WAKE UP DEAD MANIt's 11:20PM on a Sunday night as I write this, The Knife's "Silent Shout" is playing softly through the laptop speakers. I'm exhausted, I'm destroyed beyond all measure. I'm squinting bloodshot into a 100W bulb glaring above me. I'm drifting off in a daze, I don't think I'll last to the end, I consider writing my last will and testament and then I remember I have only 9 dollars and 30 cents left to my name and nothing left to give. I plan on playing Broken Social Scene, Mountains In The Sky and The Doves next. I'm a corpse on wheels, strung out on wires. I'm lacking the recommended daily intake of vitamins, my fridge feels uninspired, I briefly consider the notion of toast but the toaster confuses me. I play Morals Of A Minor and Taught By Animals next. I'm an egg timer leaking sand. I'm staring down the walls and I can't find the words, I'm falling down the stairs. I can't connect the dots, thoughts scatter like autumn leaves. A plastic bag dances in the breeze, the creepy kid from American Beauty starts crying over it, I imagine a grand piano falling on his head and I start to laugh. I walk like a zombie. Sleep debt is kicking my arse. I remember a documentary where someone didn't sleep for 3 months straight, dropped into a coma and died. That guy is now my hero. TV On The Radio echoes my thoughts to the end. I am Jack's wasted life. String me up like a meat puppet and watch me dance. Wake up dead man.
Yup, if you ever wanted to know what it would be like for me to live like "Weekend at Bernies" in the mean streets of Adelaide, then let THIS slackarse journey in narcolepsy be your cautionary tale!
FRIDAY NIGHTThose of you familiar with the many great public artworks of innercity Adelaide (especially
those of you prone to sexually molesting said public artworks in states both altered and unearthly late at night) would've noticed the recent and most glaring absense of the most beloved of them all: Bert Flugelman's silver "Mall's Balls". The powers that be claim this is a merely a temporary measure as our much beloved chrome gonads have simply been shipped off for a few months of much needed spring cleaning and will be back shiny and new by mid July to commemerate their 30th anniversary, yet one still can't help but feel a little lost without them. So it is with this in mind that we bring forth tonight's much needed antidote to our demasculating woe: "The Rockening" at Jive. Featuring Screaming Gibbon, The Dairy Brothers, High Stakes and more hirsuit testiculartude in fullblown amplified carnage than you could possibly shake a pair of oversized jingling.. well.. *cough* I think you get the idea already ;)
SCREAMING GIBBONFirst band to bring forth the wrinkly nutsack of doom is Screaming Gibbon. Think late 60's / early 70's hippy rock, Eric Clapton, extended guitar solos, brown acid, everything turned up to 11 and a bucket bong the size of a hippo falling from the sky to crush that kid from Almost Famous (who pretty much had it coming to him after making a mess front of stage
last week). It is as much about the music as it is about the hair. They're still rough as fuck and the baldies and buzzcuts out there will likely run screaming for the exit than listen to this, but if you're scratching armpits a few people left on the "Ascent of Man" evolutionary chart like I am then you'll dig this shit. Bonus points also goes to the succinct and highly apt title of "Screaming Gibbon", making them one of the few Adelaide bands of late that dont require an entire sentence, commas or exclamations points to make a
name for themselves (*cough* not to say I'm
incriminating anyone
out there in the
slightest ;) ).
THE DAIRY BROTHERSNext up is the Dairy Brothers. They're like The Wiggles greatest hits as performed by the entirely unlikely supergroup merging of Van Halen and AC/DC, they are inches away from becoming a children's television show with puppets and they are the quintissential Adelaide joke band; but it doesn't make them rock out any less. With spastic full fisting honky tonk solos, shriekingly overboard vocal histrionics, psychedelic animated cartoon visuals and double fretted flailing guitar fury they're equally as hilarious as they're likely to bury you under a tonne of concrete like a richter 8 rumble in a third world shopping district. I can just imagine both Wayne and Garth prostrate in front of stage chanting "we're not worthy! weeee're not worthy!" if they were to witness this live. If you don't go apeshit to this out there in the crowd, then you don't have a pulse, you're under 6ft of compacted dirt and you're already dead!
