The Whitlams - 8 Dec 2006 - The Metro

Such an amazing gig. I didn't want The Whitlams' set to end, I didn't want them to leave the stage, I wanted them to play another song and another and another...

When we walk into the Metro, everyone ahead of us in the line (and there were a good 40-50 odd people) is either at the bar or seated. Mend and I stare at the barely occupied barrier in a kind of disbelieving wonder, then decide, hell, why not? I really do love experiencing a concert from the floor, even if my feet and legs do kill the next day, and even when most of the time my sight is obscured by a large sweaty man. So we pick a spot just to the left of the centre of the stage on the barrier, which means the stage is about a metre away from me. We would NOT be regretting this decision by the end of the night. I spent every other moment just basking in the fact that I had an unobstructed view of everyone and everything and every single moment on stage for the whole entire night. Plus the crowd was this weird mix of everything from conservative to alternative, young to old, and overall very polite so I had space to dance along and breathe and didn't get jostled once.

We had no idea who the support acts were. The first support act, James Cooper, played average singer-songwriter pop rock that occasionally was quite fun but nothing stuck in my head at all. And for someone that had a four piece band with him, there wasn't much sound or energy coming through. Second support act were a five member band headed by a female singer, The Hampdens, who played a 45 minute set that seemed a lot lot longer, mostly because they weren't particularly catchy, didn't seem very enthused about being on stage, and had very little presence.

Thank goodness for The Whitlams, who utterly redeemed the night.

Tim Freedman is funny and sharp and really lovely and has a really sweet smile. He and Jak Housden in particular have really good chemistry and there was some good banter going on between them towards the end, but the band is really great together as a whole. The four of them (Tim Freedman on piano, Jak Housden on guitar, Warwick Hornby on bass and Terepai Richmond on drums; they all have a part in vocals which surprised me) seemed to be having so much fun, and they played so well individually as well as together; there’s such joy in their performance that it just spilled out over the crowd, who were quite placid at the start but really warmed up to a fannish devotion by the end. The lone drunk annoying woman, who would interrupt at inappropriate moments with a whooping call (like a bad coo-ee!) was thoroughly told off by Tim Freedman in the first ten minutes, and actually seemed to get the idea after the THIRD time he told her to shut up and go away. Not to make him sound crotchety, because everybody must have been feeling the same way - the room erupted in cheers after she was chastised.

The set list – oh goodness, what a set. 20+ songs over two hours, so I couldn’t really give an ordered list but I can remember most of what we heard. The first six songs were definitely:

Beauty in Me
White Horses
Fall For You
I Will Not Go Quietly
Make Me Hard
Tonight

Then I think just after Tim had announced they were playing 'Fondness Makes the Heart Grow Absent' next, Terepai Richmond’s snare drum broke, or something malfunctioned or it was planned, but anyway, the rest of the band moved offstage and left Tim Freedman in his own, and he performed absolutely heartbreakingly beautifully '12 Hours' and 'Charlie No.2' with just his voice and the piano, and I’m sure people behind us were crying through the second song and I was mesmerised because '12 Hours' is my favourite song off Little Cloud and I have listened to it over and over in these last few months especially in some of my worst days and to hear it so pure and unadorned and perfect was just amazing.

The band then came back on and continued, though they didn’t end up playing 'Fondess...' at all. The next lot of songs were definitely in there though possibly not this order:

Little Cloud
No Aphrodisiac
Blow Up the Pokies
You Sound Like Louie Burdett
I Was Alive
Royal in the Afternoon
Fancy Lover
Year of the Rat

There was a song that I didn’t know just before 'I Was Alive'; Tim said it was about considering marriage and deciding NO (“luckily for her” he quipped) and then they segued from that into 'I Was Alive' which is kind of the opposite, about a very stormy relationship that seemed to have been worth it anyway. The last two songs of the main set were definitely 'Thank You' - which was so very very good live, energetic and happy and so appropriate for the moment with its chorus that suggests a band looking back on their long successful career and thanking the fans who've stuck with them despite everything – and 'Gough'. There was moment in Gough where I just stopped and looked this sold out room of very disparate people, brought together by a band who had them all singing and dancing along to a song about Australian politics and betrayal in the 1970s, and I just laughed because it was so cool and unusual and what other band could do it?

There were two encores. Tim Freedman came out on his own to do 'Charlie No. 3' (my one tiny disappointment was that there was no 'Charlie No.1' to complete the set and my wishes) with just him and the piano, then they went into a rousing rendition of 'Stay With Me' and also 'The Hamburger Song', which the crowd went wild for. Second encore was'She's Moving In' and then one final song.

