Live Review

St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival @ Brisbane Showgrounds

Laneway is one of my favourite festivals, a gig where you go because you like music, not because you’re one of a million kids climbing over every other kid in some sweaty rite-of-passage they barely understand or even enjoy (damn kids these days!).

The line-up is so carefully curated there are always pleasant surprises from end to end. My day began with exactly that kind of find in Metz. I hadn’t enjoyed their second record quite as much as their first, branching out in ways which seemed to forget their core strengths in fuzzy, visceral guitar noise. On the Mistletone stage the Canadians delivered in force: crushing power but with texture and timbre through all those bassy, growling registers. A powerful, no-nonsense and exciting way to start the day.

I dashed down to see Royal Headache on the Good Better Best Stage and heard Shogun, looking a little alarmed, admitting that this was the very first gig he’d ever done sober. He threw himself about the stage with just as much abandon as ever. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen the band live and in the past I’d been struck how much the raucous punk element of their sound took over on stage, obliterating much of the garage-pop sweetness on their records. Sobering up really seems to have allowed them to realise the pop side of their sound, because they sounded a whole lot more like The Easybeats than The Sex Pistols, this time round.

Back at The Mistletone stage again, I only caught a little bit of US pysch-pop weirdos Diiv. Zachary Cole Smith certainly won the weird indie fashion award for the day, with baggy track pants tucked into his socks under a flowing shirt and denim vest, rainbow guitar strap and a baseball cap to finish it off, natch. For the few numbers I was able to stay for, their songs woozily but sweetly blended into a river of psych, more wonderfully deranged than on their records.

I puffed down to the Red Bull Music Academy stage for the first time that day to catch Thundercat. It’s hard to be much more in demand than Thundercat’s Stephen Bruner right now. Outside of Flylo he’s basically the central figure of the whole afro-futurist revival and everybody wants a piece of that. Having said that, I wasn’t so into his last EP (although everybody else was): so noodly and almost bloodless, lacking musical oomph. On stage it was the complete opposite. Thundercat showed why he’s considered one of the best bassists in the business, his fingers flying like an agitated spider over his huge, eight-string bass. His drummer and keyboardist were similarly insane, all three of those guys embellishing Thundercat’s repertoire -those weird tunes and his fluting falsetto- with endlessly sick solos that just brought the whole thing roaring to life. The crowd was the quietest I saw, just looking on transfixed by the mastery going down before them. Pick of the day.

Over on the Never Let It Rest Stage, Odd Future soul survivors The Internet appeared a bit confronted by the heat, but didn’t let that stop them laying down a set of their beautifully smooth neo-soul. I’m a big fan of Syd The Kid and Matt Martians, although it surprised me how many other people are into them: the tent was jam-packed with screaming young folk. It was a kind of weird, The Internet seem like they’d be much better suited to a smoky jazz-club than an enormous festival, but it’s a small gripe to have.

Battles were back up on the Mistletone stage and were their usual, brows-furrowed, massively complex, math-rocking selves. I haven’t connected with any of their albums as much as that first, huge record and their set didn’t change my mind. The intricate rhythms seemed to take a while to gel, occasionally faltering before a song took off. Their brilliant song, Atlas, was the big finale, but for the first time that day I was reminded of the muddy sound that had marred the Mistletone stage the year before: the lower registers obliterated the trebles and everything felt a little off, rather than celebratory.

I caught a tiny bit of Vince Staples, another guy who seemed to be suffering from the heat and taking a few jabs at the audience too, saying something like, “C’mon we gotta perform for all these beautiful white people” at one point. I sorta understand what he was thinking: there were well-meaning superwhite superfans screaming, “Fuck the LAPD!!!” which was pretty cringey. Heat exhausted or not, Vince was killing it, but the set continued to feel a bit awkward and I left to catch Grimes.

I’m so impressed with Grimes’ steady process of transformation from outsider-pop-oddity into genuine pop star. She bounced about the stage all trussed up in day-glo sweatbands and cute ribbons. Her realistic-body-shaped dancers (is it OK to draw attention to that?) collaborated beautifully with a stage show that was really winning. It was hilarious to be reminded that Grimes is also the ace producer who makes all her own sounds, when she’d suddenly switch out of pop diva mode and race desperately back to press buttons and twiddle knobs. You’re big time now Grimes, you gotta delegate more! I tried to stick around for as long as possible but the crowd became unbearably heavy. Punters are developing this habit of daisy-chaining in the festival crush so they don’t lose their friends; a group of twenty waiflike but determined girls with their meaty bro’-friends in tow, elbowed past and stopped right in front of me before the lead waif proclaimed loudly, “This isn’t CHVRCHES!” and started pushing back the way they’d come. At that point I gave up.

I was keen to hear Hudson Mohawke. His last album, Lantern, really surprised me, finding new life in trap-dance, a genre Hud Mo pioneered but which is rapidly becoming all-pervasive and pretty boring. He kicked off his set with the techy, even mathy sounds of System, one of my favourite tracks from the record and, frankly, it thrilled me. Unfortunately it wasn’t all quite as exciting. One of the great things about that record is its contrasts: party bangers interspersed with quiet neo-soul, sweet guest vocalists and unusual stylistic choices. Hud Mo didn’t bring any guest vocalists and clearly wasn’t prepared to play them out of a can, so instead we got banger after banger, and really, those are the cheesiest bits of his work. On a brighter note, he threw in some of the material he made with Lunice as TNGHT. That was where the whole trap-dance thing kicked off and those cuts remain some of the best and biggest you’ll hear. The crowd surged and I surged with ‘em.

I stuck it out for the final act of the night, Purity Ring. They’re another band whose sound has been mutating, away from the iconic ‘daze pop’ of their first album and into, what, gabba house? Euro techno? Cheesy electro-pop? What eventuated was something else again: an ethereal, ghostly electro-pop complemented with a perfectly judged light show, the best I saw all day. For a group that’s so DIY in their production I was really surprised by their mastery of the stage. An unexpectedly great way to end the day.

- Chris Cobcroft.

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