Have A Little Fun Tonight

Jerry Lee Lewis – Live At The Star Club, Hamburg

It was another crazy weekend here at Wildebeest Asylum HQ and my head is totally frazzled, but this week I'm going to push on nonetheless and try and wring something sensible out of my fingers through the haze of a headachy hangover and serious sleep deprivation.

The subject of this week's musing is one of the 1001 albums. I anticipated Jerry Lee Lewis with little excitement, knowing little about him and following on the heels of the dire previous entry in the series, Buck Owens' ear murdering country drawling. I was expecting to just give it one quick listen and then move on. How wrong I was. Even half way through the first track I was thinking “Oh this is much better than I anticipated!” and as it transpired Lewis was just warming up. Three songs into his set when he drops into 'Money' (you know the song, “Thats. What I want!”) I was floored by the absolute insanity of his performance. Lewis' piano playing is phenomenal. His riffs may be simple but considering that he's screaming like a madman whilst bashing them out like the keyboard killed his parents, and combined with his reputation for playing behind his back or while standing on top of the piano it's very impressive. His singing is amazing too. Sure most of the time he's just shouting but there's no doubt that he's giving it all he's got both physically and emotionally. And his backing band keep up in the intensity department. The guitar solos may be just two note wailing but even the likes of Opeth or Dragonforce should envy the rawness and wild energy that they capture.

The songs themselves have been reduced to hoary, clichéd golden oldies by the decades. 'Good Golly Miss Molly', 'Great Balls of Fire' and 'Hound Dog' may garner a bit of intellectual respect for their place in music history but few of our generation have much genuine inclination to actually listen to them. All the same in this performance Lewis howls his way through them with an energy and yes even savagery that would give even the likes of Dillinger Escape Plan something to think about, and should cause half assed metal bands who treat a live performance as a job no more exciting than sitting in an office all day (I'm looking at you Satyricon, Slipknot and the Deftones) to hang up their scary masks, wipe off their scary makeup and admit that a forty year old album made by a devout Christian lad has made them look like a bunch of gutless pussies.

The concert recorded on this album was performed at a time when Lewis' star was on the wane, following the media response to revelations of a dubious nature about his personal life (and it's wasn't just some moral majority era wowserism either, marrying one's thirteen year old cousin would probably still be frowned upon today), and it's easy to hear in his manic performance the sound of self-destruction; as though he feels he's lost everything and has nothing left but the catharsis of throwing every piece of oneself into the primal thunder of rock and roll. One of the tragic things about art is that we can only ever achieve our full potential when one's personal life has wound up in such an unpleasant place that the anger or despair brings about some kind of transcendence to create something beyond the norm. Sure I've heard plenty of great performances where the performers are jazzed up in a positive way, usually simply by the pleasure they take in creating music, but those can never quite match up to the spectacle of seeing or hearing someone totally fucking losing it for real. And the appreciation of this is not schadenfreude or pity or voyeurism, but the feeling that you've witnessed something truly genuine; that the hands smashing that keyboard or throttling that guitar are driven by real emotion instead of a mere abstract passion to make some good music. It's a little depressing but of course it's the human cost that it took to create the performance that makes it special. And that's why this album is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest live albums of all time, and why when I see Sigur Ros tonight they're probably going to suck.

Wake! Lift!

Rosetta – The Galilean Satellite, Wake/Lift and Live at Hermann's Bar 21st July

Over at I'm the Most Important Fucking Person in the World they've been running a series on bands that sound like Isis/Neurosis/Cult of Luna, as a response to and criticism of the particularly lazy way that the metal music press like to dismiss such bands as 'just another Cult of NeurIsis clone'. Rosetta would be a perfect candidate for their series, as their sound is quite unashamedly derivative of Isis and Neurosis (and in fact, Aaron Turner, vocalist of Isis, designed the artwork for The Galilean Satellite), but who cares how much they fit into an oversaturated genre when their music is so fucking great?

From their progenitors Rosetta borrow the long track lengths, raw, shouted vocals, a slow cycle of build and release and use of alternating gentle interludes and heavy climaxes. The more unique elements that Rosetta display are dense and frequent use of ambient electronica, an enveloping, spacey sound and a positive, uplifting vibe. Not just the electronics, but also the full sound of the instruments create a much richer soundscape than say Isis, who tend to be somewhat sparse and (at least until their last album) somewhat more purist in their adherence to a standard rock format. Rosetta also have a more uplifting, at times even joyous, emotional vibe to their music, which is a nice point of difference to their post-metal contemporaries and indeed to metal as a whole, which of course tends to be melancholic, when it's not downright depressing.

Rosetta have two full length albums out (as well as a few EPs which I haven't heard). Their first, The Galilean Satellite, is the more conventional post-metal record of the two. The songs are all roughly between ten minutes and a quarter of an hour long and are leisurely arranged, allowing plenty of time for the gradual cycling from peaceful acoustic and ambient passages to the heavy climaxes where they indulge in the genre's signature sound, lumbering riffs belting out a wall of crushing distortion. And of course, it's a concept album. This one is about a man who forsakes the company of his fellow humans and begins a life of isolation on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons, hence the album title), but eventually realises that he can't live without human companionship and returns to Earth. It might sound a little cheesy, but simple stories work best as album concepts and this one is well serviced by articulate lyrics and a powerful delivery. The Galilean Satellite also comes with a companion disc of purely ambient music and while it's a perfectly good album in it's own right it's actually meant to be played synchronously with the album proper. It's very a cool idea, even if Neurosis did do something similar a couple of years back.

Wake/Lift is their second album, and it shifts gears slightly by tightening up the arrangements and putting more focus on melody and riffage at the expense of the ambience, which is neither a bad nor good thing, just a difference. By and large the two albums are pretty similar, and they both rock out something wicked so I'd be hard pressed to pick a favourite.

Now I would never had heard of these guys, but they happened to be doing an Australian tour last month; unusual for an overseas band with so little exposure but most welcome all the same. Fortunately a half page interview in a local free music rag caught a friends eye and after a quick look at their myspace page I was sold.

The gig was at the dark and pokey Hermann's Bar, on campus at Sydney Uni. I was curious to see what kind of crowd a band like this would bring in (if any) considering the relatively sparse attendance for Isis last year. I was heartened to see that there at least was one, and as you'd expect mostly comprised of shy young men dressed all in black, some trailing bored, disinterested girlfriends.

There were three opening bands, and we arrived just in time to see the first close their set with a Celtic Frost cover. Following this mysterious, unnamed band were The Surrogate, from Brisbane who were an easy fit with the headliners in terms of sound and style. They were pretty fucking good too, with a lot of fine technique on display from all four musicians. Their drummer was especially impressive, handling primary vocals while playing. They performed with tons of guts and were very well received. The only bad thing I can say about them is that their guitarist didn't wash his hands after he uses the bathroom.

The final opening band did not go down so well. In fact I felt a bit sorry for them, as after the enthusiastic applause that The Surrogate invited they received total silence at the end of each song. I don't remember their name, which is perhaps just as well because I wasn't very impressed by them. They sounded about halfway between Converge and Parkway Drive: screamy hardcore stuff. The singer did have a good strong voice, but I thought that their songs were kind of straightforward and boring, and their performances lacked the fire that that style of music really needs.