Everything sounded excellent live – from classics with new arrangements (such as with 'No Aphrodisiac') to the newer songs that sounded louder and bigger out of the studio and came alive, to the delicately beautiful solo songs. For just four guys on the stage, they have such energy and sound that they fill the room. It was an awesome night, and best of all – the tickets had only cost $30. I’ve never had better value for money at a live gig.

John Mayer - 3 Nov 2006 - Enmore Theatre

I am now a humbled fan.

I wasn't particularly excited about tonight's concert - John Mayer seemed to have moved form 'cool' to 'adult contemporary' in the 4 years since I first heard his songs, the new album hadn't captured me as completely as the previous ones, and well, our seats were in the 2nd last row, upstairs, at the Enmore. Hmm. Oh, but how wrong I was to think all that would matter, how wrong. Because I did enjoy this concert very much, and John Mayer is really awesome live. I think, at this stage of his career, having worked on more jazz-based performances with his Trio, he's learnt to meld the pop sensibility of his earlier songs with this amazing blues sound and so created a show that's full of awesome guitar work, cathcy songs, and meaningful lyrics.

He is also infectiously charming, and enthusiastic about performing, and so very comfortable on stage. He bounds around, does a quick two step, riffs with the other guys on stage, teases members of the audience, all while playing his dizzying array of guitars with consumate skill. His voice sounds good live - strong with just a bit of grit in the rockier moments, perfectly husky in the ballads, soaring over the wall of music from his very capable band.

There's a real camraderie between him and his 7 member band (keyboard, drums, 2 guitars, bass, tenor sax and trumpet) and each song is embellished and extended with jazzy, blues-influenced improvisations and interludes, as the musicians and instruments play off each other. It's fun to watch, and really awesome to listen to, as they work together so well, and it rarely strays overlong.

He played at least one of my favourites from each of the previous albums, and all my favourites from the current one, Continuum - the defiant 'Belief', the smoky regret of 'Gravity', the loveliest bitter breakup in 'Slow Dance in a Burning Room', and the indictment in 'Vultures'. Very good live. But I saved my most piercing embarrassing scream for when he decided to play 'Neon' on an impulse. Neon is otherwise known as 'my favourite John Mayer song EVER', and I hadn't seen it on any recent set lists online so I didn't even hope to think that I would get to hear it live. He even mentioned that he doesn't play if often - I think they have to tune everything to a different key?

Bigger Than My Body
Vultures
Good Love Is On the Way
I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
Clarity
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Why Georgia
Neon
Gravity
Waiting for the World to Change
In Repair

Belief
No Such Thing

Overall, this was such an enjoyable concert, a great musical experience. John Mayer is an artist who can straddle that tricky line of commercial success with musical talent, and it was a pleasure to watch him do just that tonight.

Brick (2005; d. Rian Johnson)

After hearing good reviews from others, I was worried that I would go in with too high expectations and be disappointed. No fear! It was an excellent movie.

Let's start with the story as it first seems. Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a loner at high school, an outcast by choice. His only friend is another loner nicknamed The Brain who knows everything about everyone. When Brendan's ex-girlfriend Emily, whom Brendan still loves despite being dumped so she could climb higher on the social ladder at school, rings up sounding scared and confused and asking for help, Brendan throws himself back into the thick of high school and its cliques and secrets in an effort to help her out of a mess that she won't elaborate on. When he finds her dead two days after her phone call (not a spoiler - this is the first scene of the movie), the detective work, the menace and the double-crossing really begins.

If this sound less like a teen movie, and more like old-school Hollywood noir, that's because it's a really clever and intense attempt to blend the two. There's no swearing in the movie at all, but the kids get across their messages in dialogue that's informed by the language of hard-boiled detective and pulp novels, at time confusing, but always understandable from the context. Like when Brendan asks if The Brain knows who a certain person named The Pin is, The Brain replies in sharp quick patter, "Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that who scored it from this who bought it off so and after four or five connections the list always ends with the Pin. But I bet you got every rat in town together and said 'show your hands' if any of them've actually seen the Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets."

But don't fret. Even if you're not a fan of Hollywood noir, or if you don't know much about it, you can just sit back and enjoy a twisty mystery that's very stylishly filmed - the clever touches in the way it looks and sounds and moves. If you are a fan though, it's even more fun on a meta level, as you identify the usual tropes and see how they play out in a high school setting. Brendan, of course, is the world-weary detective in the mould of Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade; Lukas Haas' plays his shady character, The Pin, with the slick style of the old gangsters, with his cane a nice touch as well as being more than an affectation; Laura, the popular girl at school with the status and money and connections, has the brains and the beauty to be the ambigous femme fatale role. And all the minor characters have their place in moving the story along at a zipping pace, while setting up some really funny scenes that break up the inherent sadness in the mystery of Emily's death, while adding to the clues at the same time.

