SPECIAL PATROL + ZETA LEAGUELIVE @ ROCKET BAR / Friday October 26th 2007
A journey of a thousand miles begins with one single step. One single step, one thousand stories to tell. One single pebble dropped to echo the thoughts of forever. One word on repeat. One step forward and two steps stumbling with a knife to my back. One step forewarned. One side step to dodge the bullet. One step to spin the axis of the earth. One false step into oncoming traffic. One step colliding with a door that should've been pulled. Twelve more steps and another to fall into the infinite below. One step to come full circle to face myself coming up the other way.
Do I not recognise this shadow? This howling malcontent? This murderous glee? So many steps to come face to face and my enemy is me. Five thousand steps more and the aliens will come collect me. Send me stumbling up those stairs. Send me again and again drawn to swords. Faces blank with fear. Arms flailing backwards. Words within words. A look of surprise. Daylight robbery and zombie stares. Broken down doorways to my spleen in need of repairs.
One thousand steps to Rocket Bar, one thousand braincells lost. One thousand steps stumbling and laughing into an endless echo of ghosts. This ever lengthening shadow. This territorial pissing. This one thousand strong lurking. This song on repeat and my head is peppered with toast. Live by the sword, die by the knife? Why do I keep choosing this ever present strife?
ZETA LEAGUEUpon this first band, my clarity is sought, the rhyme is broken.. *ahem*.. and thus we present the Zeta League: if they ever toured with "The 000's" or "The Aardvarks" they'd make damn nice bookends to anyone's music collection (if only one of Billy Corgan's
idiot side projects didn't already beat them to it). Zeta League, as far as idiotic names for Adelaide bands go, it's altogether thankful they didn't succumb to something
much MUCH stereotypically worse. Zeta League. In a name they conjure up a dysfunctional superhero team of orthodontic disasters and librarians who fight crime using nothing but laughing gas and loopholes in the dewey decimal system, but their sound is more akin to all the best bits of Sonic Youth (as sung by Thurston Moore with a head cold) and all the best bits of Billy Corgan's first band (back when he used to have hair) packing out your bong. Twin fuzzing guitars, sweet downtuned melodies, all these art-rock noodlings climbing the walls? Worthy contemporaries to a growing resurgance in grunge: I Heart Hiroshima, Batrider, Mary Trembles, Trixie Plain and Taught By Animals? duuuuuuude.. it's like the glory days of 1992 all over again! :)
SPECIAL PATROLSpecial Patrol. The headliners tonight. Quite possibly named after Vyvian's pet hamster "Special Patrol Group" from the Young Ones, or considering their entirely blitheringly hungover sound, quite possibly not. Special Patrol, very much akin to a blissful hit of head injury as found in post-inebriance on a lazy Sunday afternoon, eeringly misplaced here on a Friday Night. They sound like The Shins, The Doves and Coldplay's first album of innocence staggering blindly into our consciousness before falling flat on their arse with a whisky bottle and out've our minds. They sound like a wet tennis ball, a floppy brown hat, a comfy wool cardigan, a droopy bloodhound asleep on the porch, grandpa's old pants doing a dance and that slow skipping crackle of warm static that greats you at the end of a vinyl record. Sloppy as all fuck and frequently ever so slightly out've tune. They make alcoholism sound romantic. They cover both Neil Young and Creedance Clearwater Revival badly. They're all about the cheesy sing-alongs. They make me hit the bottle harder than a Kings Of Leon record. Aaaah, what's not to love? :)
And so we return to where it all begun. All is said and done upon our band's final departure. Beckon two heads spin, snear and bicker as one. Suffer the fools in the crossfade shatter. Abrupt key changes and a deafening clatter. Inane chit-chatter. Thoughts do scatter. Richochet splatter. My brain fries in a light beer batter: running the rampage of a hairbrained mad hatter.
Once more comes the disarray, this mocking display, this game we play, this soul sucking cloud, this pumping loud, this manta ray shroud, dickheads build me a funeral mound, follow that one fish swimming in a fish bowl fighting a thousand thick crowd. Leaps and bounds. Climb the walls. These spoils of war. Infinitely unkillable and ten feet tall. So many memories lost before the fall.
I admit defeat. I can't find my feet. This final collapse. This mental lapse. Chasing vapour trails where naught else prevails. Cockroaches advance upon me as I light this match to fight through the darkening approach. Scatter like leaves to the dawning sun. Suffocate snakes tower in a town with no ladders. Ghosts of circumstance as the shadows dance. Take this one moment in deafening silence before the stormclouds gather. Amongst this chaos I will again find my peace.
Release.
Previously on Spoz's Rant:
Chasing Phoenix + Quiet Child + The Black And White 
