The Adelaide scene: to many of you it may be little more than a touring speed bump between Melbourne and Perth but to us it's a way of life. Feast within, on all its dysfunctional splendour, as we bring you the highly satirical, laughingly fictional and intellectually imbecile tales from our rock & roll wasteland...
THE DARDANELLES + FIRE! SANTA ROSA FIRE! + THE E.L.F. LIVE @ JIVE / Saturday November 3rd 2007
Tonight's episode is brought to you in tribute to Smoking Man Dave: one of Spoz's Rant's most laughibly obscure and fuckoff random of cameo appearances. Hero to the people? Liberator of the oppressed? Serial pest? Forgetten by near to everybody who's reading this right now wondering "dude, what the FUCK are you on about!?": yup that's Smoking Man Dave! He's all things to all people! You may've seen him at your favourite live music haunt puffing up a storm, you may've found yourself choking to death on a stinking cloud of his exhaust, maybe you've even offered him a light; either way with the brand new anti-smoking in place in all Adelaide clubs, pubs and rat infested dives (and yes even vinyl brown lounges) he's pretty much right royally fucked now isn't he? Oh yes Smoking Man Dave, we're gonna miss youuuu! :P
*cough* and now onto less important matters. I know what you've ALL been thinking since I left you all in nail biting suspense after last night's do or die cliffhanger: did my camera survive it's trial by ale with all it's image sensors intact? did it miraculously return from the dead against all odds to fight another day? will I be forced to feature nothing but crudely drawn stick figures in compromising positions to act out all my blogs from now on? or did I simply rush out the following day in a mad panic to blow more than $500 on a replacement unit for a website that no-one in their right mind reads anymore? (aaaah I love the sound of crickets in the morning!). Sheeeiiit wouldn't YOU like to know! Seriously, sometimes you're really better off NOT knowing the insane lengths I go to each week just to keep this increasingly futile dream alive! :)
and so.. against all odds and beyond all reason ($500!? what the FUCK was I thinking?) here I am at it again on a Saturday night, looking to void yet another warranty in record time! Surely anyone else in the same situation would've taken a night off to recuperate from the shock of it all, but as we know well by now I have a death wish and no matter how hard I try I cannot die! *sigh* oh well, y'know what they say.. "if at first you don't succeed, try try and try again!" :)
arriving at Jive at the exceptionally late hour of 9PM (pfffft!) I've already missed out on the first band for the night: Reptiles, who've apparently come all the way from Melbourne to play to a roaring crowd of no-one! YEAAS! (such is the price you pay to play the graveyard shift: 8PM? on a Saturday night? duuuuudes.. you SO drew the short straw!) and so *cough* without further ado (trust me Reptiles, you dodged a bullet) it's onto the second act..
THE E.L.F. Never heard of him? Shit, neither did I till tonight! So in effort to make an absolute mockery of all the shitty-arse photos I'll be taking of him tonight standing at a desk looking bored and tweaking knobs, I present to you his music video: made for the princely sum of $12..