Finally Rosetta themselves took the stage. They were plagued by technical troubles to start with, including no vocals for the first song, and a muddy mix that rendered their spacey wall of sound mostly into a dull roar. Such things are to be expected at a rock show though and Rosetta compensated admirably with an impassioned performance. It's been a while since I had the opportunity to go to a smaller gig, where you can get right up and close to the band (close enough to get a bit of a shower when the vocalist went nuts on the climaxes), and the audience is well behaved but appreciative.

Hopefully it wasn't too expensive for them to come all the way over here and play. I'd love to see them again soon!

Here's the only video of them on youtube, or at least the only one I could find:



We were a much better audience than those guys by the way.

For The Great Blue Cold Now Reigns

The Ocean – Precambrian

German band The Ocean have been around for a little while now but they're new to me, having caught my attention by way of a surge of music press interest brought on by their first US tour, and they are poised to be the 'next big thing' in the world of beard metal, blending the disparate but congruous influences of Mastodon and Isis.

The Ocean are more correctly named 'The Ocean Collective' (at least according to wikipedia) on account of it's constantly rotating membership. Songwriter/mainman Robin Staps is the constant that gives the band its identity, but he assembles a veritable circus of performers for each album. Precambrian credits more than twenty musicians, many of whom are bought in for just one song. The change in performers on each track brings some nice variety, as even though the genre and songwriter remain the same the interpretations of the performance give every song a different character. It works nicely!

Precambrian is a two disc set, the first named Hadean/Archaean and the second Proterozoic (these are the three eons that comprise the Precambrian, the geological term for the lifespan of the Earth before the current eon), and each track is named after a subdivision of each eon. It might seem to be an odd concept for a metal album, but it's strictly metaphorical; the lyrics (which are terrific by the way) are more concerned with alienation and the death of the soul in the modern age, in a nice blend of Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine. The two discs are themed by musical genre, Hadean/Archaean is all fast metalcore, in the vein of Converge or Mastodon, while Proterozoic contains songs that are longer, more moody and more progressive, similar to Isis and with a cinema soundtrack feel to many songs that calls to mind the various projects of Mike Patton.

Did I mention that this album is fucking brilliant? Opening track 'Hadean' immediately kicks the listener in the face with a brutal riff that combines the inventiveness of Mastodon and the intensity of Converge, and indeed the Hadean/Archaean disc as a whole delivers a divine twenty minutes of metalcore that never stops to catch a breath. As befitting the primordial song titles the music is earthy and volcanic, even if the riffs tend towards unconventional rhythms and the performances are precise in a typically German way.

On Proterozoic disc the songs stretch out to seven or eight minutes in length and incorporate gentle acoustic and electronic parts. There is still plenty of brutal heaviness to be found, but these passages are now accentuating points and climaxes that form only part of much longer songs containing a multitude of themes and moods. The Ocean achieve a much wider palette of styles than many of their post-metal contemporaries, from the dark and spacey 'Siderian', which places an unsettling sax lead in a movie score style soundscape, to the peaceful, pastoral beginning of 'Stenian' and the acoustic guitar backed cello piece 'Statherian', which sits behind a sampled movie quote and builds from mournful to menacing in a way that reminded me, surprisingly enough, of Swedish prog/black metal band Shining. Despite such varied styles, the disc makes up for its schizophrenia with masterful songwriting, and it's moody trippiness makes a nice counterpoint to the angry, gutteral first disc.

I'm a huge sucker for bands that combine the violent and the beautiful, and few others do it as gracefully as The Ocean or with such intelligence. And if the live video below of them performing 'Calymmian' is anything to go by, they're a fucking awesome live band too. Here's hoping they make it to Australia some day...

A Couple Of Early Candidates For Album Of The Year

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WARNING!

The new Meshuggah track is so awesome that it actually will melt your face off. Whatever you do don't listen to it!

Since You Betrayed Me So...

PJ Harvey – White Chalk

It's an indication of how far I've stuck my head down into the dank, dark oubliette of the metal world that my first reaction to this album was 'OK, but... meh...'. It took the right context for it's brilliance to be revealed, and this happened to be while trying to sleep in Singapore airport and needing something quiet enough to relax me to sleep but substantial enough to drown out the soul killing awfulness of the muzak being played over the speakers. At that moment, trying to find a way to get comfortable on the horrible plastic chairs, I was unexpectedly stunned by its beauty.

PJ Harvey has always made a point on not repeating herself so it's par for the course that White Chalk sounds like nothing else she's ever done. Throughout the album Harvey sings in a high, fragile sounding voice and is accompanied by a similarly fragile sounding piano. Reinforced by the lyrics and concept art, the songs have a Victorian gothic air about them, as Harvey's stories of loss, longing and regret portray romantic characters from a bygone era.

Despite the artifice of the White Chalk's concept the music is very moving, and there's some killer songwriting to be found. While most of the album is low key and contemplative, space is found for a few climactic outbursts, which don't come as an eruption of heaviness but rather when Harvey's voice builds from the disassociated, regretful sighing that she affects for most of the album to a howling, tormented shriek. Given an environment when you can pay it the attention it deserves, White Chalk is beautiful, in a strange, moody kind of way, and more intense and affecting than you'd expect from something that comes from so far out of left field.

Here's 'The Mountain':

For Hate's Sake I Spit My Last Breath At Thee

Moby Dick
by Herman Melville

It's always a bit of a gamble picking up a so called classic novel. There's every chance that it might turn out to be Dickens, or some other shite that has managed to coast into the canon under the cover of night and is kept there by the malice of some secretive cabal of English teachers. Fortunately Moby Dick is not one of those novels, and is in fact pretty fucking awesome.

The novel is recounted by a man who calls himself Ishmael, although after the first couple of chapters our narrator disappears from the story more or less altogether. Ishmael takes a job aboard a whaling ship which, much to his misfortune, is captained by the insane Ahab, a man who has developed a terrible obsession with the eponymous Moby Dick: the whale that attacked the last boat he captained and bit off his leg. And as anyone with a passing familiarity with the story knows, the voyage and Ahab's quest do not have a happy ending.

Moby Dick was not well received upon it's release in 1851 and it's easy to see why. The novel has a remarkably post modern sensibility for its time, and it makes every bit of sense that it did not become respected until after the World Wars. Melville's character Ishmael is obviously a stand in for himself, and having had much practical real world experience with whaling he spends a good half of the book detailing the technical particulars of life and work on board the whaler and the lives of the whales themselves. These constant digressions, which increase in frequency and length as the novel goes on, were maddening to the audience at the time of the books original release.

Melville also has a very post modern sense of irony and a fairly relativistic attitude. Ahab's whaler, the Pequod, is staffed by three harpooners of Pacific Island, Native American and African origin, and despite his use of a lot of terminology that we would regard as slightly racist nowadays, his sympathies clearly lie with these noble savages, especially in comparison to their twisted, obsessed civilised shipmates. His digressions upon why the whale should be classified as a fish, not a mammal, and why whaling will never have a noticeable impact on the population of the hunted animals may or may not be ironic, but are damn funny nonetheless. In fact, the constant, verbose, irrelevant tangents remind me of David Foster Wallace's epic (but fantastic) pile of bloviating digression Infinite Jest, a book so pomo that it threatens to collapse into a singularity of hipness under the weight of all its cynical irony and smirking self-referentiality.

