Words with pictures

Date: August 8, 2009
Venue: The Hi-Fi, Brisbane
Artists: Mary Trembles, Drawn From Bees

I seem to have turned into some sort of Drawn From Bees mini-stalker, having seen them at least four times in just a couple of months. Chalk this one up as number five or something. The setlist mirrors previous gigs nearly exactly, but the boys are in good form. It’s a pity the Hi-Fi acoustics aren’t playing nice though — nasty amounts of echo and fuzz make a mess of half of Waiting For The End until Dan pulls the vocals back into shape at the end. They debut one song among the half dozen or so they burn through — Cables In The Sky — and it’s a corker, but frankly I expected a couple more new tunes considering they’ve just been in the recording studio.

If DFB’s mix seemed bad at times, Mary Trembles cop it even worse — it’s as though someone put a bullet through the treble controls on the sound desk. Thus the confused crowd is “treated” to the bizzare and totally unsatisfactory experience of hearing Scene From Below and several other fine Mary Trembles tunes in a new, radical bass-only format.  Sanity is only restored when one perturbed punter screams at Skritch to turn up his “fucking guitar”. The tool at the mixing desk obviously finally gets the picture, because from that point the acoustics improve enormously.

Normality restored, the band churn out a slew of chunky tunes from last year’s long player Borrowed Ear, Borrowed Eyes — none finer than Eating Through The Debauchery. Skritch’s angry-screamy singing is, as usual, completely at odds with his wolfish grin and dapper, waistcoated outfit.  And I’m, again, struck by how fluidly he moves. It’s neither a prowl, nor a strut, but he’s rarely completly still — and the visual dynamic is a wonderful complement to the sonic aggression. Early issues aside, a strong performance from an outfit that has turned over two-thirds of its personnel since the beginning of the year.