Ball Park Music, City Riots,Buckley Ward @ NorthcoteSocial Club (16/07/2011)

Sun 24th Jul, 2011 in Gig Reviews

A floor tom prominent amongst the stage clutter for opening band Buckley Ward explains pretty much all you need to know about what this band brings to the musical landscape. Light, airy melodies backed by throbbing, tom-heavy jungle-esque rhythms with sparkling keyboard highlights. Sure, it’s nothing new on the horizon and the band do it justice, but it is smacking of something a little faded already. Surely we can draw a line under the set-ending tom-drum solo and never revisit that again?

City Riots, on the other hand, nod to a small envelope of musical history where Australian guitar-pop was king. Shades of Even, Motor Ace and The Superjesus ooze through their guitar lines, and it’s refreshing to see a young indie band in 2011 eschewing the trappings and bringing everything down to a focus on 2 snappy guitars, solid bass and hi-hat heavy drumming. A fitting finale sees the leaders of fellow genre-buddies Boy in a Box and British India take vocal duties for a cover of the Bruce Springsteen’s Dancer In The Dark.

As a fan, I’m conflicted as to what it is exactly I want to see from Ball Park Music in 2011 and on the cusp of releasing their first full album. On the one hand, their endearing mad-cap antics and cute-beyond-cute lyrical takes are a major part of what sets this group out from the crowd. On the other hand, an inability to move through that wide-eyed-in-astonishment stage of band evolution may see their serious musical talents and pithy takes on society lost in the sea of giggles and knowing raised eye-brows, doomed to that well-worth path of the mildly humorous gimmick groups (their cover of Presidents of The USA’s Peaches mid-set nods to this very issue).

With yet another single release to support (the optimistically titled It’s Nice To Be Alive), BPM set off on a sly slew of capital city headline slots to give a glimpse into what the band will be offering with their first full length. Immediately, it was clear this wasn’t going to be a typical set, as they kicked off with their runaway favourite iFLY, which usually sits in the well-deserved set-pinnacle slot later in the night.

A blend of newer, less-familiar titles are then snuck in before the full force of the set is unleashed with a Guns ‘n Roses-esque segue into Culture Vulture of the Year 2000, no less. Leader Sam Cromack is now less and less encumbered with a guitar, leaving him to roam, shimmy and thrust around the stage to his heart’s content with all the swagger of a bona fide rockstar frontman. And while the other members are still as mad-cap as ever (bass/co-vocalist Jennifer Boyce’s deliberately dopey one-liners are killer throughout the night), Cromack’s wacky frontman routine steals the show and seems to have his colleagues constantly keeping watch on where he’s wanting to take the show.

It’s a little disconcerting to watch, initially, as he rock-stars up all over the stage, but by the time he slithers out of his shirt (which in itself could be a comical act owing to the pasty white skinned torso underneath) and snakes himself around the mike stand in a pure rock moment, it starts to strangely all make sense. And it fits with the tone of the songs – the sweet All I Want Is You benefits from a sincere delivery and the full-blown scale of Alligator hint to a depth that has been constantly lurking. The encore sees Cromack complete the full rockstar compliment: sans shirt and necking a nearly empty bottle of scotch, he prostrates himself on top of the outstretched arms of his adoring audience and embraces the moment. It’s Ball Park Music with a healthy swig of adult swagger: good, clean, adult fun.