*cough* aand THAT is The E.L.F: otherwise known as the electro funking side project of one Darren Cross, otherwise known to most of you out there as "that hungover git from Gerling". Aaaah yes! how could we forget that midget?! All his deranged squinting, the screaming, for being that ONE unshaven git in every band most likely to pop an Elvis on a toilet seat? Fuck! how he hasn't died from an exploding blood clot to his brain by now is anyone's guess? (I need 5 aspirin, greasy KFC and a lie down just LOOKING at him.. sheeeiit!) and tonight he's presenting his very own banging DJ set on stage. Equal parts E.L.O. vs KLF, Kraftwerk vs Ween and 2 Many DJ's vs a 4 year old beating a musical Tonka toy to death; it's everything that was awesome about Gerling's first 3 albums and blissfully wipes my memory clean of that fuckarse excuse for a 4th album they coughed up last year (phew!). Sure, all this banging dirty electro may sound a little lost THIS early on a Saturday night at a whisky rock-n-roll dive like Jive; but just imagine if it hit Rocket at 3AM? There'd be nothing but blood and teeth by the end of it! :)
FIRE! SANTA ROSA, FIRE! Up next we have Adelaide's favourite self proclaimed indie-fags - Fire! Santa Rosa Fire!, aka: Happy Pants on Fire!, Flaming Gay Santa!, Flat! Fanta Soda! or as they sometimes like to refer to themselves as: "Fearless Vampire Killers" (pffft.. you idiots!). Clearly words are meaningless in describing what it is to see them live and no amount of me beating this dead horse is gonna get the point across. So instead I present to you THIS, their finest hour ever caught on video! :)
Yup, that's them in a nutshell. Hard to imagine they have ALL that talent at their fingertips. Such genius! Such intensity! such raw flatulent energy! ( *cough* why are you looking at me like that!? oh!? you STILL want some of them candy sounds!? then why not download their first EP here you ungrateful fucks! HA!). Aaaaah yes, what's not to love about Fire! Santa Rosa Fire!? They're bringing nerdy back again and again and again! They're Interpol dressed as Wham! They're the attention span of a hummingbird on a fruit loop sugar buzz! They make the Klaxons sound like Portishead! and they're so damn freakin' red hot tonight Jive better be packing NASA grade Space Shuttle foam tiles or we're gonna boil the oceans dry! weeeeee! :)
THE DARDANELLES and quite like a mad sugar rush invariably leads to a crushing comedown, we present the final headlining act for the night: The Dardanelles. You may remember these dweebs from when they last toured Adelaide back in July at Rocket Bar. You may remember them for being the staging ground for a botched allied invasion of the Ottoman Empire in April 1915. Or if all else fails (ie: you slept through that week in History class like I did), then you may recognise this..
Yup, nothing quite speaks cutting edge "fuckoff indie" like a music video starring a reject from ZZ top, a pack of street mimes on a fullblown cocaine frenzy and a Teletubbies episode gone oh so HORRIBLY wrong! YEAS! That's The Dardanelles: almost as badly dressed as the Red Riders but nowhere near as euro-trash wanky as the Midnight Juggernauts and their debut album "Mirror, Mirror" is without a doubt the coolest fucking Australian album released this year! Ever wanted to know what New Order, The Cure and Depeche Mode would sound like on chronic blast of horse tranquilisers? then get a mad dose of this and find out! Sure, you don't really necessarily need to be on drugs to enjoy their music, but it helps, especially when you see their idiot-savant of a lead singer Josh flap his arms about like a mad toddler on stage. I dunno what the fuck that space-cadet is on but dammit, I wanna find the kid's toy to suck to get it! :)
Now that we've experienced all 9 circles of hell from Dante's Inferno, The Dardanelles disappear into the inky shadows of the night, mission accomplished. For the next half an hour or so, I entertain the notion of what would happen if Josh from The Dardanelles, Craig Nicholls from The Vines and Patience Hodgeson from The Grates ever formed a band called "Windowlickers" performing nothing but unintellible punk versions of Bob Dylan songs, before I'm ambushed by one of the twits from the Reptiles: doing his very best to claim 5 seconds of infamy in my blog after I missed out on their opening set tonight. Hmmmmm yup, good luck with that! :P
With the live entertainment done for the night, Jive swarms with all the usual living (brain) dead; here to woop it up into the ugly hours for DJ Craig's fortnightly "Gosh" trainwrecking..
aaaaah.. Rocket Bar, Supermild and Shotz combined have nothing on THIS lunatic!
and as the pint glasses pile up to the ceiling and all the indie dweebs begin to hit the floor, I make my exit out've this grinning shit heap. Happy in the knowledge that despite all my best efforts to kill myself every which way to sunrise, this blog will still live to fight another day! :)
BACHELORETTE + HIT THE JACKPOT + HOME FOR THE DEF LIVE @ URTEXT STUDIOS / Friday November 2nd 2007
Out've all the dimly lit venues, clubs, pubs, vinyl brown lounges and seedy rat infested dives I've come to frequent throughout this laughable excuse for a city; it's often the more willfully obscure of bohemian haunts that offer up the best stories to tell. Throughout the ages wild rumours circulate of these out've the way places, these lunatic fringes, these forever hard to find, subterranean and shrouded in secrecy. They hide behind walls. Walls of undecipherable noise and unmarked doors. Doors you pass by every day. Doors seemingly like any other in the city. This is just but one of those doors. One door on Grenfell St. One door with a story to tell.
