Beck’s Festival Bar feat. Caribou @ Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney (17/01/07)
It is sometimes said that into every life, a little rain must fall (although to be fair, this is more often said by soggy Hallmark greeting card writers than by gig reviewers). A little fell into mine during the course of another top notch evening at the Hyde Park Barracks, but not enough to dampen the spritis or enthusiasm of a crowd who saw Canada’s Caribou bookended by two excellent local acts last Thursday night.
Arriving bright and early at the Barracks usually allows you to catch the last of the evening sun, but tonight, heavy cloud put paid to that ambition. But it did allow me to catch Matt Levinson, playing under his own name rather than his nom de vinyl of Calico. Had he been playing as Calico, I would have observed that it doesn’t take long to cotton on to the fact that this he is a DJ cut from a different cloth. I would have observed that he was expertly canvassing a variety of musical styles, and that if you wanted to seersucker DJ, it wouldn’t be this one. But as he was playing as Matt Levinson, I have to talk about the music instead. He started off with a little jazz, and then went cinematic – not world music, but worldly music, or to borrow a line from somewhere, music from home, if you live in the world. It was an excellent soundtrack to watch the crowd gently rolling in, and Levinson’s later interlude sets between the live acts confirmed what an excellent choice he was to play this gig.
Surveying the crowd, I observed that I shouldn’t have used the “black-clad hipster” line when reviewing the Amp Fiddler crowd, because there were many more of them here tonight. And they were all heading into the marquee to see Melbourne’s Mountains in the Sky. (In the time-honoured Australian tradition of sawing long band names down to size, we’ll call them “the Mounties”.) In the studio there is only one Mountie, John Lee, who plays the Machine Which Triggers Samples and the Vintage-Looking Keyboard Which Has Many Knobs. Live, Lee is joined by Stuart McFarlane on drums. Onstage Lee and McFarlane face each other, which means that they are at 90 degrees to the audience. This is a good set up if you want to keep an eye on your drummer to make sure that he is not goofing off, but makes audience interaction a little more difficult.
Describing the Mounties’ music requires the creation of new words like “psychexotic beatronica”, although “sonic tone poems” might also do, if you were limiting yourself to words which are actual words. On the basis of last night however, these are poems written ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS. That is to say, for just two guys, they were really, really, loud. Really loud. To the extent that it was uncomfortable to be down the front, so I wandered around the Barracks trying to find the most comfortable place to listen to them (which was probably somewhere in Girraween, I suspect). That also added to the difficulty of audience interaction, in that the people in the front row had formed together well away from the stage. However, the music had the energy to move feet as well as moving the air, and I’m glad I’ve moved the Mounties from my list of “bands I want to see” to “bands I have seen and who were marginally louder than a 747 coming in to land on the back of your neck”. Can you have energetic shoegazer music? If you can, this is it.
Matt Levinson played again as the Mounties packed up and Caribou set up. Again, Caribou in the studio is Dan Snaith but on stage there’s also guitar, bass and another drummer. Formerly called Manitoba (“Why’d he change his name to Caribou? Don’t ask silly questions, you’ll get silly antlers”), Caribou plays drums, keys, guitar, glockenspiel, and recorder. The band all have regulation tousled indie haircuts, and the drummer is wearing a scarf to ward off the sort of January chill you only get in Sydney under hot stage lights.
Caribou start loud too, but this is a performance with a great deal more light and shade. When the front line is two drummers, the pace is often frenetic; driving; when Snaith steps away from the kit, the tone changes, there are borrowings from folk, from rock; electronic stylings, analogue stylings. The marquee is packed and heaving, so those looking for a little more space in which to dance are doing so outside, in the aforementioned very light rain that never gets heavy enough to be annoying (or to adulterate my beer) but rather serves as a gentle water cooling system. As the set builds to climax, the full sonic possibilities of duelling drummers are demonstrated, the drummers raising their sticks high as they charge towards crescendo (during which guitarist and bassist are on percussion duties, as well). For an act usually characterised as electronica, Caribou sure know how to rock, and the appreciative crowd’s call for an encore is rewarded in kind.
At this point on a school night, a reviewer has to decide; finish the job, or pull up stumps? Fortunately, as I have the recuperative skills of a much younger man (won them in a poker game, not giving them back) I stayed for Jamie Lloyd, and I’m very, very glad I did. I last saw the Jamie Lloyd live show at the Playground Weekender and on tonight’s performance, I really need to see it more often. Jamie sings and bounces behind his laptop (connected to enough cables to deliver Kevin Rudd’s ‘Broadband Revolution’ to a small African nation) with a dancing style that makes you wonder whether his head is actually connected to the rest of his body. He’s joined by Jimi Polar (sporting a look that will see him cast in the lead role in my upcoming movie “The Paddle Pop Lion goes Train Driving”, if I can ever get it made) and by this stage, the crowd has thinned out so there’s both room to dance and perfect music to dance to, made by two men who are obviously enjoying the work they are doing.
Of the ways in which you could describe Lloyd’s music, I quite like ‘dirty soul’ – dirty in the way that a dirty martini is dirty, which is to say, in the best possible way. Lloyd’s recent Trouble Within is a fine record but the live show adds a whole other dimension – if you haven’t seen it (or haven’t seen it recently), check it out.
However, there’s only so much dancing one can do in a suit (“Come straight from work, mate? Nah mate, went home to change from my work suit into a dancing suit”) and I couldn’t quite last to hear Somatik, who was playing the last set. So I walked out into the January night, as light rain on the road glistened in the reflected glow of another stunning Festival Bar success.
