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...
SOFT WHITE MACHINE + SLEEP PARADE + TRIXIE PLAIN LIVE @ JIVE + FOWLERS LIVE / Saturday March 15th 2008
Consciousness comes to me in tsunami waves, washing away tourists, villagers and last night's memories quite like a Baghdad bombing competing for airtime with a Britney Spears meltdown. I am a broken toy bent and bedraggled, dragged down hallways by absent minded four year olds. Eyes squint fluorescents smashed by adolescents. Pipe bombs and letter boxes, old folks homes, slashed tires and the smell of sulphur. Where the fuck am I? Busted television. Do not adjust your horizontals or your verticals, gravity is a game of pingpong. Ears ringing, fall forward and reboot the mainframe, sledgehammers, I'm missing an F6 key. Recollection? one speed edit montage, scattering like butterfly wings flapping. Chaos theory. One hundred monkeys on one hundred typewriters could not write this novel, let alone a sequel; while the blurb reads "I flew too close to the sun, flip me over and do the other one!" Adelaide Uni O'Ball calls my name, but I don't live here no more, try four doors down: Fowlers Live, Jive and a game of venue tag? one Saturday dressed like a Sunday? lambs on spits, puppets on crutches and stop animation? oh fuck! Curse my urge to do it all undone in one night like a badly knitted three-armed sweater!
KYTES OF OMAR (***1/2) myspace :: Stumbling into Fowlers Live tonight and seeing this band, is quite like looking into a mirror, out've my mind, smashed in the mistaken belief I was having an out've body experience and needed to return: "fuck I'm a goldfish, fuck I'm a budgie! fuck.. what?" Kytes Of Omar, they give new meaning to the phrase "hair of the dog"; thanks in no small part to a series of strategically placed fans that make lead singer Anthony look like a cross between Sasquatch and someone you find floating face down in the River Torrens. Sure, he may sound like trip to the dentist numbed up on novocaine; but the thick guitar melodies, stoner fuzz and bucket bong rhythms from the other four do give his vocals a complimentary "Neanderthal" like quality. Hmmmm. Kytes Of Omar, if you can picture 70's rockers Daddy Cool and T-Rex chasing the floor boards after an ill advised stoush with Spiderbait and Queens Of The Stone Age's "Sick Sick Sick" then you're halfway there, they're three to the right on the Ascent Of Man evolutionary chart, they're the slobbering poster antagonist from a 50's B-grade sci-fi and they're the bucket of greasy KFC and two tabs of aspirin you yearn for after a hard night's drinking. If you like your rock delivered by the blunt end of shovel, then this is the band for you.. Kytes Of Omar? FUCK YEAAAAH!
But of course all these chance sightings and eyewitness accounts are proof of nothing without some circumstantial evidence to back it up. So, short of coming up with stray hairs, footprints or far flung stool samples, I bring to you this live video instead (or click here if you want more)..
Feeling altogether refreshed by such hirsuit pursuits (aaah beer really does wonders to bridge the evolutionary divide!), I float downstream to see what more smells I could unearth at Jive..
THE KILLGIRLS (****) myspace :: If ever you've wondered out loud what Nikki Webster or Hilary Duff would sound like covering Nine Inch Nails' "Pretty Hate Machine" after five years "chasing the dragon", then wonder no more, in this next band we have your answer! Yup, as much as my attorney wishes to advise the court that I'm in no way implying frontman Mario Spate has any difficulty growing a beard, opening a jar of pickles or peeing in a straight line, you still gotta wonder WHICH one of these band members is the "Killgirl" in question? Yup The Killgirls may, like many industrial/electro acts before them struggle endlessly with gender identity quite like drummer Tony Irish dreams one day he'll be a real boy, but they have no problems cranking one fuck of a jam! Mechanoid 4/4 drumming, whiplash guitars, pacman synths and new rave influences aplenty from early 80's INXS, Gary Numan, Klaxons, Damn Arms and The Presets, aaaah what's not to love?
TRIXIE PLAIN (****) myspace :: Snorkeling through the dirt, I surface back at Fowlers Live in continuation of my night of festive hangovers and hairballs: as we present Trixie Plain to the stage. Quite like the faces of Crystal Meth, tonight they crank out a blissfully fractured illbience in stoner grunge and snot nosed yokel that's very much reminiscent of what you'd get if you combined Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Frank Black from The Pixies and Hillbilly Cletus from The Simpsons to cover Iggy Pop and The Sex Pistols (I'll let you make your own mind up over which is which). Still not to be underestimated by surface layers alone, give it time to linger in your smoking skull cavity and Trixie Plain prove to be nothing short of master craftsmans: delivering an evolving sound that has matured rather like a fine wine, a fine cheese, or more accurately like a fine layer of cheese that collects on an old pair of sneakers left to ferment in the closet. Fuck full of artful dissonance, chromatic fuzz, punctuated hooks and melodious jangle that lingers long after the last note has fallen; they are expert travellers in a well worn art that's well worth exploring.