You may find yourself at a door just like this. Doors led by rumour. Doors found with seemingly no clue or purpose. You search high and low for the mad design within the disorder. That secret lever. That secret handshake. Those silent words to invoke. Then you find an intercom. You find one hastily handwritten note. Push that button. Hear that voice. Speak and you enter.
Down silent halls you travel. Silent and alone. Through darkening halls. Festering halls. Halls of the ancients. Accompanied only by the soft carpeting footsteps that thud in time to your ever escalating fear. You come to an end. You find a lift. You take that lift up to the second floor.
You arrive disoriented and bent. Low lights and leaking fumes. Confusion abounds. Alien sounds. What mad design is this? What crazed fools have conjured this? You discover that you're not alone. Welcoming hands now find you. They reach for you from afar. You scream. You scream outside of yourself. Arms flail. Caught in the wires. Then all thoughts turn to black.
And it is at this moment, as you wake to find yourself: in a box, a perspex box, a box that's slowly filling with water, filling with a maniacal laugh that echoes tinny and shrill from beyond as the water slowly rises to extinguish your life, that you come to that fateful conclusion..
"fuck.. why oh why didn't I chose that OTHER door!?"
Such is the way of Urtext Studios. This artist enclave. This derelict squat of artists, musicians, cinematographers and couch philosophers rife with the subtext. A space so haphazard in it's bohemian construct you truly do second guess yourself over whether you DID step through the wrong door and into the most cliche of b-grade torture porn. Is it the low hung velvet curtains? That all pervuading murk? Those high art-deco ceilings and bleach bone walls? All these strange bedraggled shapes that do pounce from obtuse angles? Or maybe it's that unmistakeable feeling you've gatecrashed a suburban house party at 3AM, at the height of it's drunken volatility, only magnified here by almost a year of accumilative abuse? How far can they take this? How far can they push it? Will this mad science experiment continue in earnest? We can but only hope! :)
For this place is not without it's infinite charm. Fortuitous as it is to be situated in the very heart of the city: witness to such resplendent views as THIS from it's 2nd story Grenfell St balcony!
Such beauty to be found in the trivial. The soft lighting over the mixing desk. The incidental art found hanging on the walls. Such culture! Such vitality! Such wealth of wit and wimsy!
To be witness to such grand ecclectism must truly be any photographer's pant's wetting dream!
and then, just when you can't stand no more and your ears are a bursting with glee, you stumble into this, the most vile of productions. So infinite in it's murk it mocks even the most ardent of rock photographers.. oh sweet jebus have mercy on our spleens for it is ripe for the venting!
Is this a live band I do see before me? Back alley surgeons in thirst for organ harvesting? Skin eating freaks with cleft pallets, lazy eyes and hooves for hands? Who the fuck knows!?
For no amount of me shooting in the dark is gonna fight me out've this mess..
and so it is with much reservation and bitter regret that I must admit defeat against the forces of darkness and fire up the flash to finally reveal the first victim for the night..
ZETA LEAGUE For infinitely better live photos (and a much funnier review) of this band, look no further than a week ago when they played Rocket Bar. For in stark contrast, the haunting surrounds tonight seem to seep deep into the soul of their sound, embuing them with a distinct undertow of sanguine gloom. Is this Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth jamming with Smashing Pumpkins with sinuses shrill with sweet dissent? Or is this Brian Molko covering Echo & The Bunnymen to the conjuring of Donnie Darko's worst nightmares? Somewhere between the lunatic extremes the truth lies. Are they bare inches and one hyperdermic needle away from becoming a goth band? Should we be planning our intervention well in advance lest their lead singer attempt to shave his head in emulation of his Uncle Fester forefathers? These shadows must be playing tricks with my mind if they lead me down these winding paths! Still, fucking good band but..
