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...
KYTES OF OMAR + IT'S WARSAW! + MAYDAY FAIR "TRANSMISSION LIVE" @ ED CASTLE / Friday July 25th 2008
Winter. Oh maaan is it giving me the shits! shits you can damn near chisel round with a hammer, launch out've cannons and punch holes through six feet of concrete. It's so fucking cold, you can't walk outside without a stray autumn leaf blowing in the breeze, striking you at odd angles and shattering you into a million pieces. It's so fucking cold, some homeless guy in the parklands is cutting up a woolly mammoth with his light sabre and crawling inside its carcass for warmth. It's so fucking cold, I get woken up this morning by an FBI team and Billy Connolly bleeding from his eyesockets, pawing at me and shrieking: "it's here! it's here!" only to realise they were talking about ME!! Dogs stuck to trees, penguins upto me armpits, polar bears pissing on my roof, what the fuck is going on with this weather!? I mean shit, It's SO fucking cold my testicles have migrated north with all the other testicles and now frightened Polynesians are beating them with sticks in the mistaken belief all their coconuts have gone "native".. fuuuuck! Yeah I know this shit happens every year, and I bitch about it every year, and I'll probably bitch about it again in August, but seriously: all this shit about global warming? climate change? the greenhouse effect? Al fucking Gore? we gotta DO something maaaan! The sooner we launch more flaming garbage and car tires into the sun, the better! This madness has GOT to stop before it's too late!!
But of course even THIS shit couldn't hope to stop the Adelaide music scene.. oooooh no! Not when there's beer to be drunk and eardrums to be blown; there'll always be someone damn near stupid and insane enough to be throwing a party in it. Just look at all their smiling faces! there's hundreds of them out there! and here I am, stepping over all their frozen corpses, all the way to the Ed Castle! YEAAAS! they don't let a little ice age stop them now do they!? Not when there's Transmission Live tonight! what could be better than crawling out've your igloo tonight and facing certain death for the finest in live music and a host of all your favourite DJs banging the metrosexually ambiguous all night!? I ask ya! aye? AYE!? waiiit.. where'd everyone go!?
MAYDAY FAIR (**) myspace :: Yup, when you think Transmission Live, you think nothing but the sounds of "awesome", and opening act Mayday Fair are no exception. They remind you of the best in indie post punk. They remind you of the Bloc Party, Interpol, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, The Editors, The Rakes, Kasabian and the Kaiser Chiefs. They remind of The Killers, The Rapture, Maximo Park, The Futureheads and The Moving Units. They remind you of the awesome production talent that is Paul Epworth. All those angular, gnashing, buzzing guitars? all those hammering and droning rhythms? all that driven intensity in vocal delivery? that four to the floor beat that burns up a dancefloor at 3AM like no other!? That mad buzz that can't be beat? Yup, you're reminded of all that and more: because they're absolutely everything Mayday Fair could NEVER hope to be even if someone stuck a gun to their nuts and threatened to pull the trigger. Awesome! :)
Yup, Mayday Fair are nothing short of awesome! I shit you not! They can stand up without falling over, they can play their instruments, they occassionally play a passable tune. They're Mayday Fair! masters of the more or less adequate, the artfully mediocre, the bangingly half decent and the marginally C average. They're also damn near lethal in their fiendish ability to make all the ferocity of indie post punk sound about as exciting as a balloon pissing out air! All the hard hitting sounds of margarine, diet pepsi, unsalted peanuts, lite beer and me snoring loudly fast before I hit the floor!? Thanks Mayday Fair, I haven't slept this good in weeks!
And now for absolutely no reason whatsoever (since clearly we're bursting with off the wall excitement here tonight), we present to you the side splitting hilarity that is Surahn Sidhu, aka: Sid. "Sid who?" you may ask. Sheeiit.. Sid? Sid's awesome! Sid's a cultural icon, Sid is everything that is brilliant about the Adelaide scene! I mean hell, how could we possibly forget the wild and woolly, hair flailing antics that was Sid when he played bass with Egypt back in June?
Or what about Sid, back when he was lead singer of everyone's favourite Adelaide band Morals Of A Minor!? Maaaan that band was all kinds of awesome! what ever happened to those guys? they broke up!? fuck that's balls! I mean just LOOK at that afro! that shit spells quality!
Or what about Sid the squinting gimp, popping it large with The Swiss? we all remember that shit riiight? that shit was badass! go Sid you funk weasel!! go you mad magician! YEAAAS!
Or what about the.. *ooops* how the hell did THIS photo get in here!?
*cough* of course the only reason I'm mentioning any of this right now is because Sid recently got this ridiculous new haircut and Azz from Lady Strangelove thought it'd be hilarious if I took a whole bunch of photos of it, and featured it here on Spoz's Rant for the world to see.. awesome!
*cough* yup, aren't you glad you chose to waste 10 minutes of your day reading THIS shit!?