It's very well done, and even when characters are familiar and their arcs are familiar, the path between A and B is enjoyable that it doesn't matter if you know whodunnit, really. Because the journey, and being towed along like Brendan is through that journey into the seedy underworld of this non-descript high school, is the fun and interesting part, and that comes across so well in the film.

related reading >> Hard-boiled high, an article on two teen-noir features on at the moment, Brick and Veronica Mars

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006; d. Michael Winterbottom)

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is possibly the best movie I've seen this year (which is only half over, but I doubt I'll engage with and enjoy another quite as much). Even now, as I think over the movie, I find myself laughing out loud remembering a visual joke here, a bit of slapstick there, the clever dialogue all throughout, the ridiculous yet pointedly observant scenes.

It's got a set-up that could be as pretentious and boring and badly done as anything you could imagine - it's a film adaptation of a rambling 18th century English novel that has been dubbed "unfilmable", packed with top British actors (and one well-known American actress), and also a film about the film of an adaptation of a rambling 19th century novel...but it's very very funny and clever and hits just the right note of arch without being wanky. While trying to sound profound, the lead actor gives an interview about the greatness of the novel he's in without having ever read the novel and says, "This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about."

You don't have to have read the novel either, and that's one of the running jokes of the film, that no one on set has actually read the 600+ pages of novel. Very few people have, really, because while it is supposed to be about Tristram Shandy's life but because of the author's passion for digressions and moving between past and present on tangents it also ends right after the main character is born! Thus in reflection of this, the movie that is shown to the producers at the end (ie. the movie we've just watched) is also so digressive that very few of the originally scripted and pitched scenes (ie. the ones from the novel) actually make it into the film. Confused? Now, the movie itself is set on the film set of a movie adaptation of this novel with some of the actors playing characters on this film-within-film as well as playing the actors themselves (eg. Steve Coogan, the actor and comedian, plays an actor and comedian named "Steve Coogan") while other actors are playing crew members (eg. Jeremy Northam plays a director named Mark, who is really a stand in for the real director, Michael Winterbottom). Now completely confused? However, don't worry - it's a lot more understandable when you see it unfold wonderfully on-screen, as they break fourth-wall and talk to the camera, and move between scenes and sets and "real life", all with a funny, hyper-realistic script that flows naturally between all the different modes.

One of the ideas of the film is not just to give a sense of the shambles of the novel (which is does wonderfully, thus being a great adaptation in that it gives the atmosphere if not the plot) but also to revel in the process of film-making and a feel for the little bubble world a film set is. While outside events unfurl - a radio news report gravely reports on the Iraq insurgency - the actors and crew members are tangled up in their petty worries, fretting over the latest crisis on set; whether it be the battle of egos between two actors ("we're co-leads", Rob Brydon insists, while Steve Coogan sharply replies, "well, we'll see in the edit!") or Steve coming to terms with his new family unit of girlfriend and child while trying to hold onto his old life by flirting with a pretty film runner who has the same name as his girlfriend or the producers insisting they not use money they don't have to refilm a diastrous battle scene in which extras - in anachronistic costumes - stroll across the screen desultorily! The inside jokes are great for anyone who loves film, and I'm told there are even inside jokes in the inside jokes for those who really love their movies.

The cast is amazing. A veritable list of great British actors, doing good work no matter how big or small their part. In particular, Steve Coogan is great - he's such an vain, insecure man as an actor, but he also shows a softer side playing a new father, and it makes him endearingly human and thus likeable - plus he has a difficult job playing three parts as Tristram the narrator, Walter Shandy his father, and Steve Coogan the actor. Rob Brydon plays very well opposite him, and their bickering from who looks taller or has the bigger part or does the better impression of Al Pacino (a great end-of-credits sequence) is a cack. Kelly McDonald is beautiful and lovely and warm as always, and Gillian Anderson in a brief cameo is breathily sexy in an 18th century way (and funny as herself, wondering where all the scenes she shot over two weeks went).

But apart from the clever ideas, the great acting and the tamed chaos, there's also a lovely sense of the visual joke. One of the craziest, most memorable, lasting images of this movie for me is a scene where Steve Coogan is asked to test out a giant fake womb for a scene later in the movie (that doesn't actually make it into the "movie"). As he is lowered head first, complete with his 18th century costume, into a big pink uterus model, he has an argument with the production assistant about how he is positioned.

"[Mark, the director] wants it to be as realistic as possible," they say in defense of having him upside down.

"He wants realism. Yeah. I'm a grown man, talking to the camera, in a womb." Coogan yells back, through the plastic window, still stuck in the grossly overlarge and pink fleshy cavity.

Visually and in words, it's a great summary of the sublime ridiculousness of this movie.

