The Bullet Holes, GrandCentral, The Colors, The FourWalls @ Fly by Night,Fremantle (15/12/2006)

Mon 18th Dec, 2006 in Gig Reviews

Man the heat has really set in over the past few days. Summer is here again and that means the festival season is just around the corner. But with all the touring bands that will be gracing our stages over the coming months we shouldn’t forget about our home-grown up-and-comers that slave away on the small stages in our favourite local venues.

With that being said the first thing I noticed when I came running into the Fly-By Night Club on Friday night was how much the atmosphere in the venue resembled a school disco. The Bullet Holes held their Lost Cause EP launch and so it wasn’t so much of a surprise that the vast majority of the crowd was made up of parents, siblings and friends of the bands in the evening’s line-up - and I’d swear some of the punters must have been using fake IDs. It didn’t help that the Fly by was only about a quarter full and most of the patrons were seated around tables about fifteen metres back from the stage.

Apologies to The Four Walls and The Colors as I missed their sets on the night but from all reports they both put on fantastic shows. I arrived as Grand Central were beginning their set and the smartly clad boys certainly appeared to be giving it their best shot , they were tight, they looked sharp and musically they have some catchy pop tunes with some well worked guitar parts - but something just didn’t quite do it for me. Their stage presence was kind of impersonal and static at times. They let their guard down a couple of times and the band members slowly began to show traces of smiles, but for their big hats and cowboy shirts they weren’t really quite rough enough around the edges to impose themselves as credible rock and rollers.

The Bullet Holes, whilst still a very young band, know a lot more about stage presence than their immediate predecessors. They entered the stage through a parting mist of smoke-machine clouds while TV screens propped on the stage fuzzed with white noise. The band quickly cut into some high octane riffs and fist pumping choruses as the masses suddenly rose from their chairs and formed a mosh in front of the stage. Over the course of The Bullet Holes’ set I noticed that the gap between their best and their worst is really quite large. They played some ripping songs such as Wake Up, Every Day and Our Fault and some not-so-good ones with cliched acoustic guitars and faux Americanised vocals to boot. At their best they kind of resemble something of a young Living End but that’s been done before, hasn’t it? However there’s no doubting these boys’ talent and a word like potential is apt when describing this year’s Ampfest winners. Brad’s drumming and Owen’s composure as a frontman mean that this band will always be able to connect with an audience and as their songwriting matures, who knows what the future may hold for The Bullet Holes?

Jump forward to the end of the night and Simon from The Colors stumbles on stage, glass in hand, to join The Bullet Holes in a sensational rendition of The Cure’s Love Cats. “This guy is so rock and roll,” mutters Owen from the Bullet Holes as Simon smashes his glass to the ground. Now I’m a big advocate of the local music scene and I really enjoyed Love Cats on the night, but every now and then you see something that gives you a little bit of perspective of the spectrum of what we sometimes call the music business. So at the end of the night I was left wondering, what is so rock and roll about a bunch of kids breaking glasses and singing eighties tunes in front of their parents?