New Tunes

Add the following new tunes to the collection...

Guns & Drums — Low
Noumena — The Drift
Loney, Noir — Loney, Dear
Mosaic — Love of Diagrams

Here are the early impressions.

Guns & Drums - Low
Everyone's favourite Mormon snorecore band step away from their The Great Destroyer signature-sound departure and return—sorta—to whence they came: expansive, wankst-ridden, introspective songs peppered with Alan and Mimi's distinctive harmonizing croon. But this time it comes with bleep. I guess Low got the indietronic memo and have now added a layer of circa-1994 ambient synth sound to their product. This one's going to take some listening, as Low usually does.

Noumena - The Drift
They're a local act who were brought to my attention by one of Julia's colleagues at the LAB gallery. Their brand of post-rock/freeform-jazz crossover is wafting out of the speakers as I type. Unlike most of the post-rock ilk—throw the likes of Mogwai and their stable-mates, Explosions in the Sky, into this category—they're given over to heavy use of brass, especially trumpet, which has the effect of distinguishing them from the rest of the pack. Still, they've evidently spent long enough swapping song writing tips with their more guitar-crazed peers; tracks clocking in over a healthy ten minutes are more the norm than the exception. That's fine with me, there's a lot of layered complexity in their music—more than enough to keep me engaged for the next week.

Loney, Noir - Loney, Dear
This one's the crowd-pleaser. The first few bars of the disc reveal Loney, Dear to be ear-candy: a kind of aural confection that is so easy to enjoy so quickly that you're left feeling slightly cheap for being persuaded by its charms without so much as a fight. I'm waiting for an internal backlash to start but so far there's no sign. Despite near-constant rotation in the car CD player, the shelf life of Loney, Noir seems to be getting extended with each listen. That's what I suppose anyone should expect from an act that sounds like a helium-huffing Simon & Garfunkel.

Mosaic - Love of Diagrams
I caught them the other night at Slim's and they put on a good show. Perfect it wasn't, but in the context of the environment and where they were listed on the bill I thought they performed more than admirably. Mosaic picks up where their debut Matador EP left off, even promoting two of the EP's tracks to fully-fledged album status. Love of Diagrams wear their influences on their sleeves and I'm cautiously waiting for it to become a tiresome shtick; so far they're holding on. Early listens of the album haven't hit me square in the face with raw energy the way the EP did. For whatever reason the album seems more restrained, and that acts as a detriment. A few more spins are required here before final judgment falls, but at this stage my position remains neutral.

Love of Diagrams at Slim's

Smile a smug grin of self-satisfaction if you're hip enough to be at the venue for the warm-up band. Last night Ted Leo and the Pharmacists played at Slim's, but I was there for the backup act, Love of Diagrams. Any of my cooler-than-thou hipster credentials weren't really all that well earned since I've never heard any song by Ted Leo and Pharmacists in my life; I wasn't snubbing them; I just don't know about them.

Our arrival was timed perfectly. Not more than twenty minutes after we had our tickets checked and hands stamped in verification of our age did Love of Diagrams take the stage. "We're from Melbourne," the lone male member of the group, Luke, called to the crowd eliciting a small chorus of acknowledging cheers. Those were probably the other Aussies.

Scruffy hipsters, scruffy hipsters—the group looked typically ramshackle, sporting the kind of urban-trendy look you'd find anywhere on Brunswick Street: unkempt, greasy hair and recycled boutique clothes. They fit the mold. But when they opened with the first few bars things fell into place. You could accuse them of being too aware of their image and you'd probably be right, but they've even got a woman beating the skins and that wins big extra points. Rarely do you see a woman behind the kit belting out the rhythm. There are too many male drummers in this world and it's time that changed.

So what about the music? Love of Diagrams do a great knockoff of early eighties post-punk—all heavy bass riffs, discordant guitars and half-screeched vocals. It's clearly a conscious effort on their behalf to resurrect one the superior musical eras of the past and for the better part it works. On stage the approximation to their recorded material more or less hits the mark, they're more raw and more energetic. Notes get missed, the balance on the vocals is off kilter—probably more a function of the cruddy acoustics at Slim's than anything else—and they fumble a couple of songs. None of it really mattered all that much and the now-full venue seemed to side more with acceptance rather than rejection. The set was short at around forty minutes, leaving barely enough time to rip through a catalog that really could use a longer airing on stage. Perhaps their best song, No Way Out, remained inexplicably absent from the playlist and that's a loss. It would have made the perfect closer.

There was no point sticking around for the headlining act; I'd got what I came for and besides, the Great Organiser was about to fall over from tiredness. Getting older will make you do things that your twenty year old self would hate you for: stand at the back of the venue and admire the band from afar; have only one beer; leave early. If that's what being a 30+ attendee at a rock gig is all about then I can live with myself.