Photo: Tom Gilhespy
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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.
Mountains In The Sky prove to be another highlight, delivering a set that’s half experiment and half shimmering pop hooks. The one essential element of the band is John Lee – sporting a bandaged forehead after picking up an injury at a recent gig – but tonight it’s Jojo Petrina, playing a Moog synth, who sums it all up. Almost from the start she’s grinning wildly, unable to contain her joy at how good it all sounds and feels. Perfectly understandable, too.
Anyone coming late to the work of Stereolab – and more specifically, their set today – could be forgiven for feeling somewhat mystified. This, after all, is a band described as ‘iconic,’ ‘influential’ and ‘experimental’ so often that those verdicts probably have some hint of truth in them. And here they are, playing some passionless seventies Euro pop with more added Lounge than you need while standing or sitting around doing next to nothing. But they do it so damn well, so stylishly, that you’ll soon forgive them. Maybe even start to enjoy it. Damn, it’s over.
Short sets are one of the hazards of festivals, of course, but The Drones have more to worry about in that regard than most bands, since everything about them is epic. They tell epic stories through epic songs with epic riffs played at epic volumes. Truly epic volumes. Today, with the CBD around us, they’re far quieter than normal, but no less fervent. The spine of their set is the same as it was a few months back, opening with Nail It Down, passing through Shark Fin Blues and The Minotaur, and closing with I Don’t Ever Want To Change. Though there’s less to flesh it out tonight, everything they play is fresh, taut and exhilarating. In short, it’s another ordinary gig from The Drones – which means, of course, that they’re playing a blinder.
If The Hold Steady really are the best bar band in the world – debatable, not least for the high energy antics of Craig Finn, geared more for stadia than some scummy dive with a postage stamp for a stage – then it’s both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They’re hard, tight, focused and turn in a fantastic show, but that can’t disguise the woeful lack of invention in their music. Well, actually, it can. The Hold Steady are playing nothing that we haven’t heard a thousand times before, often from godawful, tasteless jerks you’d happily run over if it meant you never had to hear their radio-friendly dross again. Bob Seger, to name one. Yet for most of their set it doesn’t matter one little bit: the excitement they generate is perfectly able to carry you through any reservations about their music. Until, that is, they decide to slow things down with Lord, I’m Discouraged. It starts innocently, and even sounds as if it might be worth listening to rather than just watching. But then, on a twin-necked Gibson, Tad Kubler launches into the most excruciatingly painful guitar solo I’ve ever seen performed. There are musicians other than Seger that I’d wish pain on – everyone involved with P!nk’s So What, for example – but this is the sort of solo that Guantanamo Bay should be kept open for. The spell is well and truly broken. The Hold Steady rock, but please.
Thankfully, Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, is already installed on the other stage and is happy to remind us that music can still be reasonably fresh, even in 2009, and needn’t make your stomach turn. A little later, Pivot achieve exactly the same thing on the same stage with an eclectic set that’s part electronica and part art rock.
Back in the great outdoors, Architecture In Helsinki take a different approach to retro, focusing on eighties angular pop rather than classic rock favoured by The Hold Steady. They might never hit the heights that the Americans reached, but nor do they do anything downright offensive – unless you count a Men At Work cover. Still, at least it’s Ain't Nothing Gonna Hold Me Down rather than Land Down Under. They’re great fun too, as most of the audience would rate Girl Talk, the final act on the main stage. Gregg Gillis’s mash ups are interesting, and great to dance to, but never quite move from being technically impressive to truly worthwhile pieces of music in their own right. Even so, it’s a reasonable way to end the day.
Final verdict is that this year’s Laneway Festival, at least in Adelaide, has been about as good a festival as you could hope for: relaxed, well-run, and with an audience firmly skewed in favour of genuine music fans rather than people who only want to say they did something hip over the weekend. All in all, it’s just about enough to outweigh that guitar solo, and there can be no higher praise than that.
