Wollongong four-piece Bruce started the night off in a charmingly rowdy and loud fashion. The quartet has a really solid take on straight up, no bullshit rock to them, with a great twin guitar attack, reminiscent of bands like The Supersuckers and Thin Lizzy.
“Money & Go”, “Disease” and the mighty “Sludge”, where the band got to really stretch out their sound and style, hint at a band with a great deal of promise and potential to them. It was a great start and hinted at wonderful things to come during the night.
For a three-piece, Sun God Replica creates an almighty wall of sound, loud enough to knock you down. It was interesting to see how the alternative pop stylings of the band, influenced by the likes of Teenage Fan Club and Big Star, gave way to a more heavy take on the blues.
Not quite heavy metal, but definitely a million miles away from the ‘sensitive new age singer with an acoustic guitar’ pose and stance. Think the early work of musical giants such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and you would be in the ballpark. The trio have a highly personable and idiosyncratic take on the music they make, which is a blessing that prevents them sounding like a bad photocopy of what has been before them. An excellent set.
Five-piece outfit Tumbleweed came screaming out of Wollongong in 1990.
While never as big as some of the ‘90s contemporaries such as Spiderbait and You Am I, they experienced a strong wave of popularity at the time, bolstered by their support slot for Nirvana when they toured our shores in 1992. Their sound has, for better or worse, come to personify on a local front what is known as ‘stoner rock’, basically one part psychedelia to two parts loud, utterly in your face rock.
After a bit of a hiatus from 2003 to 2009, the band have returned to the spotlight, headlining Homebake in 2009, playing as part of the Big Day Out festivals and only last year blitzing at Cherry Fest in Melbourne. The band has a new album, their first in thirteen years, entitled Sounds From The Other Side, set for release later this month.
Tonight saw the quintet in fine form, storming their way through a thrilling, at times charmingly shambolic and electric set. In a world where, musically, everything is polished and predictable to an inch of its life, it is refreshing to see something that comes straight from the guts and has a visceral, immediate quality to it.
Kicking off with “Atomic”, one really got the feeling that the band hadn’t been away. The material off the new album made for a nice fit with the older material. Songs such as “Hang Around” and “Sundial”, which for many years listeners thought was called ‘Mary Jane’ due to that gratuitous drug reference being repeated during the track, prompted many a head bang and smile amongst the crowd, bringing back memories of concerts in the early Nineties and discovering live music for the first time.
Things definitely hit another level when the band unleashed “Daddy Long Legs”, one of their best known tracks. Too old to crowd surf these days, the crowd, many of ‘a certain age’, were dancing like there was no tomorrow. Lead singer Ritchey Lewis, at times fighting a losing battle with his microphone lead getting tangled in a lighting rig, proved to be charismatic as ever. One of those nights that reminds people why they love local music and rock, this was a welcome return of a band many have loved for over the past twenty years.
