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| Snakadaktal in action. Photo by Arianna Lucente |
A young, loved up and turned out crowd packs the room early on for this,
the last ever show from one of Melbourne's most galvanising bands. But before
2011's Triple J Unearthed winners can take to the stage, City Calm Down kick out some jams. Skillfully deploying keys,
dub-deep bass and punchy drums, all the ingredients are in place for new wave
dance-floor bangers. Riding between the clean groove of LCD Soundsystem and
louche funk of A Certain Ratio, new song Pavement
is a fiery calling card, proving the four-piece are hitting new heights.
Over buzzing 16-beats, chugging basslines and spiraling synth arpeggios, singer
Jack Bourke channels the dramatic bluster of Ian McCulloch. Lost: Trapped, Speak to No End and closing epic Dare are longer than they need to be (though not long enough if
you’re dancing, but, being Melbourne no one is), and demand a bigger stage. CCD
would be a perfect Golden Plains discovery for those not already won over.
To deafening cheers, Snakadaktal arrive
on stage, stand in a line and smile tiredly at each other. “The summer of year
nine, we were all at Phoebe's house,” explains drummer Barna Nemeth, of their
journey to now. “Since then we've experienced so much awesome stuff, and we're
forever grateful. Thank you.” Occasional outbursts of sincerity pepper
tonight’s emotional set. With the audience giving the band far more than they
give us, the night plays out like a sleepwalker being shouted at by a drunken
football team. Singer Phoebe Cockburn couldn’t invest the songs with less
effort or emotion, yet the audience responds as if she were invisibly
administering cocaine. With only the atmospheric noodling of Joseph Clough’s Rickenbacker
(and Cockburn forgetting the lyrics to Isolate)
enlivening the first half of the set, song after song (Union, Hung on Tight, Air, Wake Up) vanishes like a rescinded
uncertain suggestion. This is the sound of commitment-phobia, of respectfully
keeping it down, of really nice people being really nice.
Until, finally, songs cease to resemble their sedate recorded versions
and a thrilling Too Soon, Fall Underneath and Dance Bear burst into being. No longer a
set more suited to a sensory depravation chamber, moshing, crowd surfing, girls
on the shoulders of boyfriends, and a dancer dressed as a crocodile appears on
stage transform the venue into the first night of Schoolies week. Closing with The Sun III, instead of an encore we get a teary group hug and scarcely a
wave goodbye. An ironically bombastic end to a career of a band that, like them
or not, never faked a note, and chose to float away rather than self-destruct.
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