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
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