat with a powerful lead vocal, squelching synthesizer and occasionally soaking his guitar in feedback and effects – needless to say, this was no Don’t Dream It’s Over. Nothing they played – predominantly from the upcoming self-titled debut – even came close to it. The Pajama Club sound is another part of the continuing story concerning Neil’s intense interest in sounds, tones and – in particular – electronics. It’s sound full of haunting harmonies, a subtle influence of funk and a determination to see how long it can stretch the ideas of a pop song before snapping them entirely. It leaps from the seriously strange to the strangely serious within the course of half a verse, and practically all the while it’s engaging, thoroughly enjoyable stuff – to most of us, at least; the older folks are a little bewildered by the whole thing.

Pajama Club is an interesting beast. The freedom to work under an entirely new moniker is clearly liberating for Finn, who neither looks nor sounds his 53 years. He powers through the songs with the energy of someone far younger, with a satisfied grin never too far from his face as he shifts from sparse guitar to wafting synth atmospherics – and, on one occasion, right on over to the drums. Meanwhile, his better half Sharon recalled the role that the late Linda McCartney played in Wings. Her skill as a musician (bass in this instance) is average at best, but she clearly enjoys the music and provided some very pleasant vocals, both lead and backing, throughout the set. Up the back, Alana Skyring was deeply focused on her playing, with a facial expression that she might have hoped would have suggested a deep concentration, but instead suggested a continuous loop of “don’t fuck this up, don’t fuck this up, don’t fuck this up…” She needn’t have worried, though, as she filled out the songs remarkably well. The real secret weapon in Pajama Club, however, was revealed to be Sean Donnelly. It was his keyboards, guitar and vocal work that helped fill in the missing pieces, adding in that extra sense of adventurous weirdness to the compositions, particularly when he takes his scattered, warped sounds off the course of the song entirely, as if he’s off in his own little world.

So what can we expect when the album drops this coming August? It’s not quite pop, rock or electronica, but there’s no time for genre-based trivialities when you’re dealing with a sound as interesting as the Pajama Club’s. If this performance was anything to go by, Finn will have put his name to two brilliant albums within the space of eighteen months, the last being 2010’s Crowded House record Intriguer. At a time in his career where he could be spending his millions on another holiday house and living off the royalties of Woodface for the rest of his days, it’s inspiring to see Finn in what appears to be yet another creative renaissance. Stay tuned.