Snow Patrol - 24 Jul 2006 - Enmore Theatre

So, let's recap: cute rock boys with dry senses of humour and Scottish accents playing guitars and singing awesome songs = a good night.

The lead singer, Gary Lightbody, made me giggle like a charmed schoolgirl - it's partly the accent, and partly because he sounded so natural at drawing the audience in. He chatted to the them throughout the night, with extended riffs about being in Australia and how things weren't what they expected; from the rain ("we didn't think you got that here") to the fact they still hadn't seen any kangaroos ("[Nathan, the guitar player] got punched in the face the other day for saying kangaroos don't exist. Discuss. [longer pause as audience yells various answers] Well, we haven't see any ...ergo."), to attempts at surfing ("Well when I say surfing, I mean swallowing a lot of sea water, but hey, at least I didn't get eaten by a shark.") Also, he plays his guitar and bounds all over the stage like he's possessed.

Onto the music. Gary's voice has been plagued by nodules/polyps, and it was kind of noticeable. He started off by saying "I shouldn't really say this 'cause it's kind of admitting defeat, but I've not been feeling...well, nevermind. My voice hasn't been the the best the last couple of months, so sing along if you know the words." And usually, it meant at the beginning of each song he would sound a little off key and hoarse, but usually by the end it would warm up and become a lot better, apart from the odd high note. The concert itself followed a similar pattern - the energy wasn't quite there at the start, but it really hit its stride after the first few songs and it was so awesome in the songs people knew best when everyone stood up and clapped and danced and sang.

I was estatic when they played my two favourites back to back, especially because Somewhere A Clock is Ticking isn't that well known (as evidenced by the suddenly quieter crowd) but I just love this song and it's weird fluttering and clockwork rhythms behind the falsetto in the verses and the choir-like chorus building and building. What I love about the songs are that they are so melodically dramatic, rises and falls with the emotions while retaining a lush beautiful and catchy sound, and paired with Make this Go On Forever, I think I made a fair few happy squeaks as the beginning chords of each song rang out.

A real crowd favourite was Run, which sounded great and had this crackling energy, and at the end it was just really sweet - they kept playing and the audience just launched as a whole into one last repeat of the chorus and the band just looked so chuffed at the response.


Spitting Games
Wow
Chocolate
It’s Beginning to Get to Me
Headlights on Dark Roads
?
Chasing Cars
Shut Your Eyes
How to be Dead
Somewhere A Clock is Ticking
Make This Go On Forever
Ways and Means
Run
You’re All I Have

Open Your Eyes
?

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - 20 Jul 2006 - Enmore Theatre

The band is known for being crazy and having really energetic shows, so I was a little apprehensive of the crowd and just really unsure of what to expect. The band came on a little late (about 10:15pm) and played a relatively short set for an hour, almost half-half from their two albums. And though Karen O sounded...spacey...the show was pretty tight and had a real energy to the sound.

Her voice was not always in tune, but it worked with her vocal style and the music, and it was still really lovely during Maps. They played it with the full backing at first, then Karen O said they were going to try something they'd never done before because she felt like it (I may have taken a few obscenities out for that paraphrase) and that was a great acoustic version of Maps, just her voice and an electric guitar, and it really is a great love song, with an indie rock feel. And the band seemed like they were having fun, with Karen O throwing herself all over the stage (without any mishap) and wearing crazy sparkly pompoms on her head and at one point spinning half a disco ball on her head in time with the music. All in all, a fun experience.


Phenomena
Date With the Night
Art Star
Way Out
Cold Light
Modern Romance
?
Gold Lion
Cheated Hearts
Dudley
Maps
Maps (acoustic)

Warrior
Y-Control

Death Cab for Cutie - 16 Jul 2006 - Home

A strange choice of venue, sparse with minimal security, but that said, it was such a small space that the concert felt really intimate.

The support band was Belles Will Ring, who I've never heard of before. All through their set, I had this niggling feeling that they sounded like some other band, and that was the problem with them - while they were a perfectly competent and decent rock band, they sounded so generic as to be unmemorable while inoffensive.

Death Cab came on with minimum fuss, just four unassuming guys on a small stage. But they played awesomely, the rhythm section loud and strong and great, the band sounded tight and together, and Ben Gibbard's voice sounded excellent over it all. Even with the softer songs, they have the ability to build this wall of sound, warm and enveloping and strong.

Marching Bands of Manhattan
The New Year
We Laugh Indoors
Title and Registration
President of What
Soul Meets Body
Summer Skin
Crooked Teeth
Company Calls
Company Calls Epilogue
Photobooth
A Movie Script Ending
Styrofoam Plates
Blacking Out the Friction
All Is Full of Love
Expo 86
The Sound of Settling

I Will Follow You Into the Dark
Tiny Vessels
Transatlanticism