LIVE Reviews # A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
On record, the music of Architecture In Helsinki can convince you it has some of the artful innocence of Jonathon Richman, or Belle & Sebastian at their best. But somewhere in the planning of their live show they mistook infantilism for innocence.
The three young, blonde girls sitting behind me trill expectantly as they look around Rod Laver Arena, taking it all in. Stimulus, response. Stimulus, response. Finally, having discussed clothes, boys, Avril, and more clothes, one of them earnestly asks her pals, “What is the mosh pit?” There’s no doubt about it, this is My First Rock Concert for the majority of the sell-out crowd.
Mick Jagger once said that “the only true performance is one that attains madness”, and it’s a rule The Casanovas seem fond of. Unlike so many of their earnestly furrowed-brow peers, they are happy to bury themselves in the theatricality of rock. Feet on the monitor. Aiming the guitars at the audience like a gun. All the moves.
Just how much of this crotch-vibrating rock can you take before your legs buckle under post-orgasmic stress and you fall into a dithering wreck on the floor? How long is it going to be before you throw yourself over the speaker boxes screaming for mercy? Is that a guitar or a sexual device??
There are gigs where you feel like you’re witnessing the splitting of the atom or the creation of the wheel, the incendiary nature of the music and performance making it almost too much to bear, and there are gigs that are so transcendently baaad that they’re almost good again, with a total disregard for musicality and delusional lead vocalists so confident of their completely non-existent abilities that you can’t help but be charmed. And then there’s that middle ground: very good gigs, performed by very good bands. But who really wants to see grey when you could have had black or white?
It’s not every Saturday night you get to see two of the newly crowned Hottest Bands In The Universe Right Now for the price of one. That’s right shoppers, come on down to the miracle tent and get your fill of heavenly riffs and roll. The Evelyn in Brunswick Street is, accordingly, stuffed to the gills with feverish believers ready to bare their stamped wrists to the saviors of rock as we know it and be healed. ‘Didn’t you see that wedding in Israel where the roof collapsed’, pleads the desperate door-man, beating back frothing indie-kids, ‘I can’t let any more of you in!’
If brevity is the soul of wit, then Kelly Rowland must be a very clever lass indeed. Convincing a fair few hundred of her dedicated fans to shell out $25 for a night at a club that, I’m guessing, they wouldn’t usually pay for admission to – and then performing three and a half songs, well, it’s either incredibly shrewd or incredibly cruel. Or both.
Is Start Me Up the Best Song Ever Written for an Arena Rock Concert, EVER? It just might be: with those unmistakable chords, the worlds’ greatest rock and roll road show rolls into Melbourne town on a late summer’s evening. Questions of relevancy, age and competency are quickly vapourised as the worlds’ coolest knight, Mick Jagger, cakewalks his way up and down the stage like Rudolf Nureyev in an evangelical holy-ghost-trance.
Forget Angel of Death and Rock The Kasbah. If George W. Bush had siphoned non-stop boogie-rock into Iraq, not only would there have been no war, Saddam Hussein would be personally cleaning the toilets at Camp David with a toothbrush. For this is the most blatant, inescapable, and relentless form of torture.
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