Beck’s Festival Bar feat. Kora @ Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney (19/01/07)
Imagine, if you will, a pub in Surry Hills. You are sitting in that pub. You are eating a rather good steak, and you are drinking draught Coopers’ Green. You are watching the tail of the Australian cricket team mounting a brave but ultimately futile rearguard action to save the Perth Test, and if you glance out the window while doing that, you can see the rain, fairly hammering it down outside.
From that position, would you have gone out in the rain to review some music for this fine website? If you answered no, your adventure ends here. But if you answered yes, follow me. We’ve got something a little special planned for a resolute type such as yourself.
What we have was the night that awaited me as I scurried across Hyde Park to the Hyde Park Barracks; a heady, if sometimes moist, blend of reggae, soul, funk, and well, ‘Other Stuff’. Reggae was the sound that greeted us as we entered the Barracks, courtesy of the man with the second-thickest-spectacles in dance music (your correspondent claims primacy), Captain Franco of the Dynamite Sounds crew. Franco’s work during the course of the evening was of such high quality that a promotion to the position of Major Franco can surely not be far away.
The first of the live acts on a crowded slate for the evening were Melbourne heavy funk exponents Cookin’ on 3 Burners, who were cookin’ on four for part of the set when joined by vocalist Kylie Auldist (the first three are guitar, drums, and organ). Auldist featured on the blazing new single Cook It, and the set was finished with the Burners’ inspired cover of Gorillaz’ Feel Good Inc. If you’ve seen the Bamboos play live, you will know just what a great result you can get by marrying deep understanding and feel for funk with exceptional musical craftsmanship. Cookin’ on 3 Burners share both a guitarist, and the ability to produce this result, with the Bamboos, although with different methods and sounds. Your correspondent hopes to see Cookin’ on 3 Burners tearing up dance floors at this end of the Hume Highway a lot more in the nearish future.
A short blast of Dynamite Sounds and then Aloe Blacc came on stage, rocking one microphone for his vocals and one microphone for the trumpet he was playing. He started brightly in soul territory (“the sun ain’t shining tonight, so we got to make our souls shine”) but the soul became nu-soul, and nu-soul can too quickly become R’n’B. Which unfortunately, it did. Blacc probably also wasn’t helped by the fact that he was alone on stage – although Captain Franco did appear to be cueing the backing tracks ‘live’, he wasn’t on stage. There’s only so much of a bloke singing along to a backing track I really need, unfortunately, even if he does also have a trumpet. Time for a sponsor’s product, which coincided with the fireworks from the Symphony in the Domain. Aaaah!
Time for a bit more Dynamite (slamming Roady by Fat Freddy’s Drop into Feel like Jumping by Marcia Griffiths, nice!) and then Budspells, whose sometimes fluid live line-up seems to have solidified into MC Kye, Ants on laptop and other kit, and a bloke with a trumpet. There’s a new album Nomadik Souls pretty close to dropping and we got a good sample of that material in this set. By this stage the marquee was starting to fill and the sound of Kiwi vowels was becoming more noticeable as the crowd started to warm-up for Kora. As they were last time Kora last played in Sydney, Budspells were the perfect warm-up act, as shown by Kye’s contributions of vocals when Kora came on stage.
Kora’s live show is fantastically energetic, an impression amplified by the constant changes of instrument (every member bar the drummer changes duties at some stage during the set). Their opener,Burning is a slow-build monster that sets the scene for the set brilliantly. The set features the best of the new album Kora and demonstrates the band’s ability to take an attitude which is all rock, but to infuse it with funk and roots sensibilities. That the band of five features four brothers might go some way to explaining why the stage show is so tight, but probably only some way. The rest of it is obvious passion for the music they are making, and the crowd were feeding off every minute of it.
By the time DJ Dexter was on stage with Grilla Step, the Barracks had opened up to the free entrants and things were pretty packed. What I heard was bass heavy, but didn’t especially inspire me to dive into the scrum to check it out. Next time, I hope.
So you are glad you chose to venture out with me? You should be. Had you stayed in the pub, you would have missed another superbly diverse evening’s entertainment assembled with the attention to detail for which Niche Productions should justly be more famous. And anyway, you’ll be remembering the music long after you’ve dried your clothes, I reckon.
