Like Paris Hilton, you sometimes just want to give Sydney a good slap. It bemoans the fact that so many bands give Australia the touring cold shoulder but when the good people at Feel Presents bring some of the world’s finest, most exciting musicians right to its doorstep, Sydney just yawns and mutters something about having to stay in and wash its hair. So, despite playing host to a group of hugely promising locals, a mind blowingly talented Melbourne band and one of the world’s finest exponents of inventive, heavy duty rock, The Gaelic Club is not even half full. It makes you want to weep for the bands we won’t get to see because this kind of a reception just doesn’t make it viable.
Those that are here will do their best to make up for the city’s apathy by arriving early to support The Dead Farmers, a young trio who refuse to let their still evolving musicianship box in their creativity. Taking their cue from tonight’s headliners (who they describe as being the best band in the world) the Dead Farmers allow a precocious bass with lead guitar pretensions, take centre stage in a psychedelic whirr of furious drums and guitar that hisses and fizzes at will. Vocals are chewed up and spat out by the microphone – much like the notion that support acts should be seen but not heard.
The subservience of the support is also eschewed by Melbourne’s The Grey Daturas. They’ve been honing their brand of experimental, art noise that turns its back on traditional…well, everything, since 2001. Time signatures, melody, song length; nothing is sacred for the Grey Daturas who rip the norm apart and stick it back together as an improvised mesh of fiery noise and feedback. They have an on stage intuition that allows them to roam around the scope of their individual instruments without leaving the necessary confines of the collective effort and the confidence to round things off with a five minute noise headache that makes your eyes bleed.
Although Dead Farmers and Grey Daturas impress, the memory of their virtues are extinguished by the arrival of the Comets on Fire. The Santa Cruz five-piece dispense with the need for niceties by immediately breaking open the acid scorched riffs of Blue Cathedral’s Antlers of the Midnight Sun. It marks the start of a set that hangs loosely on a framework of tracks taken from Comet on Fire’s back catalogue. Dogwood Rust, Whiskey River and Swallow’s Eye are all familiar, but the band merely take the guts of each song and nail layer upon layer of tightly wound, improvised sound to its body so that it’s altered almost beyond recognition.
Despite the Gaelic Club’s sound system buckling under the sheer weight and complexity of noise, none of the impact is lost through its straining amps. The Comets’ aural assault is a reverberating maelstrom that resonates through your internal organs long after the last note has rung out- you don’t so much listen as walk away with physical scars from the experience.
What should be a 45 minute set (if the band replicated each song verbatim) is stretched to over double that, although given the intensity of their performance it’s a wonder they make it past the ten minute mark. The Comets play like its the last gig they’ll ever do; as if there’s an audience of 300,000 not 300. They wring every last chord, word and beat out of their instruments and voices like they’ll never use them again. It’s easy to think that there’s something special about tonight but the truth is the Comets on Fire probably don’t have either off or on nights – this is it every time. They play for the sheer love of what they do, and if people want to come along to share in that, well that’s just a bonus. Tonight has been truly astonishing, it’s a shame so many opted to miss out.
