There is a forty-year old within my acquaintance who possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian rock, but does not care for The Drones. As far as I can make out this is because their music ‘insists upon itself’. They certainly have no time for raised eyebrows or tongue filled cheeks, but then they’ve certainly earned the right to be as unironic as they wish, filling the Annandale’s dank confines tonight with a suitably sweaty press.
Based on his support spot tonight, Jack Ladder on the other hand hasn’t quite got there. The elements are in place, his Nick Cave circa Boatman’s Call warble interweaving nicely with some clean steel guitar. The wildness wasn’t however and the set stagnated under the weight of its own seriousness, not helped by the at times dragging slowness of the songs themselves.
Perhaps it’s just that heavy material needs to feel lived in to be believable, which is exactly what Gareth Liddiard seems to understand. His vocal delivery is a bodily event, skinny frame twitching with buttoned down agitation, raw lyrics chewed to mush and spagged back out. He settled into a controlled rhythm, holding it together before unleashing the spastic, only breaking the spell between songs to clear his ravaged trachea.
The last few years of touring have honed the rest of the band into an equally focussed unit. Taken as a whole, they were in the zone tonight, offering the crowd some of their best material, ‘Shark Fin Blues’, the spiky atonal Nintendo riff of ‘The Minotaur’ before encoring with Kev Carmody’s gut-wrenching ‘River of Tears’. Riveting.
First published in The Brag, March 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Wooden Shjips @ The Annandale, Thursday 11th March ’10
Psychedelic rock and beards share a number of surprising similarities. While they may grow with single-minded focus into stately bushes, or explode into wild uncultivated snarls, both require a degree of commitment to generate and possess a certain grandeur when executed properly. They also compliment one another wonderfully, Wooden Shjips’ six-string wielding helmsman Ripley Johnson producing a searing example of the one whilst sporting a fine specimen of the other.
Perhaps the most essential shared feature however is testosterone, which was in no short supply this evening, the Annandale’s blackened cavern being loosely filled with intense young men cultivating a motley array of facial trimmings. Johnson may like to think of the group’s music as ‘dance’, but moving and shaking seemed low on the crowd’s agenda, most seeming content to stand at slack-jawed attention to the meditative blare being sculpted on stage.
Fair enough really, Wooden Shjips’ particular brand of psychedelia – defiantly minimalist harmonies, droning repetition and blistering noise – producing an at times numbing sense of stasis. Not for the fellas on stage of course, rhythm section and bassist Dusty Jermier in particular maintaining an unshakeable groove with dogged glee, leaving Johnson free to emit all manner of enigmatic utterances, abrasive spirals and stinging whorls all soaked in a suitably impenetrable tangle of reverb.
It’s not difficult to appreciate the precision and muscle that underlie the grinding noise. That said, Wooden Shjips still feel as though they’ve yet to really hit their stride. Letting it all grow out may be liberating, but it gets old after a while – the audience halved between the main set and the encore, it taking some persistent enthusiasts to coax them back for some more. Might be time for a trim.
First published in The Brag, March 2010
Perhaps the most essential shared feature however is testosterone, which was in no short supply this evening, the Annandale’s blackened cavern being loosely filled with intense young men cultivating a motley array of facial trimmings. Johnson may like to think of the group’s music as ‘dance’, but moving and shaking seemed low on the crowd’s agenda, most seeming content to stand at slack-jawed attention to the meditative blare being sculpted on stage.
Fair enough really, Wooden Shjips’ particular brand of psychedelia – defiantly minimalist harmonies, droning repetition and blistering noise – producing an at times numbing sense of stasis. Not for the fellas on stage of course, rhythm section and bassist Dusty Jermier in particular maintaining an unshakeable groove with dogged glee, leaving Johnson free to emit all manner of enigmatic utterances, abrasive spirals and stinging whorls all soaked in a suitably impenetrable tangle of reverb.
It’s not difficult to appreciate the precision and muscle that underlie the grinding noise. That said, Wooden Shjips still feel as though they’ve yet to really hit their stride. Letting it all grow out may be liberating, but it gets old after a while – the audience halved between the main set and the encore, it taking some persistent enthusiasts to coax them back for some more. Might be time for a trim.
First published in The Brag, March 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
the news of today will be the movies of tomorrow
The Hurt Locker is an action movie. It’s directed by Kathryn Bigalow, so this shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen Point Break, i.e. all white males between the ages of 15-55 as well as most of everyone else. And although it simply oozes adrenaline that’s about where the comparison ends. The Oscar noms are completely warranted. Bigalow has managed to provide the first attempt by any member of the Hollywood establishment to deal with the ongoing ignominy of the Iraq war with anything remotely resembling a sober mind.
The only overt clue towards the film’s political sympathies (if it has any – the filmmakers have quite carefully left the question open) is provided by the opening quote from the left-wing political commentator Chris Hedges that ‘war is a drug’. Or to be a touch more precise, the adrenaline that it induces is. From the masterfully directed opening sequence (which sees the rapid demise of Guy Pearce along with any hope of any stars riding in to save the day) onwards, Bigalow forces the audience to share the at times excruciating levels of tension that her characters endure.
Not that they may exactly be called characters in any proper sense. Replacing the unfortunate Pearce as leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit within Bravo Company of the United States army is Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner), a confident battle-tested customer with the job of defusing Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs, or more commonly, road-side bombs), a task he performs with unrestrained relish. Less confidant are underlings Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) who provide him with cover whilst vainly attempting to reign in James’ reckless tendencies.