Above all, Moby Dick, despite its length and formal nineteenth century language, is great fun to read. Melville's wit is very fine, both in straight up humour (I loved the cook's sermon to the sharks:

Dough you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness – 'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a dam sleppin' and bitin' dare?”
Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I wont have that swearing. Talk to 'em gentlemanly.”
Once more the sermon proceeded.
Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now. Look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark good right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts soemtimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bite off de blubber for small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves.”

) and the quality of the writing in the more poetic and romantic parts. Also the story of Ahab's doomed quest is as iconic as they come and the allegorical meanings of his obsession with Moby Dick are a clamouring multitude. Among those suggested explicitly by Melville in the book: Moby Dick as God, Moby Dick as Satan, Moby Dick as the immense, uncaring universe and Moby Dick saying “Stop anthropomorphising me, I'm just a fucking whale!”.

With such great humour, poetry and insightful philosophy Moby Dick truly deserves its reputation as one of the great American novels. Well done Western canon of literature, you got it right this time at least.

A Mouth Without A Heart, An Action Without Meaning

Dillinger Escape Plan – Ire Works

Poor old Dillinger Escape Plan have had a rough time over the last couple of years. Since the release of the brilliant Miss Machine, both of their guitarists have suffered from muscle problems that prevented them from performing. Fortunately main songwriter Ben Weinman has recovered, but sadly second guitarist Brian Benoit will probably never be able to play again. On top of that the drummer, Chris Pennie, quit the band and for inexplicable reasons joined the dire Coheed and Cambria, a band whose unique blend of all the worst aspects of emo, prog rock and nu metal reveals an artistic capacity for terribleness that is the dark twin of Dillinger's genius.

With all these problems surrounding the recording, it was hard to guess what to expect from Ire Works. It was also difficult to imagine how their sound could be improved from what they achieved on Miss Machine, so it was a question of whether they'd just try and make the same album again or go in a new direction, as well as whether it would turn out to be any good. The answers turn out to be a surprising sort of compromise to the first question and a 'hell fucking yeah!' to the second.

The meat and bones of the album are a number of two minute thrashers in the style that has endeared DEP to their fans over years past. These will be familiar territory to anyone who's heard any of their older albums. Ben's guitars spit out twisted, free time riffs with astonishing technical skill, vocalist Greg Puciato screams with savage intensity and the new drummer, Gil Sharone, is (much to everyone's relief) a perfect fit for the style and if anything his capacity for controlled cacophony is even sicker than Pennie's. Two of these tracks feature guest vocalists, 'Fix Your Face' brings back original vocalist Dimitri Minakakis and 'Horse Hunter' features Mastodon's Brent Hinds. However I can't help but feel that the band is a little tired of this style, they have after all been doing it for a while. There's nothing here that isn't good, but none of these songs reach the levels of greatness found on their older albums. But despite such a slight deterioration of quality on this half of the album, the rest turns out to be well worthwhile.

Ire Works contains a healthy number of surprises that will no doubt offend many old school fans, but which are in fact uniformly brilliant. Dillinger throw their first curveball on track three, 'Black Bubblegum', which as the name suggests is their version of a pop punk song, complete with a catchy singalong chorus. It's followed by 'Sick on Sunday', a weird ambient piece that bursts into metal at the end, and the trio of 'When Acting As A Particle', 'Non Eye Gong' and 'When Acting As A Wave', which are two twin tracks that appear to be the distant descendants of Calculating Infinity's title track, surrounding a short, angry song in the old style.

Not long after that is the brilliant 'Milk Lizard', a heavy song that replaces their usual rhythmic insanity with a bluesy swagger and a soaring chorus. 'Dead As History' is hard to categorise; introduced by acoustic guitar, strings and piano, transforming into a menacing nu metal chugger and ending the same way it started, now accompanied with twee falsetto vocals.

And finally, just when you think that Ire Works couldn't get any better, it closes with 'Mouths Of Ghosts'. You know that feeling you get when you first hear a song and it gives you goosebumps, and you drop what you were doing and stare at the speakers in astonishment? And then you start to cry a little bit? Well that's how good this song is. It features a heavy ending as a powerful, cathartic finish to the album, but the intro shows off Weinman's considerable aptitude on the piano in a melancholy build up that sounds a little like Pink Floyd crossed with Secret Chiefs 3 in their Western film score mode. It's even more of a surprise to hear as a Dillinger song than 'Black Bubblegum' and is one of the best songs they've ever done.

Ire Works is quite easily one of the top three albums of 2007, perhaps the best. Come for the screamy mathcore craziness, stay for the catchy pop and mellow piano noodling.

Here's 'When Acting As A Particle' and 'Nong Eye Gong' live:

Burn The Spirits Of Cold, That Travel Through My Soul

Opeth – Orchid

And at long last we have finally come to the end of my traversal of Opeth's back catalogue. Orchid is their first album, and my disappointment with their second release Morningrise meant that my expectations were low. Fortunately it turns out that, while Orchid is nowhere near as accomplished as their mid and late period masterpieces, it's still ranks favourably in their oeuvre.

Most of the songs fit into the standard Opeth style. Long compositions formed of baroque death metal riffs alternating with moody acoustic passages. This album differs because there's still some clear roughness to the performances, production and songwriting when compared to later albums, but the passion shines through and delivers a collection of solid, enjoyable metal songs.

Two tracks stand out for special mention. 'Silhouette' is a short piece for solo piano, featuring some very impressive playing by original drummer Anders Nordin, a type of song that they've never done since and which caused me to remark sadly that there's not enough real piano in metal (a wish that was fulfilled in a most satisfying manner recently by the new Dillinger Escape Plan album, but more on that later). Secondly 'Under The Weeping Moon' stands out as one of the best songs they've ever done, most notably for it's moody ambient breakdown in the middle.

Opeth's artful compositional wizardry has always been the first thing that comes to mind when I justify my love for them, but even back in 92 when those skills were still being developed they excel all the same because of their excellent sense of mood. Despite all Akerfeldt's talk of 'evilness' the music as a whole, even the heaviest parts, is laden with a romantic melancholy for which the brutal death metal image is just a façade. The fusion of the genre with such an antithetical feeling is something that no other band I've heard has pulled off. And when you combine that with the writing genius that Akerfeldt later developed, why you have a series of albums made of pure win and metal!

Sing! My Angel Of Music!

Nightwish – End of an Era

As previously mentioned on this blog, the band Nightwish underwent a drama filled change of lead woman a couple of years back, and in true ghoulish twenty first century media fashion they have documented it on DVD. We don't quite get to see the look on Tarja's face and the tears in her eyes when she realises she's been ditched, but they've recorded their last concert with her (she was fired immediately afterwards) and included a documentary of the last few weeks of the tour, complete with ominous title cards saying 'X days until Helsinki concert...' and full of retroactively ironic statements by Tarja about her perceived future with the band.

