LIVE REVIEW: Quivers, Juice Webster

Quivers, Juice Webster @ Northcote Social Club, June 30, 2024

 

By the time Juice Webster and her band arrive on stage, the room is three-quarters full and at least ten degrees warmer than Northcote's crowded High Street. As the applause dies down, I hear one woman standing near me whisper, “I love her look, I love her music, I love everything about her.” Since Webster’s arrival on the Melbourne music scene in 2018 as a quietly observant folk pop singer-songwriter, and long before the release of her glowingly reviewed debut album Julia late last year, the Melbourne-based singer songwriter has been growing used to sentiments like these. The audience go from raucous appreciation to a hushed reverence as her band ease into the album's opening track, Returning. Quietly insistent shallow guitar strums are underpinned by a warm rhythm section that moves at the pace of a sleeper’s heartbeat. Last year, Webster featured on Victoria Kozbanis’s podcast Beers & Tears, where the Kozbanis described her music as "a kind of summoning – soft echoes of connectedness and courage; lightweight and all-encompassing", and I'm not sure anyone is going to beat that. There is a virtue in Webster's choice not to lean on dynamic shifts and instead favour a soothing circuitous jangle. Standouts from tonight's set include the quietly incandescent Black Coat, Black Skirt and Headaches, both of which appear on Julia and the almighty, time-shifting closer Wanna Be Held, a song just waiting to make a music supervisor look like a complete genius when they use it to transform the climax of a romantic drama into a wrenching tear-jerking masterpiece. Webster won fans with her support slots for The Beths and her recent free Northcote Social Club show, it's a safe bet she's added to that number tonight.

 

There are few fans a band would want more than Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance. The duo behind the nineties indie titans Superchunk and founders of Merge Records, McCaughan and Ballance discovered bands like Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon and Caribou and the act they want to work their savvy magic with next is the quartet ambling onto stage right now. Quivers mumble bashful hellos to the buoyant room, now packed, spilling into the hallway and bellowing back their appreciation, the four-piece share a nod and launch into Gutters of Love. This turns out to be one of few songs played from Golden Doubt, their 2021 album they toured to great response overseas. Golden Doubt could be mined for a dynamite crowd-pleasing set. Instead, in what seems a bold sign of confidence, the band perform their forthcoming album in its entirety. Anyone wondering why Quivers, whose local profile sits somewhere between the equally excellent The Maggie Pills and Gut Health, were selected by Merge Records, need only listen to the title track and first single from this album, Oyster Cuts. Sung by bassist Bella Quinlan who, along with drummer Holly Thomas, takes a far more prominent role on the new album, the song epitomises many of the album's strengths. Guitars are muted and chug with an authority that allows the melodies to layer and float with a sense of freedom. It's as much a vibe as it is a pop song.

 

Unlike a lot of music that has writers and reviewers reaching to bands like The Go-Betweens and REM to describe their music, Quivers are unabashedly unpretentious. From their music to their between-song chat to the way that singer and guitarist Sam Nicholson seems surprised whenever his sequencer works, you don't get the impression they're doing this on a gap year or to blow off steam until they get through their MBA. You do get the impression they'll be doing this at 60. Songs are built around a sincere confession, some deft yet unpretentious wordplay and a chorus that ends in a singalong that isn't the least bit church-y. Whether it's the regional Tasmanian roots, that they have spent countless evenings eking out a living in what feels like the dying days of the live music scene or that they have a devotion to guitar pop music, they feel unaffected and wholly themselves. There is also a pure sense of joy that comes from the stage when Quivers play. It's there when Quinlan and Thomas share a glance while hitting harmonies on the chorus of new songs Screensaver or Never Be Lonely, in their euphoric cover of Lucinda Williams' I Just Wanted to See You So Bad and when they lock in to anchor three of the greatest pop songs of recent years When it Breaks, Hold You Back and You're Not Always on My Mind. It's also there in Nicholson's dorky enthusiastic one-foot dancing and when guitarist and backing vocalist Michael Panton peels off another guitar break that ends with his right hand a blur and his left hand slipping up and down the neck of his guitar. "This next song is our last," says Nicholson. "It's a song that could fall apart… or it could fly," Of course, it flies. While they close with Reckless, the last song from Oyster Cuts, Nicholson reminds us that this isn't the album's launch. “That'll be in November,” he says. Between now and then the band will be touring the US. That these songs could sound even better for that show is a pretty exciting thought. 