HOME FOR THE DEF ..and so, to lighten the mood (or to corrupt it further still) we are presented with the next performance: a solo live act that appears to be a homeless guy with an electric guitar (that they've clearly dragged off the street mere moments ago) armed with a small cache of Beck's drum machines to present this insane asylum for the senses. This is Frank Black from the Pixies and Peter Combe being beaten to death with a whisky bottle. This is both Tom Waits and Jack White lying in a gutter with both their trousers around their ankles with confused looks on their faces. This is your first step to admitting that you have a serious drinking problem. Yup, this is Home For The Def and he's beating you blind with a mad projection of video and still imagery that makes that Buffalo Bill's "magina dance" in Silence of the Lambs look like children's television by comparison. Is it art? Is it entertainment? Did I accidently step into the opening scenes of another Saw movie sequel? Will my smoking remains make high-rotation viewing on rotten dot com? Is this quite possibly the most brilliant live act ever to burn out my retinas since I faced off against the eye of Sauron back in July and lived to tell the tale? Either way, pass me that spliff cause it looks like we're in for one helluva fucked up rollercoaster ride! :)
HIT THE JACKPOT Up next in this grand parade of the profane and the insane is this confusing 3 piece art-rock ensemble by the name of Hit The Jackpot. They appear to consist entirely of post-graduate liberal arts students of the chronically under-employed and sound quite like one of those wistfully obscure retro 12" vinyls those basement DJ's in Big Star on Rundle St love spinning to dementia in effort to glaringly illustrate just how inferior your entire record collection is. Simply combine the stabbing suicide beat of Joy Division, the howling fuzz of Sonic Youth, back it to the most brutal low-down dirty bass rhythm heard outside of Kings Of Leon, sprinkle in New York City's finest unsigned bands, stir vigoriously and swap instruments often and incessantly. Yup, I can't quite tell whether they're simply just showing off with all this shit, showing me just how intellectually inferior I am, or simply just innocently tripping balls to the mad mathematical intricacies of the art-rock "ism" but in it's own academic way, it's a blissed out trip!
BACHELORETTE and finally in effort to speed my dribbling carcass to the four walls of a rubber room we present the headlining act, all the way from New Zealand, and for one night only: Bachelorette. She was a solo act on keyboards and vocals. She sounded just like Bjork and Ladytron making sweet demented love to my hollowed out eye-sockets. She was well and truly an awe-inspiring act to behold. Or, in other words (to drill home just exactly what you unfortunate fools missed) she was something very much along the lines of THIS mindfuck to the senses..
Since y'see, in effort to capture firsthand this madness in live photography, I commited what could only be called the most STUPID (yet hilarious) fatality move you could ever inflict upon a compact digital camera. A fatal move beyond all measure. Or to put simply: imagine if you will holding a full glass of beer in your left hand, imagine holding a digital camera in your right. Imagine them both wanting to get married and consumate their relationship and then imagine the only response you could come up with as this scene unfolds in front of your very own eyes..
For the next few seconds (in what felt like an eternity) there I was staring blankly in awe and amazement as my camera bobbed up and down in that full pint glass of beer. The LCD screen flickering wildly from black, to green, to milky white and then nothing. Dumb struck and bug-eyed the shock of the event took some time to travel from my mind: struck goldfish gaping to my hand, as I finally yanked that dead weight from out've my glass. At first there was a smirk, then a wild grin then fits and howls of laughter when I realised just what I had done.
"duuuuude.. don't you wish you could've taken a photo of that!? oh wait, ooops!"
and then I drank my beer.
No point letting $500 go to waste now, is there? :)
