|
JUICE
- Onstage - October, 1995
Popsicle 2 Header, the only non-locals on the bill, somehow opened this mini-festival of Melbourne bands by playing to five A&R men and a poodle. The Perth outfit have been through many incarnations, most notably The Rainyard, who liked the whole Stems/Easybeats thing very, very much. Header lends a little from their baggy phase but rocks it up into a lean Britpop splash. A suit and stripey T-shirt, the Sugarfix EP and only a little bit Oasis. Best Tune: "LED." **1/2 Rubher. "We're Rub-her. Or Rubber...." Songs about disco dancing to Devo, English DJ John Peel and T-shirts from Rome feature, plus a new one from the Bright Red Popstar EP about Sissy Spacek called "Spacek" which is cool seeing as she was in Badlands, the best film ever. A silver frock and almighty heels. Pop with no sense of key. **1/2 Rail used to be Fragment, used to be Sleeper. Stripped down to a three-piece because guitarist Ashley Naylor was off somewhere else with Even, Rail took what used to be just a batch of perfect melodies into more powerful and aggressive territory, however plaintive "Immune Deficiency" ("I spent yesterday/smoking drugs and getting drunk/and scratching my sores...") might sound on the radio. You gotta hand it to them for pulling off PJ Harvey's "Sheela Na Gig" so well - the men washing men right out of their hair - but "Free Bird" and "Spinning Ball" really go. Open chord pop with cardigans. **** Headliners Snout were probably why everyone came on this night, being veteran favourites of the pop live scene and all that, and the songs from last year's What's That Sound? still stack up, despite a major line-up drama leaving singer/bassplayer Ross McLennan without a band after the record was released. Everything's rosy now by the sound of new Night and Day EP songs aired, but return as always to "Greenwich Meridian Time" from What's That Sound, an anthem in the parallel universe where everything is timeless. They're the Pop Art component of Popsicle 2: targets, asbestos vests and The Who. *** Sandpit are new and getting nearer to a cigar with each step. They wrote to You Am I and got a support slot earlier in the year, only to be swamped by a large stage. But in the cosy Evelyn, opening the second night, their slippery, angular Dinosaur Jr mutation felt close to right. **1/2 Dollop are so proud of their extraordinary shabbiness that the whole thing could always descend into a pathetic joke, though it never does. It gets so close though - as when the drummer comes up to sing and forgets all the words. They just grin and move on to the next stoopid balls-up that only makes it better. Intentionally naive is a strange paradox. Sometimes, when Dollop leave the odd lilting melody intact and grind on with a touch of spirited Flying Nun-style repetition, it sounds like perfectly pure sloppy lo-fi. You gotta love that. "Predatory Recipe", "Racked", "Nature's Vaccine" and "Pete", from Deflator fit the bill. A long period of recording has mant that The Earthmen have suffered of late from live inactivity, but Popsicle 2 put that to rights. Mad singer Scott introduced them as "indie fusion". It's just indie really, although cuts like "Figure 8" and "Cool Chick #59" deserve to be footpath art so we can tread all over them and throw money in the hat. Autohaze pose a similar dilemma - great tunes all, but really old. To deny praise to "Maps To Find Her" and "Light of the Day" would be bad form, and that's how it is with Autohaze. Adult pop.
|