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Live reviews with Lyndon Blue
THE STABS @ MOJO’S, SATURDAY FEBRUARY 6
I was feeling clean – too clean. We’re born covered in goo, ejected into a world made of sand and mud and rock and leaves and slime. To stay scrubbed for too long feels unsettlingly artificial, detached, like an airport or a hospital, floating silently in Dettol doldrums. I needed to get dirty – and fast.
The junkyard was dense, menacing; its towering heaps cast hot, sticky shadows. There, atop the midden, three silhouetted figures sifted through the filth to pry out gnarled, heaving chunks of crusty post-punk. LIKE JUNK are a rare breed these days – most rock bands are too scared of seeming pretentious to channel the untempered flamboyance of classic art-school avant-gardes. Like Junk’s setup includes contorted wire structures, flowers, decorated milk crates, all across a gristly musical landscape, but in its defiance of affected plebeianism, comes across as strangely earnest; all that junk aside, the trio’s music is strong enough to carry whatever demeanour they emit. Minimal, brooding, crumbly songs – often consisting of two chords – crawl desperately over taut drum beats, dripping with the low, venomous vocals drooled out by singer Scott White.
It’s a lot more fun than it sounds, especially when White abandons his keyboard to bounce about to a more raucous, upbeat tune. The set shatters into a cloud of delightful fizzing noise-trash, and I wander on, already feeling a bit grubbier.
I soon stumbled upon a chattering, skeletal structure: the BONEHOUSE. Inside, five men conjured a whole lot of fairly generic macho-riff blues rock - though the set improved, with the best track sounding something like Black Sabbath losing consciousness in a wind tunnel, and another (‘Australian Gothic’) name-dropping literary gloomsters over an eerie verse before warping into a romp. Recorded, Bonehouse sound quite good, so perhaps it was the stage presence of their grinning singer that turned me off at the time; dressed like some kind of limp-ass soft-rocker a la Neil Diamond and moving with all the Ken-Doll vigour of Michael Buble, frontman points weren’t high; introducing every song in some kind of twattish American accent didn’t do him any favours, either.
I then waded through thick mires of peat and stinking sludge until at last, I reached MONGREL COUNTRY. Rivalling the headliners for the performance of the evening, their dense, tight, noisey jams sat constantly on the verge of utter explosion. Two drummers means a double percussive slap in the face; ludicrously fat fuzz-bass may have impregnated several small nearby villages, and the stupendous growling voice of Max Ducker is like creamy bitumen soup.
FEAR OF COMEDY brought the penultimate pandemonium, resplendent with big, gritty hooks, Mohawks, and vocals by turn crooned and screeched. From the straight-up aggression of ‘Beyond a Joke’ to the freak-waltz ‘Disillusionist,’ they writhed across the countryside like a sinister circus, with singer Laith Tyranny the consummate ringmaster; he takes crowd interaction to intimate new levels, and I may have headbutted him in the stomach.
But I’d never be satisfactorily mucky until being begrimed by THE STABS. Surmounting the scrapheap, their setup was badass simplicity incarnate; one bass going through not one but two distortion pedals and into a big fuck-off amp; one guitar doing likewise, and a drum kit helmed by a delightfully incongruous-seeming bushman type, who boasted a hefty hat but little hair, and a charming brown vest but no shirt. But would the Stabs live up to the hype, or were they simply another loud rock band? In a sense, both: their success lay not in reinventing the wheel, but in having the good sense to see that the wheel’s round for a damn good reason; thus employing a type of sound that’s long pervaded great Australian rock – indeed, Antipodean rock, recalling as much New Zealand’s The Clean and The Dead C as The Birthday Party or The Saints. The songs roll out with no
bullshit; blisteringly loud with a trebly guitar tone that could bisect an armoured elk, and layered with dark, thoughtful but direct lyrics. When the time comes for theatrics though, they’re all over it, hurling instruments about in a frenzy, amps screeching pained feedback like murdered crows, three men making harsh, unforgiving love to a violent inferno of noise.
Yeah, I feel nice and dirty now.
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Steady Eye with Tahlia Palmer
the ugly tooth
As I write this, one quarter of my face is tingling. An hour ago it was completely numb. I had a wisdom tooth pulled from my skull today; it was bashed into many pieces and unhooked from its nest in my jaw.
I’ve been living with a tooth so fucked up it would take way too long to explain the problem entirely. Let’s just say for now that I’ve been lazy, poor, and good at taking painkillers. I’ve been in fairly constant pain for the last… oh…. Year maybe? With a few months here and there pain free. But despite knowing that one tiny bit more burst of pain would bring an end to my suffering, and that of the very patient people closest to me (see: I’ve been a grumpy bitch), and being completely aware that my dentist was well practised and very competent, I was scared shitless in the long chair because, after I saw the x-ray and how retarded that little tooth claw was, I was convinced that it was going to be the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.
Shakily trying to maintain composure, I motioned to the dentist that I could still feel the pointy thing she was prodding my gum with. I was terrified it would all go wrong, and she’d slip with the giant tooth breaking tool and lance my tongue. It’s was all I could think about. More anaesthetic please. More. MOOORRRRE.
Four needles full later, I relaxed as soon as I realised I wouldn’t feel it if something did go wrong, so I stopped thinking about it. Closed my eyes, thought about flowers (yeah, what?) and attempted to keep my legs relaxed.
By redirecting my mind elsewhere, I overcame my fear of tongue dismemberment. I even started to imagine that the things going on in my mouth were some weird sexualised computer game (yes, I know how fucked up that is, but who am I to suppress my own nature?), so when it came to feeling the AWFUL sensation of the tooth root being wiggled around in the jaw bone, I kind of started to laugh. I hope I didn’t freak out the dental nurse. She didn’t say a word during the whole thing.
While the outcome wouldn’t have been any different if I had gone to the dentist sooner, given the nature of the hooked root, I have decided that never again will I let any dental problems fester. For anyone putting off a trip to the dentist for whatever reason, just fucking do it. Get it over and done with. If you’re like me and can’t afford it, find an empathetic friend with money to lend. Even though I now have a dull ache in my jaw, can still taste blood, and am not allowed to drink or smoke, I am so relieved that I want to cry and squeeze the shit out of the friend who lent me the money and shower them with gifts.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the hole where my impacted tooth used to be is fucking GIANT. You could stick two pencils in that fucker. If it were possible to open my mouth properly, I would totally take a photo. Maybe tomorrow. Fingers crossed. back to top
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