The documentary is a little weird for that reason but fortunately the concert footage is fantastic, despite the best efforts of an obviously demented director whose passion for ill advised post production effects (overlayed flames, slo mo, etc.) is remarkable in it's lameness. Fortunately the performance still shines through. In fact, this DVD makes me incredibly sad that when I see Nightwish in February Tarja won't be with them. I'm sure the new singer will do fine but I very much doubt that she'll generate the same stage presence as Tarja displays here.

Nightwish's stage show is full of spectacle: Rammstein style pyrotechnics, huge video screens and all the over emoting of metal and opera combined, but even that is overwhelmed by the power of their music, which rocks and stomps it's way into the category of unbelievable awesomeness and beyond. Highlights include the old school singles 'Wishmaster' and 'Ever Dream' as well as 'The Siren' and their cover of Pink Floyd's 'High Hopes' (both of which I posted as videos in my review of Once). Perhaps best of all their version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Phantom of the Opera', which confirms my long held suspicion that that song was always supposed to be done metal.

I think this disc would probably make a great drinking game. Drink every time one of the other band members visibly snobs Tarja onstage, drink for every shot of a teenybopper goth chick crying in the audience, drink every time Tarja changes outfits and I'm sure the astute viewer could think of more.

Here's 'Phantom of the Opera':

There Will Be Cake!

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal

It's taken a long time but Valve have finally released the next episode of Half-Life, more than a year after the last one. It's a pretty sorry attempt at an episodic release scheme but when the results are this detailed and polished it's hard to complain that they've been taking their time to get it right.

There's not much to say about this instalment that I didn't say about the first episode, as the developers have found a winning formula and with fair reason see no reason to deviate from it. Expect lots of frenzied battles in a wide variety of locales, a spot of logical puzzle solving, and plenty of biffing stuff about with your gravity gun, just like in its predecessors.

While the Half-Life Episodes series has not thus far introduced much in the way of new gameplay, I am very pleased with their main contribution to gamedom: the use of actual real believable characters who look and act like like actual human beings, instead of ridiculous action movie clichés. For once I actually gave a shit about what might happen to the supporting cast during the cutscenes, which is something that I don't recall ever feeling while playing a game before (there were a few games that came close (some of the Final Fantasies, Planescape Torment) but the mechanics of gameplay always ensured that nothing permanent would happen to any of your party members. Yeah, I'm not one of those people who cried when Aeris died. She was pretty boring really...)

Fortunately for the long-windedness of this post the new episode was released in a package with a unique new game, Portal. Using the same engine and gameplay as Half-Life, and loosely set in the same fictional world, the game puts you in control of a sketchily defined character trapped in some kind of research facility and forced to complete a series of puzzles using a gun that creates portals that you can use to teleport from one place to another.

It's a short, clever puzzle game, with a smart but simple plot that is revealed a little at a time as you explore. Definitely worth noting is the game's weird, perverse humour. The player is guided by a sinister, omnipresent observer who's gentle, upbeat manner is belied by the dangerous situations that it's forcing you into (“We regret to inform you that our last statement was an outright falsehood. We promise to always tell you the truth in the future.”) and the game as a whole has a general atmosphere of gleefully sarcastic whimsy that I, and apparently almost everyone else expressing their opinion on the internet at the moment, find delightfully refreshing.

It's great to see a successful, established game developer doing something like this. A short, smart, cheap game that doesn't wear out it's welcome fills a much neglected niche in a market dominated by huge, expensive blockbusters. Also, any game that features the vocal talents of Mike Patton as a gibbering ball of hate is already made of win and awesome.

...Unless They Some Smart Ass Pawns

The Wire Season One

After watching (and loving) the first season of The Shield, I was more or less obligated to tune into the similar (and even more critically lauded) The Wire. The two shows have strong similarities, both are gritty cop shows set in poor, crime ridden neighbourhoods (The Shield is set in a bad part of L.A., while The Wire takes place in Baltimore, a choice of setting that behoves the creators to make the slightly unusual choice of having an almost entirely black cast). However despite starting from similar places the shows have vastly different approaches to the genre. The Shield poses, explicitly and didactically, questions about concrete issues, mainly the attitude of 'the ends justify the means' with regards to law enforcement. The Wire is far subtler and more philosophical with it's themes, which are presented with a sophistication far beyond that of any other TV show I've seen, even in our current golden age of good TV.

Ten years ago television was the 'idiot box', the lowest form of entertainment. As a kid I was always puzzled by the far greater artistic merit attributed to film, when I perceived them both as moving pictures and could see no reason that one should be greatly different to the other. In a sense I was right. There's no reason that television should not be a medium for intelligent and enlightening story telling, but the fact remains that, with rare exceptions, no one was using it as such for a very long time. Certain shows (Buffy, The Sopranos) turned that around and now series' with long running, complex narratives are common place. Sadly this little renaissance comes at a time when broadcast television' lifespan is coming to an end, with the internet's Sword of Damocles poised delicately over its head. This era will no doubt be viewed in retrospect with a lot of nostalgia when we're all stuck watching the puerile offspring of lonelygirl on youtube or it's successor, and when we do so The Wire will no doubt be one of the touchstone examples used.

There are two halves to the first season of The Wire. In one we follow the fortunes of D'Angelo Barksdale, a rising player in his family's drug trafficking business, and his associates. In the other we watch the police investigation tasked with bringing down the gang's kingpin, D'Angelo's uncle Avon. Despite the dedication of the officers carrying out the investigation the authorities within the police department have little patience for the 'waste of resources' so our main protagonist, detective Jimmy McNulte, balances his time maintaining covert surveillance on the drug dealers while playing politics with his superiors who are constantly pushing to shut the operation down.

On the plot level there's a lot going on, and while I have always been in the habit of watching Lost, 24 and even Buffy with one eye on the TV and the other on the internet, it's impossible to keep track of what's going on in The Wire without devoting most of your attention to the show, with it's fast paced, jargon laden dialogue and, refreshingly, it's willingness not to spell everything out for the viewer. Even a show like Lost, which has a reputation for keeping people guessing, deals out its mysteries methodically. The viewer of Lost is not meant to actually figure anything out for themselves, all will be explained (if it's going to be) by an explicit, revelatory scene or line of dialogue. The Wire, in contrast, keeps a lot of things, particularly the less important details, implied and unstated. The closing montage of the season is particularly good. Without any dialogue the point of the show is made clear, you can put as many criminals in prison as you care to, but without changing the social situation there's always going to be someone at every level of the organisation ready to step into place and carry on doing the same old thing. Sure, individuals lives and careers have been shaken up or destroyed (and one or two have even been improved), but the faceless institutions of the police force and the drug gangs remain trapped and unchanged in their perpetual war; a war which neither has any real interest in winning.

It's a downer but a great one to watch. The show lacks the gritty realness of The Shield, but makes up for it with artificial but snappy and entertaining dialogue and a plot that is never predictable. More than once I was on the edge of my seat, genuinely concerned for the fate of a sympathetic character (and they're found in both sides of the series' conflict) because the show unfolds like a novel, where plot is paramount, rather than a TV show, where a character's sudden death is more likely to occur because of the actor's contract negotiations than any dramatic reasoning.

