Saturday 07/02/09 St Jerome's Laneway Festival @ Fowler's Courtyard, Adelaide

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CLICK HERE to see the festival in photos.

Look away, gentlefolk all, for the drummer has stripped to his undies. Alright then, have a bit of a perve if you must. As statements of intent go, this one makes perfect sense. It’s hot outside – another of Adelaide’s forty degree days – and it’s really hot inside. Tame Impala’s challenge, to which they’ll rise fairly easily, is to make it hotter still. Damn the recklessness of youth!

Quite why they’re playing this early is something of a mystery. They may be new, and they may be young, but there’s a palpable excitement about the band and the tight, hard psychedelia they build on near-tribal rhythms. So despite the early hour, they’ve drawn a crowd that scarcely fits the venue. Hardly anyone is moving, on stage or off. That’s partly because there just isn’t room, partly because we’re all hot already, braising in our own sweat, but mainly because we’re all totally engrossed in the music. If they keep playing like this, Tame Impala will be closing festivals before they know it.

Out in the sun, Born Ruffians – another guitar, bass and drums trio – are indulging in some sweet three-part harmonies. They also demonstrate some rougher edges, but there’s a big problem here: curiosity. Unfortunately it’s mine, and it tempted me to leave Tame Impala to check them out when I really should have stayed put.
Laid back though the Laneway Festival undoubtedly is, it’s hardly the ideal environment for Holly Throsby. She’s good – as you’d expect of someone who can pull in guests like Bonnie Prince Billy to work on her latest album – but both her voice and her songs demand a more intimate setting than this.

Known for his work with Pavement and Preston School Of Industry, Spiral Stairs (aka Scott Kannberg) turns in one of the best sets of the afternoon, though it would also be in contention for the label of ‘most understated’. There’s nothing spectacular about it, either visually or musically – he’s confined to a dodgy office chair, after breaking his foot, and his pick-up band is missing a bass player, who had to go to a wedding or something. To that you could add further criticisms that it’s all a bit samey and his voice is far from great. Both would be true, but they’re also completely irrelevant since Kannberg has a collection of songs that take charge of how you feel and think, refusing to let go. Whatever the flaws in the performance, he can counter with something far more important: the ability to play and sing from the heart.

Back out in the courtyard, Cut Off Your Hands are far more engaging with their catchy punk pop and tales of love gone wrong. The stage alone is almost the size of the last venue I saw them in, but they fill it without any trouble. Poor sound doesn’t much help their cause, but CoYH have energy to spare.

After an earlier and thankfully short set from Canyons – a pair of well-regarded DJs/remixers who seemed intent on making your average purveyor of decks for weddings seem like a musical genius on the same level as Ludwig van – Daedelus comes as something of a relief. Wearing top hat and tails (well, minus the hat) he manages both to make some decent, floor-shaking music and to look interesting while doing it. He’s all tweak and twist, playing a Monome (essentially an array of buttons) and moving like a master conductor.

It’s easy to appreciate Dougy, vocalist with The Temper Trap, but harder to warm to his band – though they’ve clearly improved since my last experience of them. After an excellent start, their muscular indie goes off the boil all too soon. Ultimately it seems that their material is too similar in style but too variable in quality. Posting an occasional reminder of U2 doesn’t do them any favours, either.

One of the things that’s become obvious by now is how much better organised this year’s Laneway is than last year’s. The Melbourne event a week before attracted bitter criticism, particularly about the difficulty of moving between stages, but in Adelaide that has been vastly improved. The crowd seems slightly smaller than last year’s, too, though that might just be a side effect of a reworked layout. On the other hand, the budget for mist tents only ran to two blokes with weedkiller backpacks, so it’s just as well that a cool change has come through.