Posted by Mark
Thu, 25 May 2006 18:33:00 GMT
Tonight, I pity everyone who isn’t me. The Maladies played the Excelsior tonight, and as always were precious little short of a religious experience.
Edit: Hm. I should really post more often - this was a few weeks ago now.
I have a setlist with me, filched from underneath the bassist’s not-so-watchful eye, so I can go through the set song by song.
“The Woods”.
An absolute fucking barnstormer.
“Oh Mary, dance along the wire/Because tonight, we’ll set these woods on fire” - this is one of my favourite Maladies tracks, and it was a perfect way to kick off the night. Daniel showed he could be angry as well as angsty - he’s got a massively powerful voice, and, while offstage he’s mellow and even humble, on stage he’s a consummate frontman.
“Glory”
… I can’t remember how this song goes. I remember enjoying it massively, but that doesn’t help you much.
“Who’s?”
A bitter, country-tinged paean to obsessive, doomed, unreciprocated love.
“So Fine”
Another favourite, this song starts out almost brash, and slowly descends into madness - “my friends don’t like me/when I piss and I moan/so I feel so fine, I feel so fine”.
“Louise”
This was a Don Walker cover, and an excellent choice, too - I didn’t like the Bob Dylan cut I heard them play recently, but this perfectly suits their heartfelt, confessional style.
“Addiction”
A jaunty little sex jam about a Tasmanian girl. If there’s any justice in the world, Dan ought to have been admitted to hospital with a crushed pelvis and an ineradicable grin after writing this song.
“Jump Down”
- “Falling”
“Take me down”
Given that all three of these songs are about downward velocity, I can’t actually remember which is which. Sorry, fellas.
Since writing this, I’ve seen the Maladies twice more, at the Sandringham and at an odd little concert at Home nightclub. The room was disappointingly sparse at both gigs - the headliner for the Sando gig, despite an impressive pedigree (X, the Saints) was nothing particularly special, yet the room was nearly empty for the Maladies and jam-packed for him. Regardless, I dragged a few new people along to the show, and they all enjoyed it - Jules was particularly tickled by the Metallica riff the guitarist chucked in between songs.
The Home gig was a little weirder. I saw the Dirty Three play beforehand with Daniel, and was mightily impressed, and he managed to persuade me to come to their set at 2:30. After a bit of argy-bargy with the bouncer at Home, who seemed to think I wasn’t on the guest list (cheeky bastard), I managed to get in and found the boys upstairs. Unfortunately, that seemed to be about as full as the room actually got - there were as many people on stage as there were in the band. (There was some momentary amusement from watching a couple of Beautiful People attempt to dance Home-style to the Maladies’ mournful melodies, though. Doesn’t quite work.)
Anyway, I’d better stop here before this turns into an angry rant about how people would rather pay money to listen to shit than take a chance on a band they haven’t heard before. I’ve done that topic to death, methinks.
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Posted by Mark
Sun, 09 Apr 2006 06:59:00 GMT
Last night was the last time the popfrenzy collective will book the Mandarin Club. This is a bit sad: it was a reliable source of shit-hot bands you’ve never heard of for a very long time, and it will be sorely missed.
Anyway, the farewell performance had The Dumb Earth headlining. I’ve been a fan of their first album, “Walk the Earth” for a very long time, probably at least partially for the circumstances in which I heard it first: it has this raucous, ramshackle charm about it, like punk played by a hobo jazz orchestra who remember better times. Time seems to have worn away their rougher edges: they’re still dark, but there’s a smoothness that wasn’t there before. Regardless, an excellent show, and I’m very glad I went.
The second support was some guy playing covers on an acoustic guitar. Not very interesting.
The first support, however, starting kinda late, was a band called ninetynine, who were flat-out amazing. While they jumped around on instruments a lot, the basic recipe seemed to be powerful drums + foggy, overwhelming synths + piercing stabs of sound from either the xylophone or the guitar. Very very highly recommended, and I only wish they’d been able to start a little earlier and play a full set.
(Sekrit message to Shae: download, listen, enjoy. And see ‘em if they tour Boden. :P)
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Posted by Mark
Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:31:00 GMT
I’d like to apologise to everyone for the extreme awfulness of Vincent Over The Sink and Le Paper Dolls. Honestly, they were two of the worst bands I’ve ever had the misfortune of sitting through. I’d particularly like to apologise to Gordon, whom I convinced to come out and only stayed around for these two bands.
The Thaw were a welcome relief: three-piece all female band playing postrock. Dynamic, tight as hell, and kinda cute, too. Reminded me of Mogwai, but a little more concise.
Finally, Ni-Hao! were terrific: another three piece band, but this time with two basses and a drummer.. massive amount of fun, even if I was one of only very few people willing to put dignity aside and dance to some fairly jerky rhythms.
Tonight: Deerhoof and Pivot.
oh, and stolen from Warren Ellis and intended solely for the purpose of rocking out: “Pumping Iron” by “That Fucking Tank”.
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Posted by Mark
Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:44:00 GMT
I’ve set up a gigs mailing list at the request of a couple of people who got sick of me raving about bands I hadn’t invited them to. I’ll be announcing stuff I’m going to, but if you want to post about gigs in Sydney, that’d be awesome. (No London posts, should Ben be reading this - I’m jealous enough already.)
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Posted by Mark
Thu, 02 Feb 2006 20:06:00 GMT
If you get the chance to see a band called “Maladies”, jump at it. Very cool, very strange: the guy’s voice almost sounds like a woman’s, and they have this Nick Cave graveyard swing going on. They’re playing at the Hopetoun this Saturday, but I’ll be at Damo Suzuki + Pivot at the Mandarin club, with any luck. (The guy played in Can, there’s no way that’s missable.)
I’d also like to put in a hearty hell-yeah for popfrenzy. I’ve been along to quite a few of their gigs just on spec, and they’ve all been awesome. All hail Levins.
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Posted by Mark
Mon, 30 Jan 2006 04:30:00 GMT
Thanks to PeteG for coming out to one of the silliest gigs I’ve ever attended. I only wish I’d made it to the first two sets as well, they were fun, in a deeply retarded Kenny-Rogers-on-angrypills kind of way. (Your trenchant social insights might have been lost on the girls in the cowboy hats, however.)
Extra special bonus: the crazy old guy who dances chicken-style at Jackie Orszaczky gigs was there too. Scary stuff.
Dancefloor interaction is still a little odd. I was dancing sort-of-with and sort-of-next-to a girl, and some guy came up to me, asked if I was interested, and told me she was a surgeon. I said something non-committal, assuming that I was being warned off and that his posse of angry friends were right outside (remember, you have gangs of pipe-hitting niggas, posses of shotgun-wielding rednecks, and whinges of blogwriting whiteboys. Aren’t collective nouns fun?) Anyway, he leant over to her, whispered something in her ear, and she laughed and moved to another section of the floor.
I’m still a little mystified. Is surgeon some kind of code word, or did I just pass up the opportunity to talk to a pretty girl with enough brains to be able to cut people open without killing them? I guess I’ll never know…
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