Many a time at the Northcote Social Club the intro acts don’t get their fair share of the audience. Perhaps because this particular Sunday was a perfect day for hanging out at the pub, however, Brisbane dance pop quintet Pigeon got the chance to warm everyone up with their feel-good indie electro tunes. With an impressive array of keyboards and synths, some happy-sounding guitars, a bit o’ brass thrown in, and the genuine unabashed vocals of all the boys; nobody was immune to the music-camp vibes they were bringing to the little band room.
Unfortunately these vibes had started to wear off by the time Tijuana Cartel appeared, the show running twenty minutes behind schedule. The crowd, a most multifarious audience – dreads here, a walking stick there, and sequins in-between – were beginning to get a bit restless just as the lads from the Gold Coast walked on stage.
Picking up his glissentar, frontman Paul George got straight into it. Like watching a flamenco dance, George handled his guitar like a partner, gently and passionately. Holding the instrument to face the crowd it was a hypnotising display of technique. After their past five shows on their ‘Offer Yourself’ tour being sold out, the boys were in high spirits and launched into their most recent dance tracks.
‘Rise Up’ brought back a very 90s/Café del Mar sound, followed by whoops from the crowd at the start of ‘Letting it Go’, reminiscent and as catchy as Yolanda Be Cool’s 2010 hit ‘We No Speak Americano’. George was just as excited as the audience when he rebelliously enthused “for all those people who don’t give a fuck about work tomorrow!”
Though Tijuana Cartel first entered the scene as mostly a world music act, they’ve incorporated so many elements to their music since then, and in their live show the surprises just kept on coming. There was a battle between guitarist George and percussionist Daniel Gonzalez to see who could staccato the fastest; Gonzalez poured water on his snares to create quite a fantastic spectacle – the blue, red and yellow of the stage lights reflecting off the millions of tiny water droplets being thrust into the air by his energetic drumming; and even George swapping his usual vocal style, sounding like cross between Michael Hutchence from INXS and Jack Weaving from Dukes of Windsor, to hip-hop style rapping…and he was great at it!
The atmosphere just built with every song, becoming more like a hot Ibiza nightclub than a Melbourne band-room on a freezing Sunday night. People were even putting down their drinks to dance to a trance-style ironically-named ‘Keep Off the Chemicals’ and an almost-dub instrumental track when DJ and keyboardist Carey O’Sullivan picked up his electric rhythm guitar.
Pigeon’s trumpeter and Blue King Brown’s percussionist joined them on stage for the last couple of songs, bringing the night to a Carnivale-crescendo for which even a couple of professional dancers to the side of the stage threw down their bags to strut their stuff. The flamenco duet between George and O’Sullivan at the encore (as George needed to rest his dwindling voice) got everybody whipping out their very own air-castanets, and the night came to a close with smiles, a lost voice, and everybody infected by the tribal community feeling you get from Tijuana Cartel.
– Alexandra Goodwin