HIGH STAKESAnd finally we have the headlining act: High Stakes, in their first (and hopefully not last) gig for 2007. Their relative absence from the live stage is somewhat understandable in hindsight however when you consider all the good luck they've been having of late: as just days before their gig tonight, their bassplayer Heath Weber (also otherwise infamously known as the hairyarse slacker lead singer for Your Motive For) had to be carted off to hospital due to a suspect ruptured appendix (yeeeouch!). The jury of course is still out on whether it had anything to do with
these antics at the Crank last week *ahem*. Normally an incident like this would be just the kinda disaster to derail a performance outright, but somehow, just as the name suggests, no matter the "High Stakes" stacked up against them, even without their bassplayer (and with one of the guitarists playing backup) and limping on one leg, they're are so fuckoff full of beer fueled rock aggression tonight they'd still make other hard-rocking acts like Airbourne look like nothing more than a pissy little shoegazer act by comparison. I mean shit, these guys are so freaking mental tonight they could take Iggy Pop and The Stooges on in a bar brawl and WIN, and with diabolical adrenaline fueled songs under such hilarious titles as "Scream", "Rod Ready", "Gung Ho" and the infinitely catchy "Dead Alien Vagina Woman" it's not hard to see why. When you're this insane with hooting baboon fury, conventional weapons can no longer harm you. ROCK ON YOU MANIACS!! ROOOCK!!! WOOOOO!! (oh and Heath, if ya reading this? get better real soon so we can kill you with beer again! k?)
*Phew* normally, surviving a juggernaut of rock fury like that would just be another "day at the office" for me (and as you all well know, 3 bands in one night is barely scratching the surface for SPOZ's RANT on any
normal given weekend) but after a long hard week desperately catching up on sleep hopelessly lost on the tail end of week after week (and months) of similar accumilative torture I'm gargling floor boards to carpet here. I've hit the end of the rope here. I've barely made it all the way through this gig without collapsing (oh yes! sleep debt is well and truly kicking my arse from sunrise to sundown!). Still, as walking dead as I feel, no night should ever be complete without the final killing blow, which as always is amply provided by grinning twits of this fine establishment till 4AM. Just a few quiet beers, what could possibly go wrong?
Yup, how I'm not dead yet from all this shit is anyone's guess! :)
SATURDAY NIGHT
I'm beginning to suspect that my night life has now become nothing more than a game of Russian Roulette with R.E.M. sleep cycles. This morning at the tail end of last night I finally win the jackpot, spin the barrel and get clocked out cold for 9 hours straight. I don't think I've ever slept this good in six months (thank fuck for that or I'd be blowing bubbles out've my nose in a sanitarium right about now!) Anyhoo.. The original plans I had for tonight was to embark on yet another one of my near insane bipolar shifts covering 5 bands between two venues. Thankfully for my own fragile sanity however, my plan only hinged on the near impossibility of defeating the door bitch at Enigma for free entry to a near sold out Birds Of Tokyo, Soft White Machine and Is This Art? show, a gig that would've normally cost me $20 if i'd bought tickets WEEKS ago. So, more or less relieved that my insane plan would never get the green light of fruition (*phew* dodged a bullet there!), I concentrated my efforts instead on the biggest singular prize on offer tonight: Morals Of A Minor's album launch at Rocket Bar supported by serial offenders Taught By Animals (for surely when there's an album launch on, chances are damn high that it's gonna be freakin' epic).
Arriving more than an hour before the first band was even set to play, I took a rare moment to relax and chilled out on the couches with this motley selection of circus freaks: Sean Kemp (serial blog offender) from Booster, Kim Roberts (the kung fu midget) from 200 Motels, and Rachel Cearns (hidden back to the left and somewhat fearing for her life to be amongst twits like us) from Winter's Lament. As for why I always seem to look like an absolute fucknard in every one of my photos is anyone's guess (yes, there IS a reason why I rarely appear in my own blog.. hahahaha).