To start with my opinion of this show was that it was good, but not as good as The Shield, but the elegant and genuinely unpredictable denouement of the season brought it all together so well that I'll happily concede that the common consensus is correct and this really is one of the best (can't say the best, that's Buffy) things ever screened on TV.

Unbelievable Awesomeness Is Suprisingly Believable

So I was looking at this the other day, and it got me thinking about what search terms might bring the Wildebeest Asylum up as the first result on Google. I couldn't really think of any (other than obvious, dumb ones, like my name), but I tried 'unbelievable awesomeness', since that's a phrase I use frequently and one that I thought came straight out of my arsehole. Turns out that this blog is on the second page of results for that term. 'Unbelievable awesomeness' is all over the blogosphere, and I have no recollection of where I got it from.

Sunday Night Goth Piano Freakout

Grinderman / Nick Cave
Live at the Enmore Theatre, Sunday 21st

It's been a few months since a concert came around that I was genuinely excited about, and almost as long since I saw one that truly blew me away. I'm happy to say that both timers were reset by Nick Cave's (or rather, Grinderman's) concert this Sunday past.

I arrived a bit late, just in time to catch the end of the opening act, an antiquated stage magician. It was a cute act and kind of entertaining, but he was no Dr. Octavio.

We didn't have long to wait until Grinderman took the stage, led by Nick Cave sporting an improbable handlebar moustache and featuring three other members of the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey, who are also following the theme of wild facial hair (Jim and Warren's beards reach ZZ Top proportions). Together they delivered a dirty, bluesy variation on Cave's usual style. Cave himself was, as you'd expect, the centre of attention for most of the show, dancing wildly around the stage with that distinctive, preacher-like way of waving his skinny arms around (his dancing as almost as iconic as the spasmodic flailing of the Yorke Gimp Dance) and leaning out over the barrier to speak directly to the front row of the audience. Cave wears a persona for this band, an angry one that makes appear like a man possessed, but it's done with a wink and a grin.

Grinderman: Featuring some big assed beards

The music was fine stuff, supported by a light show that enhanced the bands Tom Waits-esque vaudeville goth sound, and I was particularly impressed by the raw, improvised feel of the band. Most bands I see these days sound perfectly honed and play every note precisely the way it's meant to be, and play it the same way at every concert. While that's a solid musical achievement I'm still more impressed by a band like this one, where the artists are so familiar and comfortable with one another that they can decide which songs to play off the cuff (a memorable exchange from the later set: Ellis: “What key is this in again?”, Cave: “Uh... somewhere between C and G I think.”, [muffled arguing], Cave: “Must be C, it's an easy one. All white notes.”) and to mess around and improvise within the songs without losing the groove.

Grinderman: Featuring Invisible Nick Cave

Grinderman Setlist (to the best of my recollection, as usual the order is probably a bit wrong):

• Depth Charge Ethel
• Get it On
• Electric Alice
• Honey Bee
• Grinderman
• I Don't Need You
• When My Love Comes Down
• No Pussy Blues

The short (forty minute) set was good fun, but in my opinion the Grinderman album is a lesser light in Cave's stellar back catalogue and it seems that this opinion is shared widely among my fellow Sydney music fans, as there was an element of restlessness throughout the set. It was good, but we knew that what was coming would be better. The closer, 'No Pussy Blues', was the highlight for most (although I was more excited to hear my favourite Grinderman track, 'When My Love Comes Down' and Cave's awesome guitar freakout at the end of their eponymous song) and at the end Cave announced “Good night... from Grinderman”.

After a short break a new band took the stage, one that looked remarkably like Grinderman but wearing different coloured suits and without the silver stage backdrop. In his guise as 'Nick Cave solo', Cave is much more relaxed and chatty (even more so than Lemmy was), responding to requests and heckles from the audience. I've never heard a band get heckled as badly as Cave was here (although the audience was as a whole wildly appreciative), perhaps it's because he's an Aussie, and therefore fair game as 'one of their own', or is it just because a lot of his songs are quiet, allowing the drunken idiots to be heard? I remain uncertain.

Nick Cave as Himself (rather than the Grinderman)

This set was the heart of the show and the songs ranged in quality from 'Jolly good fun' to 'Completely fucking awesome'. Some were played straight, some were a little Grindermanized from their Bad Seeds origins, and all were introduced by a amiable and witty Nick Cave.

Red Right Hand

With that distinctive bell tone the band suddenly launches into Cave's signature song. The audience immediately goes wild. This one was played fairly straight, save for some particularly aggressive piano and violin freakouts after each chorus. It was an incredible rendition and a fantastic first taste of a band I've been aching to see for years.

Into My Arms

Cave: “We're going to play a few hits for you tonight. Well, not really hits, but songs that wanted to be hits. They tried their very best... Well, they're all hits to me. If you'd all sing along to this one, [pause] it'd be a hit!”

This one was played straight (save for the addition of the backing band, who kept themselves respectfully quiet behind the piano and vocals), but it's another favourite of mine.

The Weeping Song

Holy shit this was awesome. One of the best single songs I've heard from any band this year. On the album it's a classic, but such maudlin stylings does not necessarily carry over so well to a live setting. They've reworked this one into a huge, stomping, aggro motherfucker of a rock track and although it might not sound like a good idea I can assure you that it was an almost transcendent scream-along.

This video has terrible sound quality and it's not nearly as good a version as what I heard (it's from a year ago), but it gives the general idea:



Babe, You Turn Me On
Cannibal's Hymn

These two tracks from the Bad Seeds most recent album were played pretty much straight, although there was a bit of a country twang to 'Babe' and a bit more stompy rockness to 'Cannibal's Hymn'.

Love Letter
The Ship Song

And these two mellow piano ballads were more or less straight too. They lacked a little energy compared to the rest of the show, which is unfortunate, as on record they're two of my favourites. In an amusing interlude the audience asks Cave to move the organ he played on Grinderman as it's obstructing their view of the grand piano. “Lose the organ!”, “Lose the music stand!” Cave dutifully does so (yelling in mock anger at the roadies “Get rid of it! Get rid of it!”). “Lose the moustache!” someone yells out. “NO!” replies Cave, “It's here to stay. And as for the beard...” (pointing at Ellis).

God Is In the House

The heckling actually became pretty entertaining towards the end of the show. Cave introduces the song by saying “It'd really mean a lot to me, if you'd all sing along with the chorus.” “What's in it for us?” someone yells out. Cave laughs for a while and replies “That's the best thing anyone's yelled out at me for... quite a while.” Another funny moment at the end when the song gets really quiet as Cave sings “...as quiet as a mouse...” and someone ruins the almost dead silence of the theatre by screaming, causing Cave to leap off the piano stool, run to the front of the stage and make angry shushing gestures.

Tupelo
The Mercy Seat
Deanna
Jack the Ripper

The main set finished with four old songs that I'm only partially familiar with (but which were all highly enjoyable all the same), performed in a rocky, aggressive style (even 'Deanna'). 'The Mercy Seat' was particularly intense, probably the highlight of the night besides 'The Weeping Song'.