The film depicts the following month in the soldier’s lives – action flows with alarming regularity, any conventional sense of plot being sacrificed in a skilful attempt to capture the hyper-reality of modern warfare. Kidnappings, roadside bombs, snipers, car-bombs and body-bombs (explosives sewn inside corpses) are presented with an almost documentary sense of realism, accompanied by dialogue that is remarkable for its unforced and unselfconscious fly on the wall character.
The enemy is diffuse. Predominantly set in the urban settings in which the war has been fought, the civilian population are portrayed as constant, impassive spectators, any of whose watchful faces might conceal the individual wielding the detonator. The language barrier breeds confusion, violence multiplies. At one point James pulls a single cord, unwittingly unearthing half a dozen bombs cunningly strung together around him, as excellent a metaphor as any for the interconnected hostilities that have continually re-emerged to engulf the country’s ‘liberators’.
As with David Simon’s somewhat overlooked mini-series Generation Kill, Bigalow is more concerned with the trauma inflicted on the aggressors than the occupied nation. Empty periods between active duty are filled with video games or vaguely homo-erotic post-battle bonding all of which prove hopelessly inadequate to providing the three principal characters much in the way of respite from or perspective on the horrific immediacy of Iraqi everyday reality. Wryly fatalistic humour is the norm, platitudes such as ‘going to war can be a once in a lifetime experience’ mouthed by a Yale-graduate army psychologist sounding as devoid of meaning to the troubled Eldridge as to everyone else.
Mark Boal, a war journalist embedded with a bomb defusing squad in the early years of the Iraq war, has produced an extraordinarily disciplined script, brimming with telling detail. The acting is generally excellent, Bigalow’s use of no-name actors assisting immeasurably in forcing the audience to accept the film’s reality – those few celebrities given roles enjoy only brief cameos and are quickly reduced to bit parts (ahem).
And despite the obvious assertion made at the opening, The Hurt Locker is in some ways an anti-action film – it demonstrates the awful consequences of James’ addiction to the rush by forcing the audience to share in and become complicit in it. Bigalow has produced a masterful film that does not indulge in any heavy-handed sermonising, rather allowing the anarchic flow of atrocity speak for itself. Go see it. Now.
The only overt clue towards the film’s political sympathies (if it has any – the filmmakers have quite carefully left the question open) is provided by the opening quote from the left-wing political commentator Chris Hedges that ‘war is a drug’. Or to be a touch more precise, the adrenaline that it induces is. From the masterfully directed opening sequence (which sees the rapid demise of Guy Pearce along with any hope of any stars riding in to save the day) onwards, Bigalow forces the audience to share the at times excruciating levels of tension that her characters endure.
Not that they may exactly be called characters in any proper sense. Replacing the unfortunate Pearce as leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit within Bravo Company of the United States army is Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner), a confident battle-tested customer with the job of defusing Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs, or more commonly, road-side bombs), a task he performs with unrestrained relish. Less confidant are underlings Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) who provide him with cover whilst vainly attempting to reign in James’ reckless tendencies.
The film depicts the following month in the soldier’s lives – action flows with alarming regularity, any conventional sense of plot being sacrificed in a skilful attempt to capture the hyper-reality of modern warfare. Kidnappings, roadside bombs, snipers, car-bombs and body-bombs (explosives sewn inside corpses) are presented with an almost documentary sense of realism, accompanied by dialogue that is remarkable for its unforced and unselfconscious fly on the wall character.
The enemy is diffuse. Predominantly set in the urban settings in which the war has been fought, the civilian population are portrayed as constant, impassive spectators, any of whose watchful faces might conceal the individual wielding the detonator. The language barrier breeds confusion, violence multiplies. At one point James pulls a single cord, unwittingly unearthing half a dozen bombs cunningly strung together around him, as excellent a metaphor as any for the interconnected hostilities that have continually re-emerged to engulf the country’s ‘liberators’.
As with David Simon’s somewhat overlooked mini-series Generation Kill, Bigalow is more concerned with the trauma inflicted on the aggressors than the occupied nation. Empty periods between active duty are filled with video games or vaguely homo-erotic post-battle bonding all of which prove hopelessly inadequate to providing the three principal characters much in the way of respite from or perspective on the horrific immediacy of Iraqi everyday reality. Wryly fatalistic humour is the norm, platitudes such as ‘going to war can be a once in a lifetime experience’ mouthed by a Yale-graduate army psychologist sounding as devoid of meaning to the troubled Eldridge as to everyone else.
Mark Boal, a war journalist embedded with a bomb defusing squad in the early years of the Iraq war, has produced an extraordinarily disciplined script, brimming with telling detail. The acting is generally excellent, Bigalow’s use of no-name actors assisting immeasurably in forcing the audience to accept the film’s reality – those few celebrities given roles enjoy only brief cameos and are quickly reduced to bit parts (ahem).
And despite the obvious assertion made at the opening, The Hurt Locker is in some ways an anti-action film – it demonstrates the awful consequences of James’ addiction to the rush by forcing the audience to share in and become complicit in it. Bigalow has produced a masterful film that does not indulge in any heavy-handed sermonising, rather allowing the anarchic flow of atrocity speak for itself. Go see it. Now.
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