Articles » Deaf Wish + Dead Farmers + The Escapes @ Maggotville

Deaf Wish + Dead Farmers + The Escapes @ Maggotville
21/06/2008

I passed over a last minute ticket to The Black Keys' evening performance at Manning Bar to attend this show. I am sure the Keys kicked ass and all that, but I think the Deaf Wish vs Dead Farmers vs The Escapes battle royale that I witnessed was at least 45,297 times more awesome.

The Escapes are the best, drunkest, sloppiest, worst and most exciting band I have seen in a long time. They were crazy drunk, but their music, most of which consisted of nothing more than a fairly stock standard punk riff and a repeated chorus chant, accompanied this perfectly. Expect them to be bigger than a Presets/Cut Copy supergroup.

Their set was filmed (and often confusingly heckled) by a fairly large and kinda scary ruffhead who had a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a can of coke in the other. He was mixing them in his mouth. He personified the mood of the evening.

Dead Farmers, besides the notable absence of 'the best song ever', Violence, played an unbelievably solid set. They were fresh off supporting The Black Keys that afternoon at Manning Bar and their performance rounded off a hectic couple of months which was seen the Sydney trio play around 146 shows in every nook, cranny and stadium of this town. The smallish crowd (of around 20 people) were treated to a house party set up with the two guitarists positioning themselves down on crowd level, which really added a lot to their overall eargasmic performance.

I didn't know a lot about Melbourne's Deaf Wish before they kicked into their furious half hour set, but by the end I was their biggest fan - ever.

Lead throughout by an endless sea of vocals battling it out over a nice, thick layer of sound which ranged from frantic, chaotic punk, to more traditional, dark-sided rock that gathered up to climatic, well-executed explosive spurts. It was highly entertaining and capped off the triple treat spectacular that was more than worthy of the $5 entrance fee.

As a bit of a side note - the chosen get-up of one of the members of Deaf Wish was particularly strange/awesome. He was wearing a St George jumper. Not the rugby league team - the bank. The kind you would get as part of your uniform. Yeah, fairly rad.

Our resident photo guy, Andrew, was also in attendance, snapping up some nice shots of Dead Farmers.

Dead Farmers