IT'S WARSAW! (****) myspace :: Aaand speaking of all things stupid, time for our next live act, the one and only out've control flaming trainwreck that is THIS band. It's Warsaw! without a doubt the worst excuse for four musicians you're ever likely to hear on a live stage anywhere, period. Yup, they're the bone ringing sounds of the Test Icicles, Die! Die! Die!, Young and Restless, The Birthday Party and Iggy & The Stooges blasted at full volume in one minute intervals throughout the primate enclosure of the Adelaide Zoo moments before you get a face full of flung faeces. They're punch drunk songs that barely last 2-3 minutes, a band that can barely play their instruments, start stop pounding kickdrum solos busted out've time, morse code stabbing atonal guitars, lyrics that explode like flaming bouts of tourette's and a fullblown psychotic breakdown as every one of your internal organs attempts to flee screaming out've your eyes, ears, nose and throat rather than submit themselves to this torture! OOOOOH THE PAIN!! THE PAAAAIN!!
Which is every reason why I can't get enough It's Warsaw! They're like a mad hit of vindaloo! The first few times they'll burn the roof of your mouth off, and have you shooting flames out've your arse screaming obscenities, and then the weirdest thing; you can't get enough of it! You keep coming back for more and more and before you know you're knee deep in it, sprinkling all this shit into your two minute noodles, your breakfast cereal, your morning coffee, laughing hysterically for days on end, only to wake up weeks later wondering just where the fuck all of your furniture has gone to. It's Warsaw! the more fucked up it gets; the more insanely awesome it become! It sure as fuck ain't music by ANY measure, but oooh FUCK does it rock! :)
And tonight may verily well have been their WORST set ever! I mean sure, they had the best intentions, they even brought a setlist tonight! but just like every set before, it all invariably degenerates into the same retarding shit: Christian on vocals and Scott on guitar running riot through the audience, wildly swinging their guitars, mics and mic stands about, destroying everything and everyone around them. But one LAST stunt definitely put them waaay over the top tonight: when an ill timed backwards trip off the stage by Christian sends him crashing to the floor in front of us, half his back cracking loudly on the foldback speaker he took along for the ride.. ooooh yeah! I may come for the music, but THIS is the sort've shit that I can party to!
Yup, not since Tyger Tyger's infamous glass breaking set at the Ed after the Big Day Out (or their subsequent demolision derby for Transmission Live back in May) have we ever seen such brazen disregard for occupational health and safety. It's Warsaw!? we freaking salute you!
KYTES OF OMAR (****1/2) myspace :: And what better way to headline this howling shitstorm of rock tonight than to invite the one band in Adelaide that eats entire planets. Kytes Of Omar. Punching out with a wind tunnel of spine jarring reverb tonight, they're the five flavours of batshit insane you'd get if you fronted The Strokes with Frank Black from The Pixies and then sent Snowman in with baseball bats to beat them five ways black and blue to Sunday. They're Kasabian fronted by Craig Nicholls from The Vines. They're Franz Ferdinand drugged up on horse tranquilisers armed with jangling guitars that sprout beards of fur. They're Nick Oliveri trampled to death by a stampeding herd of wild elephant and everything that is awesome about banshee screams that ring up the walls accompanied by layer upon layer of hammering distortion. Do not be fooled by their teeny tiny fragile endoskeletons, their low sloping simian brows, how they shuffle about on stage in various states of the barely erect, this band is a killing frenzy fifty times their own size!
Tonight's performance was so damn psychotic and psychedelically mind fucked, hobbits were sent fleeing under the undergrowth in the mistaken belief it was a Ringwraith attack. All those gunning surf zombie guitars, the hollaring, the shrieking, the squeal of feedback and distortion? oh yes! it was all here. Kytes Of Omar: the band that eats entire planets and spits out fire. Oh and if anyone could possibly understand a word that Anthony was saying throughout this entire song near the end of their set: whether it whale song, a recipe for dope cookies, or the grand summoning of Baalzebub himself? let me know! that shit was freaaaking gold yo!
And now in following (and in no relation whatsoever to all those photos Azz wanted me to take of Sid looking like a twit earlier this evening) here's some photos of Azz passed out in a car out front of the Ed Castle. Yup, that there pretty much sums up the excitement level here this night. If you weren't wooping it up here at Transmission Live tonight, shit you were missing out! :)
And as much as I would've loved to have taken more photos of all the DJs banging tunes, losing fingers to frost bite, breathing clouds of ice, whilst a packed out dancefloor fuck full of indie scensters stagger, twitch uncontrollably, turn white and collapse dead on the floor in a shattering shower of meat chunks and splintered bone; duuude I so seriously couldn't be fucked tonight! Don't get me wrong, I dig what you dudes do and you put on one fuck of an insane party each month, but do you KNOW how fucking cold it was out there!? FUUUUUUCK!!
So 'til next we meet in the emergency ward, scraped off the sidewalk in various states of decay, stacked neatly into furnaces, as paramedic teams desperately try to bring us back up to "room" temperature with a lit match and a can of petrol, we bid farewell to another exciting whizz bang episode of Spoz's Rant. Safe in the knowledge that I'll likely be stupid enough to do it all again Saturday night! Why? *cough* duuude.. do I even need to answer that shit anymore!? :)