Obligatory not shitty photo

At most concerts the demand for an encore is fairly perfunctory and lacklustre. On Sunday night the roaring of the crowd was an emphatically heartfelt demand for more.

Lime-Tree Arbour
The Lyre of Orpheus
Right Now I'm A-Roaming
Go Tell the Women

There was a fairly long winded discussion about which song to play to first for the encore. Cave ignored our demands for 'Stagger Lee', considered a few others and then abruptly settled on a straight but nice version of 'Lime-Tree Arbour'. This was then followed by an impromptu rendition of Happy Birthday by a random member of the audience to Jim (the drummer) whose beard had apparently grown another ring on Sunday. 'Right Now I'm A-Roaming' was a nice, light hearted end to the set, except that just as they were walking off, Nick whirls around, says “I almost forgot!” and played a last, final Grinderman track.

My best beard shot

Another brilliant concert. I've been so lucky to see so much great stuff this year (although I wish I'd bought tickets to Grinderman's Saturday and Monday shows as well). Cave is another brilliant frontman, lacking the charisma of Lemmy or Mike Patton but making up for it with huge amounts of infectious energy. I loved the way he would leap out of his piano stool just to wave his arms in exhortation at the audience in between bars for a mere five seconds before returning to start playing again (his excellent musicianship kind of goes without saying). At any rate, who needs charisma when everyone knows that you're one of the finest songwriters alive today?

Cave will be back next year with the Bad Seeds (and a new Bad Seeds album). I can barely wait!

Hearken to the Sound of Calling

Nightwish – Once

Here's one for the 'things that should be terrible but actually turn out to be awesome' file: Rammstein meets Evanescence. My previous expeditions into the realm of power metal had soured me on the concept, but Nightwish have convinced me that I've done it a disservice.

So this is the idea, take one metal band (with keyboards), add orchestral backing and get a hot chick to sing opera style over the top. (Don't fret if you have an aversion to high pitched warbling, we're talking opera as in Andrew Lloyd Webber here, not Wagner.) It sounds like a recipe for disaster but Nightwish are a testament to the fact that if you're a competent, original songwriter you can make even the most unlikely concept work.

The songs on Once span a fairly diverse range within this setup, beginning with straight up stompy metal anthems that could be written by Rammstein (save for the inclusion of female vocals) and ending with ballads that focus more on the voice and classical elements. Along the way they investigate a variety of musical styles and variations to the side of that path, giving them room to showcase each of the diverse elements that make up their music, from bombastic metal guitar solos and quirky, original pop metal keyboard instrumentals to sad, haunting passages for voice and strings and escapades into different ethnic styles.

I can't help but compare these guys to Dragonforce, up until now my touchstone for all things power metal. While Nightwish's lyrics are rarely explicitly fantastical they do have that kind of a feeling about them, but where Dragonforce come across as embarrassingly juvenile these guys are at least sophisticated enough writers to keep things ambiguous and yes it's still cheesy but at least it's heartfelt, a quality which extends to the music. And that makes a big difference.

The most overtly fantastical Nightwish get on this album is in 'The Siren', which is inspired by The Odyssey, (if it's classical then it's classy!) and it's probably my favourite track on Once. Vocalist Tarja Turunen's (since kicked out of the band for being a primadonna) wordless aria is as beautifully haunting as befits the titular mythological beast. Meanwhile the bass player, Marco Hietala, complements her nicely as he sings Odysseus' part, heartbroken as he realises that he will never see the source of the song calling him. The band complement them with hard, driving metal during the verses and understated ambience during the interludes. It's good stuff, I defy anyone to write it off as being cheesy.

If you get this album make sure it's the bonus track version. I normally dislike it when record companies disrupt the flow of an album with bonus tracks but 'White Night Fantasy' and 'Live to Tell the Tale' are pretty good songs and fit well at the end of the album.

Nightwish are so awesome that they get two embedded videos. Here's their video for 'Nemo':



And here's 'The Siren' from their live DVD:



Fuck it. Lets make it three. Here's them covering Pink Floyd's 'High Hopes'.

Just Because It Is Not Heavy Does Not Mean It Is Not Evil

Opeth – Lamentations

We've taken a bit of a break from the Opeth love here at the Asylum for a little while, mainly due to my disappointment with Still Life and Morningrise when compared to their later stuff. However I've finally managed to track down a copy of their live DVD, Lamentations, and I'm pleased to report that it's super fucking awesome.

This disc was released following their Deliverance/Damnation tour and contains material only from those two albums and from their preceding release, Blackwater Park. This just happens to be the period where, in my opinion, they were at the height of their ability. (The reason for the limited selection range of tracks included is, I believe, because of legal issues with their former record labels. They have another DVD due out later this year which covers material from an even spread of all their albums.)

The concert opens with the entire Damnation album played front to back, with 'Harvest' off Blackwater Park slotted in near the end for consistency's sake. As I mentioned in my very brief one line review of Damnation, it is a stylistic departure for the band, one where they temporarily put death metal aside completely and pulled out the acoustic guitars, clean vocals and ethnic drums to make a mellow prog rock album. Much to everyone's surprise Opeth fans as a whole, while not numbering Damnation among the best of their albums, gave it decent amount of credit and for the first half of this DVD you'll be treated to the unlikely scenario of a concert hall packed to the brim with greasy haired, black t-shirt wearing metallers standing quietly and respectfully as they listen to a dude strum away on an acoustic guitar.

But fuck if this disc didn't make me even more angry at myself for missing their concert here last year. Their albums are inspired enough but live they deliver still more intensity. The four five (mustn't forget Per tucked away behind the keyboards there!) members of the band may not be showmen like Peeping Tom or Mammal, but they all seem totally absorbed by and in love with the music they're making while onstage. The viewer is treated to many shots of leadman Mikael Akerfeldt looking skyward with eyes shut tight and a blissful look on his face as he busts out another glorious guitar solo. And speaking of Akerfeldt, fuck this guy is awesome! The whole band are brilliant musicians but he in particular astonished me with his talent. Metal vocals in a live context are always likely to disappoint but Akerfeldt's voice is if anything even better than on the albums. His cavernous growls on the heavy tracks are as great as I'd hoped but I was especially stunned by the strength of his clean singing voice during the 'mellow' part of the concert. It probably sounds like I want to marry this guy and have his babies so I will offer one criticism: what's up with that facial hair? Shave it off and then we can talk about the babies.

After they finish playing Damnation the band leave the stage for a break and return to play a totally fucking awesome set laden with the best fucking metal songs ever written; 'Master's Apprentice', 'Deliverance' and 'The Leper Affinity' are all here and would be unquestionably given six stars if my ipod allowed ratings that high. While I was more impressed by the acoustic set (I think maybe because the style was new and fresh to them the band was a little more into it) this stuff is top notch too.

And just when you thought you could turn off the computer and go to bed content in the knowledge that you just watched one of the awesomest DVDs ever, it turns out that there's a documentary on the making of Damnation and Deliverance too! It's probably not essential for anyone who's not a huge music geek and a huge fan of Opeth in particular but for me watching the arrangement and recording processes of the best fucking songwriters in the world is basically the coolest thing ever committed to digital versatile disc. By the time it got round to the footage showing the guitarists recording almost every solo on Deliverance!!! I was pretty much delirious with delight.

