Date: August 15, 2009
Venue: The Globe, Brisbane
Acts: The Room, The Gallant, New Manic Spree
Life — in the form of work — having gone rather haywire with a succession of shitty deadlines during August and much of early September, it’s taken a while for me to finish this set of photos. Which means that by inevitable corollary, the details of the night are really quite hazy. Annoying.
The Gallant use their support slot to debut a few new tunes they’ve been recording in their spare time. Initially, I come away with the sense that they might be moving to a less effects-laden sound. It feels more direct and aggressive — not least courtesy of James See’s inches-short-of-spitting-on-the-crowd vocal delivery. But, later, listening to their new three-track promo sampler, I’m left unsure. End Of The World still brims with clockwork electro-style drumming and Who-vian noises while One Call Away spends most of its poignant life as a gentle, slow-tempo ballad before spiralling to a crescendo of crashing cymbals and stabbing synths near the end. Both of which make the more straight-down-the-line guitar rock of Table For One all the more intriguing. Shed of much of The Gallant’s natural tendency to complexity, the lovelorn tune is one of their catchiest efforts yet.
Launching new EP Where The Martyr Grows, The Room must be absolutely stoked. The Globe feels packed. Not capacity, but you could almost die of thirst waiting for service at the bar. Two parts thinking-person’s rock and one part slug-to-the-guts fury, The Room deploy a heavy atmospheric that tilts somewhere between post and prog. There’s not quite the melodic immediacy of, say, Cog, but absent too are the experimental extremes of a band like Laura. Which is all merely a way of saying that they don’t fit neatly in any particular box. Being neither fish nor fowl can be a recipe for drab, but here dapper, white-coated vocalist Jay Haddon layers his crooning falsetto with the high-end guitar shennanigans of Tristan Chu over the ambient groundswell of the remaining instruments in a most appealing fashion.