TAUGHT BY ANIMALSSupport act Taught By Animals needs neither introduction or clarification. On both accounts this live music blog has been more than guilty on numerous occassions of giving you more than extensive coverage of everything this band has done short of showing you their freaking bowel movements. Yes, there IS a reason for this. This endlessly ecclectic proto-grunge act is nothing short of musical genius and if you haven't seen them already (or bought one of their EPs) then somebody should drop a tribe of silverback gorillas on your arse to beat you senseless till next Sunday and piss all over your corpse. For the trainspotters in the audience however there are two things of note in this particular set tonight; (a) the live visuals were provided by the 1980 cult classic film "Flash Gordon", (b) there was a trippy brand new song they played tonight that featured a slow punctuated kick bass rhythm that for want of a better name I shall christen henceforth as "Shart: The Shit that Masquerades As A Fart": it had the unfortunate irony of sounding just LIKE a bowel movement but was seriously cool all the same. Seriously if all this new material is any indication of what they're planning for on a full length album; then hold onto your toilet seats kiddies, these dudes are gonna be fucken huuge!
MORALS OF A MINORAnd now for the headlining act Morals Of A Minor. Longtime readers of this blog (ie: the 5 people still putting up with this rambling non-sequitir every week) will remember this band with a certain level of comical infamy. We have a rather comical history of bad blood between us, which at times has almost made me think they'd send hired goons to rearrange my anatomy across 4-5 postcodes lest I dare enter the same room as them. I wont go into too much detail over the circumstances of this "history" (or what made them the constant butt of my jokes for the second half of last year in this blog) suffice to say, whoaaaaaaa have they come a LONG way since! As for tonight's gig.. dare I say it, dare I risk a beating by hired goons, dare I risk dragging this introduction out into even more ludicrous levels of superlative suspense..(drum roll).. but this would had to've been the most utterly, stupendously, intestinally wrenching, face meltingly shit..(pause for effect)..BRILLIANT performance I've seen all year. As album lauches go it easily rivals the sublime punching bag to the senses that was Soft White Machine's
album launch a month ago. Blasting loud enough to shatter my teeth (yet mixed so blissfully smooth I could live here for days) and with a light show ran to epilectic perfection by Sean Kemp on the decks, the masses (spaced out hippies, female groupies and Rocket Bar dancefloor tragics alike) were taken on a tripped out rollercoaster ride: equal measures early 80's U2, The Police and the most strung out heroin and cocaine extremes of 70's Pink Floyd. As much as I tried I could not fault this set on ANY level. This set spoke volumes to my self destruction. Everything was well paced and punctuated for maximum killing effect. This shit was a work of art, a masterpiece, one of THE defining gigs of the year and I have just now lost what little journalistic credibility I have left in giving Morals Of A Minor (of all bands) such a glowing review (yiiikes!) Yup give yourselves a round of applause dudes, you've served up the ultimate revenge one could ever dish back at SPOZ's RANT. The revenge of a flawless execution.. GAME OVER MAAAAAAN! GAAAAAAAAME OVER!! (and their album doesn't half suck either ;) )
The rest of the night clearly pales into insignificance after I've used every single superlative in the review above, except for this one particularly inebriated photo I got with Eli, one of Rocket Bar's impossibly cute dancefloor tragics.. (and yes, I had to search my myspace list high and low for a solid 10 minutes before I could remember what the hell her freaking name was.. hahahaha!) sometimes you just gotta love this place dontcha? :)
..before effectively erasing what little memory I had left of the rest of the night by once again making the foolish (and utterly misguided) mistake by migrating to the east end in search of more festive stupidity only to blow my brains out in the vacant parking lot that is the Cranka and Shotz this night.. *pheeeuw!* what's that stench!? did someone die in here!? oh wait.. that's just me and my flea ridden carcass, nevermind! :)
Thus drawing to it's finality, we bring to a close the laziest space-cadet weekend in live music I've ever halfarsed out in the streets of Adelaide since my nervous breakdown back in
mid January and now, being as I am at the tail end of a blog at 6AM, if you really don't mind, I'm just gonna pass out on this couch coz I'm freaking exhausted.. good night everyone and FUCK YUZ'AALL!! ZZZZzzZzzZzZZzzzzz.. *clunk* (ow my liver!)
Previously on Spoz's Rant:
The Piquancy Of Frequency 
