Live Review
The Jungle Giants @ The Triffid
The queues have been building for a while and late night road works happening on the street of the venue have ensured the eager fans are sprawled wide and far. An earlier than usual kick off time means that this reviewer had missed the sets from Machine Age and Gideon Benson but the crowd is well and truly amped up with a split of under and over 18s. It’s hard to tell who’s showing more excitement.
The Lulu Raes take to the stage and launch straight into what they themselves call “Pop’n’roll.” The crowd is loving every minute of the very high energy set, and while the band is incredibly tight in what they do, there seems to be a lot of talk and banter amongst themselves without a lot of interaction between them and the crowd other than to name check the next song coming up. It’s a disappointment, as the band is so well received by the audience you get the feeling that they could really take it to the next level by hyping up the crowd or acknowledging them a little more. Nonetheless they put on an impressive performance that definitely gets the crowd more than ready to go for the main course.
The Jungle Giants don’t keep the swelling crowd in anticipation for too long. They take to the stage expressing their love to be back home and kicking off the tour in Brisbane and the performance is everything you’d expect from these quirky locals. They keep the diehards happy by starting the set off with old favourites “Anywhere Else” and “Mr Polite”, before launching into some newer tracks like “Creepy Cool” from Speakerzoid, which sends the crowd into an absolute frenzy.
The band take things down a notch with “Together We Can Work Together”, but this is a red herring for the audience as they follow it up with arguably their biggest hit to date, “She’s A Riot”, with front man Sam Hales finally succumbing to crowd demands and chugging a beer on stage. They are about to get into the popular “I Am What You Want Me To Be” when the mic cuts out, the lights come back on, and we are being led outside due to a fire alarm being tripped. It is chaos on the outside when the fire brigade turn up and more than a few punters are feeling pretty happy that security do a great job of keeping the crowd under control while the venue is attended to.
Unfortunately that is the end of the night for this reviewer, but what I got to see was one of the most memorable evenings in a long time. Not just because of all the craziness that took place but because I got to witness one of Brisbane’s best and most loved bands at the peak of their powers. It’s clear this band will be around and well supported for a long time to come.
- Michael Clark