Thursday, 14 June 2012

Oscar + Martin/Order 66


In a display of terrible unprofessionalism I’m about to write two of the briefest and least founded reviews I ever hope to write. Thankfully, though, I’m not professional in any manner of the word and am therefore not bound by any standard of quality (also I’m lazy).

On the night of Saturday the 28th I headed out to the city with a group of people for a friend’s 18th. The whole night was a confusing mess of a journey but in the interests of brevity and relevance I’ll isolate my ramblings to the more ‘musical’ side of the night.

A drunken text from the birthday boy gave us instructions to meet him at a club, or bar, or some other venue that an 18-year-old can try and fill their body cavity with overpriced alcohol on a Saturday night. On the way to said alcohol dispensary we passed a motley looking lot of safety pinned, leather jacketed, cheaply hair dyed punks milling around a dingy looking stairway, like some sort of anachronistic 70s throwback (albeit much more middle aged than a typical 70s punk crowd). This sort of crowd alone is enough to have drawn me in, but it seems that my friends do not share the same taste in seedy middle aged punks. I did manage to stall long enough to Google the event on my phone’s infuriatingly lacklustre internet and find out that they were attending the album launch for a local Brisbane punk band called “Order66”.But the bonds of kinship far outweigh my love of shitty punk music so on to the 18th we headed.   

We arrived at the “The Bridge Club” to find that there was a band we had never heard of playing inside and that it would cost us $15 to get in. While kinship may be stronger than my love of shitty punk, collectively we had to strongly consider if it was stronger than our love of not wasting money.  After reassurance that the band, now known to be “Oscar + Martin”, was good, and my own personal realisation that I could always write a review  of the show, we eventually forked over the cash, just in time to entirely miss the opening acts.  
After meeting up with the birthday group, we waited for the two men, who I can only assume are named Oscar and Martin, to take the stage. As we did this a friend silently pointed at the man in front of us, mouth agape. My confusion quickly turned to astonishment as I recognised that I was standing next to the wild dancing man from the Splendour line-up video, he was even wearing the shoes from the video. After taking many group photos and fondling his beard he lifted up the birthday boy and made the whole crowd sing him happy birthday.



This event conveniently filled the silence while the two men tried to sort out their gear on stage where they seemed to be having some difficulty with the sound guys. When they finally started up we were hit with warm synth fuzz, pulsing programmed drums and RnB vocals. While definitively indie (the crowd’s outfits were a dead giveaway) it was constructed from a very original amalgamation of genres which gave the style definition of its own. Unfortunately that didn’t stop the song from feeling bland and boring with a lack of direction.  And then, during one of the singers many ventures into the realms of falsetto, disaster struck (slight overstatement). Feedback hit us thick and fast, its unbearable screech filling out ears like molten lead (slight over-dramatisation). The sound guy immediately pulled the plug on the microphone but from that point on whenever they tried to give the singer any volume the feedback crept back in and they were forced to turn him back down again (entirely accurate boring sentence). Without any discernable vocals their next song, which would have otherwise been a middle of the road, indie, synth track, turned into a quite engaging trance song. To give credit where it’s due, that’s versatility.

At this point a friend and I had a debate over whether you could classify the music as shoegaze. In an attempt to settle it I stared at my shoes during the next song, to great success. We came to the conclusion that while not traditionally shoegaze it was not inappropriate to describe it as such. We also concluded that we had no desire to listen to anything resembling shoegaze, particularly with the sound issues still continuing to control the show, so we gathered the troops together and, slightly apprehensively, headed down the road to “Fat Louie’s” where we had seen the milling punks earlier.

Upstairs we were met by dim lights, questionable cleaning standards and a small gaggle of nihilistic punks on the dance floor. In the corner of said floor were “Order 66” screaming their lungs out above their cacophony of crash cymbals and pounding power chords. “Finally some real music,” proclaimed the birthday boy as we dodged the multitude of stomping “DocMartens” which were the footwear of choice for the footwear of choice for the modern moshing masses. While it doesn’t feel entirely correct to agree with his statement, there is something to be said of the raw energy of Order 66 compared to the refined and subdued music of Oscar + Martin. Of course my own personal biases towards Order 66’s blend of 80s style hardcore punk mixed with the pop and ska punk of the 90s entirely void my comparative opinion. There is, though, some merit in the fact that, even though I was only present for about 4 songs, I had more fun in at this free concert from an unknown band in a scungy bar amongst these middle aged, era confused, counter culture cretins (I may have just been overly harsh on them in my desire for alliteration) than I have had on so many other nights out.  

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