Polaroids Of Androids

No Age + Jay Reatard + The Disbelievers + Naked On The Vague @ Gaelic Theatre
29/01/2009

There were several factors that made this show not add up to stupidly high excitement levels. Very little of which had to do with the performances of the bands.

The night peeked too early when we saw 'No Age guy'
You know - excited No Age guy. Angus and I saw him across the room and, after a little bit of debate, Angus decided to go and talk to him. He had no idea the magical photo of him existed and he seemed a little bit confused/angry that a photo of him looking soooo giddy with excitement was all over the Internetz. This happened really early on so everything from this point on was going to be a bit of a letdown.

The lateness factor
It was a school night and the main event (No Age) were scheduled to start at midnight. The only reason I could think the organisers had done this was so they could get more bar money off the patrons. As it ended up, it backfired on them, with a substantial percentage of the audience leaving after Jay Reatard finished up. There also didn't never really seem to be a line-up at the bar for drinks. Sydney in late January is a sober beast. Too much excess Xmas.

Two support bands?
I am all for local artists getting some exposure (duh) but starting the support bands at nine and reserving an hour for both of them (the same amount of time allocated for the two headline acts) just seems like bad planning. I think if they were going to have two supports they should have started them about 8ish when the doors opened, and only allocated them the 40 minutes they were gonna play for anyway. We seemed to be waiting around for bands to play for a large portion of the night.

The Disbelievers as a support band
I admit that I don't really like the rockabilly punk style of The Disbelievers BUT I also thought that their style completely didn't fit into that of the main event. They were on some Happy Days styled up punk shit, while No Age and Jay Reatard are both on some homemade DIY lo-fi punk shit. Total punk conflict.

The sound
It had been a while since I had been to the Gaelic and I had completely forgotten why I wasn't a big fan of the venue to begin with - the sound is consistently terrible. It never seemed loud enough, especially in the back half of the venue where it seemed to get substantially 'absorbed' by the overhanging upstairs viewing area. This dulled down the overall impact of all the bands performing, taking away a lot of their edge.

And what about the actual performances...

Naked On The Vague
I only caught the second half of their set (public fucking transport!) but they were in their normal fine form. There were a lot more people there to see them than normally for an opening act. Sure, this was probably because of the late starting times, but good to see nonetheless. Hopefully, they picked up some new fans.

The Disbelievers
Um... yep.. see above. Urgh.

Jay Reatard
Most people seemed to be there to see Jay. He/they played every song about four times faster than on record, which made for a slightly tense situation between the band and the crowd. It was a solid performance BUT the rushed nature (and the fact he kept giving hate eyes to his base guitarist) didn't really help with him connect with the people. Within his 45 minutes set he got through about 4,000 songs and, due to the accelerated delivery, a fair few of them sounded very similar. He came, pumped out some songs and was gone. Flash Gordon style.

No Age
As mentioned, a lot of peeps left after Jay Reatard to catch the last train home and/or because they weren't interested in seeing No Age. I had heard nothing but bad things about the California duo's live performance so I, understandably, was a little bit worried it would be a bit of a negative turning point of our relationship. As it turned out they were much better than I thought.

With the large amount of exiting patrons, I was able to get fairly close to the front where they sounded much better than from the back 'hang out at the bar' section. Their 'mushy' style, however, meant that unless you knew the songs it might have seemed like a bit of an endless drawling pile of punk mess. Maybe.

Teen Creeps sounded like the fucking balls though.

Overall, this show was a bit of a disappointment. I was fairly pumped for it BUT there were far too many negative factors that killed it for me. Most of this was outside of the actual performances which makes it even more disappointing as it seems like it so easily could have much more enjoyable.

Words by Jonny

February 8, 2009 @ 10:37 · Gig Reviews · Naked On The Vague · Disbelievers, The · Jay Reatard · No Age   2 comments