Oh Opeth. Don't ever stop being awesome. Here's 'Death Whispered A Lullaby':

What I Did In My Weekend

Mammal fucking rock edition


Friday:

• Became an ordained minister. I can now perform marriages and name children in states of the USA that have not passed laws against bullshit internet religions that make anyone who fills out a form an ordained minister.
• Had dinner at Bentleys. Still the best damn food I've tasted in Sydney.
• Had a drink at the Cricketers Arms. I'd stayed out of there until now because of it's reputation as a hipster hangout, but I found that it 's actually full of Irish people, and you can't go wrong drinking with the Irish.

Saturday:

• Visited the Museum of Modern Art. Didn't get to see a lot of it unfortunately, maybe next time.
• More on Saturday night in a second.

Sunday:

• Had breakfast at the NSW Art Gallery (which was pretty good, lovely view of the gardens and the harbour) and had a wander around. It was really great. I liked the modern art but the 19th century paintings totally fascinated me. I've never really been much of a visual arts sort of person but I may have to remedy that with some more visits in the future.

Anyway, the big event of the weekend was Mammal playing at the Annandale on Saturday night. I'd seen these guys at Come Together and they fucking rocked something wicked, so it was time to give them a second look and see how much of my enjoyment the first time I saw them was due to the copious consumption of intoxicating substances.

First up, the opening bands. Furcurve reminded me a hell of a lot of The Murder of Rosa Luxemborg, as they played thrashy hardcore with the spastic rhythms of Converge, but with a vocalist who cooed and minced like Morrisey. They didn't inspire me hugely, but get a half hearted thumbs up for doing something interesting and different and pulling it off well.

Next up were Guns for Glory, who very nearly bored me to death with a long dose of straight up emo. My lovely concert going companion started to get restless and only my confident reassurances that Mammal would make up for it convinced her to stay.


And fortunately they didn't make a liar of me, their set was every bit as energising as the last time I saw them, if not more. I've described them as 'like Rage Against the Machine but upbeat' and I think that's a pretty accurate description. They've got your funk, your metal and your rap and despite sharing Rage's political inclinations they blast their message out with positivity and fun, rather than bitter anger. These guys are a brilliant live act and all four members have that performer's x-factor that grabs your attention and holds it from the second they take the stage. The vocalist especially has the same kind of showmanship that I noted about Mike Patton earlier this year that transfers his energy and enthusiasm straight to the audience. The moshpit was one of the best I've seen in a while, with everyone, jumping, dancing and generally going nuts and having a good time. I've waited too long to go to the Annandale, which has a reputation as one of Sydney's best live venues. One that appears to be justified.


Anyway, brilliant live band. Go see them if you have a chance.

Because He Gets Results You Stupid Chief!

The Shield Season 1

I know I'm really late to the party with this one. The Shield is almost about to (or perhaps already has, I've been keeping myself in the dark about it to protect myself from spoilers) finish its sixth season, whereas I've only just cottoned on to it by way of the breathless anticipation echoing around certain internets of what was supposed to be its grand finale (the sixth season was intended to be the last but it was granted another at the last minute).

In broad terms The Shield is a plain old cop show. It's set in a seedy suburb of inner L.A. and follows the police department responsible for keeping some kind of order in the middle of rampant drug use and gang warfare. The focus is on a small group of about half a dozen main characters, all of whom are conceived with originality and skilfully acted. Of these Vic Mackey, leader of the anti-gang strike force, is central to the show as a crafty and charismatic man who does a good job keeping the peace but whose methods range from the corrupt to the outright abominable. Countering him is the district captain Aceveda, who appears to be the straight and narrow foil to Vic and his dubious attitude to policework but who gradually reveals more shades of grey on his soul as the season wears on.

While the morality of the show ultimately seems to come down against Mackey and his techniques it does show his perspective well and poses a genuine moral question. The corrupt cops of the strike team do honestly want what's best for the community, and if thuggery, planting evidence and even murder are necessary to catch the crims then to hell with those bureaucrats and their red tape! If they get results, isn't that what matters? The actor behind Mackey, Michael Chiklis, does a great portrayal of a man who honestly believes he is in the right even as his means grow more and more morally untenable, not only in the way he justifies his actions but also in how his cheerful, easy going nature persuades his fellow police, some of whom have a few more moral qualms about pocketing confiscated cocaine in order to put their kids through college, to go along with his schemes.

Most of the time when recommending a good TV show it's customary to note that 'you have to watch until the thirty-eighth episode before things really hit their stride' but that is by no means the case here. The first episode is easily one of the finest hours of TV I've ever seen, introducing the characters just to the bare degree necessary and launching straight into a instantly engaging setup for the rest of the show, culminating in a tour de force scene where Mackey commits a heinous crime that will haunt him for the next thirteen episodes and beyond.

Later on in the season more and more drama is added, to the point where a lesser group of writers would sink into a morass of mediocrity under the weight of it, but these guys take the tired old soap opera clichés, from repressed homosexuality to a kid with autism, and make them work. None of the later episodes recapture the intensity and sheer mainlined dramatic goodness of the first episode but the whole season is top notch.

Coming soon, season one of The Wire, which I'm told is even better.

What I Did On My Weekend(s)

For no particular reason, except that I did a bunch of cool stuff over the last couple of weeks, I'm going to indulge in a little cat blogging and recite the (hopefully not too tedious) details of my life over the last few weeks.

Last weekend (the 28th and 29th) my work flew everyone up to Port Douglas for a holiday (thank you U.S. stock market crashes!) I'd never been up to that part of Australia before (I never even realised how huge Queensland is compared to New South Wales, but I guess that's what you get when most of the country is desert that's no use for anything) so it was pretty exciting. Unfortunately the weekend was somewhat marred by the fact that some of my luggage was lost on the way up (and I'm still waiting to get it back), but other than that it was great fun.

On Saturday we went on a trip out to the Great Barrier Reef to go diving and snorkelling. I passed on the diving on account of feeling a little unwell, but I regret that now. At least I got in the water (unlike some people), and at least once I got in the water I didn't jump straight back out again because I saw a big fish (unlike some other people). The reef is a very unique, beautiful place (almost as good as New Zealand) but unfortunately none of my photos turned out very well. At least I got this one of a whale on the trip back:


Later that night we went out to dinner at Nautilus, one of the swankiest restaurants in this swanky resort town. It was open to the rainforest and the ambience was superb. The waiters certainly knew what to do when they saw a big corporate group come in with the company paying the tab and plied us with all manner of expensive wines, and even egged us on by telling us that the next table had spent more than us and we should try to catch up. I hate to think how much I drank and considering that I woke up without a hangover when red wine usually seriously disagrees with me it must have been very good quality. The food was excellent too.

Afterwards there was a spot of clubbing and then a long walk down the beach back to the resort. The beach looked amazing in the moonlight even when perceived through my hazy drunken memories. Back at the hotel much room service was consumed and drinking games continued well into the morning.

The next day was spent lounging by the pool and on the beach, with a spot of Coconut Olympics in the afternoon (won by the UK in a controversial round of 'who can throw the coconut the furthest', which could not be resolved due to the object of play bursting open and leaving smelly, rotten coconut milk all over the hands of the contestants).