SLEEP PARADE (***) myspace :: Swinging through the trees once more, I return to Jive just in time to catch the last few songs of this next touring band from Melbourne, and true to their name they're just the kind've prog rock in noodling excess that'd put even a Tyler Durden grade insomniac into a six foot coma. Yup, Meat Loaf's lactating D-cups they are not (thank fuck!) but they still cook up one mellowarse groove. Sleep Parade; they're the musical equivalent of a Sunday afternoon spaced out on the couch watching wildlife documentaries because your too fucked to find the remote, they're the Dungeons & Dragons Monster's Compendium set to music, they're being so baked after passing out from heatstroke in the midday sun that you start to resemble a Michael Jackson before and after shot. Drawing instrumentation from A Perfect Circle's "Thirteenth Step" and the vocal inflections of Chino Moreno's side project "Team Sleep" and Cog's Flynn Gower during his more medicated moments; you may find yourself waking up in a bath tub full of ice missing both your kidneys and a good portion of your frontal lobe, but you'll be no less the richer for it.
THE AMCATS (***1/2) myspace :: Crawling out from under the Black Hawk helicopter wreckage I found myself back at Fowlers Live for The Amcats; just in time to hear their last song *cough* Of course, I could just continue to spout all manner of wildly hallucinogenic rubbish that bears absolutely no relation to anything I just heard (ie: see any Lady Strangelove review), plagiarise shit on The White Stripes, slap in an abitrary rating to cover for it and none of you dribbling fools racing for the dictionary would be ANY the wiser. However, since I've now just inadvertantly admitted to pulling that stunt every OTHER night of the week (hey, I do like to drink!) I guess I'm fucked now, Ooops! Still, if we look on the bright side? whoever I stole these photos from is one masterful freak! :)
SOFT WHITE MACHINE (***1/2) myspace :: One mad hit of mescaline and a spirit quest with a three eyed giraffe later I find myself back at Jive. Soft White Machine; one of Adelaide's finest rock bands (that next to nobody outside of the 2-3 tragic dweebs who populate THIS website has ever heard of), is having one of "those" nights. Call it a comedy of errors, a gyspy curse, irregular sunspot activity, that time of the month or what'ever the fuck; but we all know the tell-tale signs, we've all been there! (come to think of it, I believe I based my entire live music career on it woooo!). Still against all odds, this band soldiers on triumphantly through every flat mix and far flung kickdrum pedal, despite: (a) Nick's far flung kickdrum pedal, (b) Andreas' ever shrinking guitar, (c) the continuing unknown whereabouts of Jett's shoes, and (d) Karl spitting out the kind've wisearse one-liners between songs that gets innocent bystanders knocked out in bar fights. Aaaah, you really can't tell we've been suffering through a record breaking two week heatwave CAN you!? Awesome!
Altogether disoriented by my schizophrenic journey between venues tonight, I decide to seek some much needed psychiatric care at the Ed Castle, a few brews and a quiet place to collapse dead. However, upon walking through the front doors I'm met with a sea of dumbfounded faces and Brendan from Lady Strangelove asking me "duuuude, where the fuck were you!?".
It was only at this moment that suddenly I realised what just happened. With just 24 hours notice, one chance myspace bulletin and a title on their myspace screaming "ED CASTLE THIS SATURDAY NIGHT!!", they unleashed a live music stunt so face meltingly freaky, so utterly retardingly brilliant, that no one will ever believe it happened beyond an all-too-suspiciously-blurry photo I stole from Bec the bartender. Yup, your eyes are not deceiving you, that's Azza, Lady Strangelove's bass player, performing an entire gig in the freaking nude.. whooaaaah!
And to think that this one time only, never to repeated again, Lady Strangelove stunt, would've been the funniest, most fucked up thing EVER to be pulled on a local live stage in the history of Spoz's Rant? and I FUCKING MISSED IT!!!?? ARGGHHH DAAAMN YOOOU!!!
Of course I could go on in trivial detail about the rest of my night: The Cranka, The Garden Of Unearthly Delights and Shotz followed by me sleeping in on a Sunday (instead of killing myself retarded at Scorcherfest this year.. yeouch!) but then we're just ignoring that one pink idiot in the room laughing at us for being so foolish. As much as I kill myself stupid to cover it ALL for this website, this music scene comes up with yet more surprises to remind me that I really don't need to see it all, to be a part of it. And that thought alone helps me to sleep at night.