It was a pretty cool holiday.

This weekend just been was supposed to be a quiet one but the Death Metal Kindy Teacher was ill, leaving me to wander the streets of Sydney without the tender oversight of a woman to keep me from going off the rails. Friday night ended up being work drinks, and a few unsuspecting co-workers were press ganged into a slow, meandering ramble down Oxford Street, during which I learned the following valuable lessons:

• Doing two consecutive jagerbombs is easier than a single shot of 42 below.
• Living so close to Oxford Street has made me surprisingly comfortable in gay bars.
• It's always the foreigners who go home last.

I actually got a little too wasted that night but my friend E. was having a birthday party on the Saturday so I soldiered on the next night too. We began with a very nice home cooked meal before heading off to the Crystal Boudoir, Sydney's trendiest burlesque club. The term burlesque seems to be a fairly unspecific one, and can mean anything from a slightly classier variety of stripping to something quite arty and pretentious. Crystal Boudoir is located right in Martin Place, more or less the most sophisticated (or at least perceived as the most sophisticated) part of Sydney (home to the most expensive bars and stores like Armani and Louis Vuitton) so it tended towards the latter. Things almost went awry with the door staff having issues with some of our shoes, but a party of twelve with prebookings pretty much does as the proverbial five hundred pound gorilla so in we went anyway.

But man, what a great show! The bar itself is a very nice venue, with lots of class and ambience. The drinks are expensive but not too bad for that part of town. You sit there and drink and eat nibbles, and periodically the performers take the stage and entertain the crowd for a while. The first few dances leant very much to the 'arty' side of things, being slow, graceful and moody, while still sensual. Later on things got more fun and light hearted. The performers themselves, male and female, were just brilliant, exuding so much grace and sexuality that the entire room was enraptured every time they took the stage. A bit of audience participation never fails to go down well either, as one relatively straight laced girl in our group learned when she got a face full of hot, jiggling burlesque dancer arse. Anyway, if you get the chance to go to anything like that do it, because I don't think I've been so well entertained for a long time.

Afterwards we ended up back on Oxford Street at Spectrum, a club that I loathe with every fibre of my hipster hating soul, but it was the birthday boys choice so there we were, hanging out with eighteen year olds who think they invented cool because they've heard of The Smiths.

Overall it was a very fun night, especially the burlesque, but what goes up must come down and on Sunday night I found myself sicker than I can remember being in eight years. I trundled off to bed at about ten (pretty early for me) where I was beset by a fever and dreams that three wizards were having a fight (complete with purple and green lasers shooting from their staves) inside my head. Finally at about midday on Monday one of the wizards triumphed, emerging from a shattered hole in my crown that had been opened by a final climactic concussion, and declared victory. I then returned to the realm of the sensible, although I was still unable to get out of bed until four hours later, when I staggered down to the dairy to buy the only dinner I could stomach the thought of; several cans of tinned fruit and a big tub of chocolate ice cream. A worthy reward for such a tiring couple of weeks.

Mike Patton?!

Peeping Tom - Live at Enmore Theatre, Sydney, June 21^st

I was not terribly excited by Mike Patton's latest project Peeping Tom on record but it was only a disappointment by Patton's standards and considering that far and away the two best concerts I've ever attended were both for Tomahawk (one of Patton's other bands) it was a no brainer to grab a ticket to this show.

The Enmore Theatre is a nice venue. They have thoughtfully segregated the main theatre area into two sections, one section in front of the stage and one further back. The front section is also connected to the bar, which means that the snivelling, disgusting swarm of under eighteen year olds are safely quarantined away at the back of the audience, hurrah!

We found a nice place near the front and slightly off to the side. The opening act was Tango Saloon, who played an inventive mix of jazz, latin music and Morricone style western film music. Remind anyone of Secret Chiefs 3? There's no explicit musical connection but I thought that their drummer looked familiar and wikipedia verifies that he is in fact Danny Heifitz, formerly of Mr. Bungle and who joined Secret Chiefs 3 on their recent Australian tour. Tango Saloon are a fantastic band, very skilled performers all and with highly original and creative songs. They're based in Sydney so I shall make an effort to keep abreast of their comings and goings.

Tango Saloon

As for the headliners, the essence of the concert can be summed up by acknowledging that Mike Patton is the coolest guy alive. In concert he's full of boundless energy and wit, and simply exudes charisma. Watching him makes me realise why musical legends of the past such as Elvis or Jim Morrison are so idolised. As much as I appreciate them on record I've never quite understood why people loved them quite as much as they do. I now suspect that there's something about these guys (i.e. charisma) that can only be witnessed in person.

Peeping Tom is more or less a hip hop band, and they had quite a few people on stage. A bass, guitar and drums rhythm section were tucked away on stage left, while opposite them were a DJ and a keyboards/synth guy. Once these guys took the stage and began playing a spacey intro the crowd's chant of “We want Mike” finally bore fruit and he took the stage with a female co-vocalist on each arm. They then busted into a cover of Marvin Gaye's 'Desperate Situation', which was then immediately followed by my favourite Peeping Tom song 'Mojo'.

Peeping Tom take the stage

It was just brilliant seeing Mike Patton with this band. Tomahawk's music is melancholy and eerie, so as you might expect Patton's performing persona is a little different for this band, as the music is far more upbeat and fun. Mike jumps around the stage and engages in constant audience banter and encouragement. Best frontman ever.

Imani Coppola

The setlist consisted of the entire Peeping Tom album, plus a few covers (the aforementioned 'Desperate Situation' and 'Across 110^th Street' by Bobby Womack), solo spots and, much to my delight, 'Get Up Punk!' from the collaborative album Mike Patton did with the X-Ecutioners.

The only partway decent picture I got of Mike Patton

Some complaints:

• More munters than I expected, I thought this band would draw a more mature (by which I don't mean older) crowd.
• The DJs solo piece went on for too long. I was bored.

A few highlights:

• The two backup vocalists were rapper/beatboxer Butterscotch and singer/violinist Imani Coppola. The violin was a nice touch but Butterscotch almost upstaged Patton with her unbelievable beatboxing solo, in which she combined the abilities of a drum machine and the sound effects guy from Police Academy, and sang at the same time! You could hear the audience's jaws collectively hit the floor.
• Some random guy managing to get on stage and hug Mike Patton. Patton hands him the microphone and the guy uses his moment of glory to say “Whooooooooooooo!” and stage dive into the crowd. Security was ready to pounce on him but Mike stayed their hand, “Hey, leave that guy alone, he's my buddy. Me and him go way back” claiming to have met him in a whorehouse in Kings Cross. Later on a girl got on stage and started laying big wet kisses on Mike's cheeks. He just stood there and said “I'm not looking, I'm not turning around to see who that is...” and she got dragged away by security.
• The last song of the main set, 'Sucker', was dedicated to Mike's favourite Aussie rock band, Wolfmother. I laughed.
• Mike giving some dude in the front row shit for no reason, “C'mon, laugh ya little rugrat!”
• 'Get Up Punk' and 'Mojo'. Fucking awesome.