 

 

LIVE REVIEW: Dirty Three

Hamer Hall, June 14, 2024

Photographs: Rick Clifford

Judging by the lack of people who look under 40, tonight’s audience will be hoping for rowdily-invoked memories of the 1990s, when the trio we are all here to see would pack bar after bar with what felt like a brand new style of music. First here in Melbourne, later other cities across the country, then across the world. That intimate sense of being seduced, transfixed then overwhelmed is difficult to replicate in the sold-out Hamer Hall, but it is also a natural response, shared by hundreds of thousands of people who have heard the music of Jim White, Mick Turner and Warren Ellis. Two and a half thousand of those people are here tonight, plastic cups of booze in hand, layered up against the cold, filling the seats. As the houselights dim and the cheers subside, Boz Scaggs' seventies rock classic Lido Shuffle bursts from the speakers. With the arrival of its anthemic chorus, familiar to anyone who has ever seen a film at Hawthorn's Lido Cinemas, the three men arrive on stage, the ever stolid White and Turner looking as if they've come to conduct a tax assessment, Ellis as if he has just won the lottery. "Fucken Melbourne!" he shouts at us. "Fucken MELBOURNE! Well, this is a bit better than The Great Britain," he says referring to their first ever show. "No, hang on, what the fuck was that venue on Commercial Road?" "Bakers Arms!" shouts a guy from the stalls. "That's it," replies Warren. "Were you there?" Nathan from the crowd replies in the affirmative. Nathan is promised a t-shirt from the merch desk for helping Warren measure just how far his band have come, a journey that often seems to confound him. This interaction sets the dynamic for the rest of the night. Maybe around a quarter of tonight's two and a half hour, ten song set, consists of Warren chatting to the crowd and the gig is no poorer for it.

 

The band open with Love Changes Everything I, the first song from their new album and one that sounds like the Dirty Three clearing their collective throats – all squalling feedback, loops of violin noise, scattering drums, gestural piano and warm fragments of distorted guitar chords. Ellis paces the stage, kicking the air and shouting to the rafters, horsehair flying off his bow, white hair and beard flung outward. Like a mustang loosed from a stable, Ellis embodies the spirit of the song and the band with every fibre of his being. Long before the song devolves into squelching feedback, I can't be the only one thinking, "where can he go from here?" The answer is more, and harder. The band ease into another, longer and more melodic track from their new album, Love Changes Everything II, which promises that the orchestral qualities that made their late 1990s recordings favourites among so many of their fans is still very much part of the trio's DNA.

 

"The new album’s out today, the vinyl," says Ellis. "That was a couple of tracks off it. Please buy a copy and send Dirty Three to the top of the charts. When we started out, we were trying to write hit singles," he waits for the laughter to die down. "That never happened." Turner and White wait while Ellis takes a seat at the front of the stage to continue the conversation. “My people! My people! What’s been going on?” He's up for a chat, and it sounds like everyone wants to get some Waz-time. People shout back and Ellis either wilfully or mistakenly misinterprets almost everything anyone says. "Taking heroin!" shouts one guy. "Go to Adelaide?" says Ellis. "Is Justin Kurzel here?" Undaunted by the acoustic assault that accompanies every question or observation, the long-time resident of Paris welcomes the chance to be back. “We were told we couldn’t come on at eight o'clock because our audience was still at the bar," says Ellis. "This is such a fucking nineties crowd.”

 

Eventually the getting-to-know-the-audience section of the show ends, and we are treated to a journey through what is by any measure a phenomenal batch of albums. "This is one of the first songs we wrote in St Kilda," says Ellis, getting to his feet and returning the microphone to its stand. "St Kilda is a suburb in Melbourne. It used to be a lot of fun. This is called Indian Love Song." A swaggering, chaotic, euphoric version of the opening track from their self-titled album – 30 years old this year – erupts. It finds room for audience participation and one of White's more notable drum solos of the night. We are now three songs and one hour into the show. Hope, from their album Horse Stories, follows, a gorgeous languid moment amid the chaos. Sea Above Sky Below is dedicated to the memory of its recently passed producer, Steve Albini. Throughout the night, hundreds of people call for one of the band's most renown tracks, Everything's Fucked. Finally, they oblige with a titanic version that sounds like it could have been the culmination of a long summer's Saturday night at the Tote in the mid 1990s. The cacophonous drawn-out tension, the near silent release of the melodic hook as Turner slides his hand up the neck of his guitar to pluck the bell like arpeggio, Ellis following with restraint and subtle vibrato. These dynamic qualities are also on show for the stunning songs that follow, Some Summers They Drop Like Flys, and Authentic Celestial Music.

 

As we move chronologically through the band's repertoire, tempos slow and songs stretch out. Looped violins become more frequent and White, always a figure of calm as he flings his arms outward and upward, increasingly acts as a magnet for the other two. Ellis plays most of his parts facing the drummer, Turner never looks away and White rarely looks up. The dynamic, baked in from day one, seems to make the venue smaller, as if we could in fact be watching a show in a pub in the 1990s. "Do we have a curfew?" Ellis asks someone offstage. The audience, naturally, bay for the show not to end. After an effort to reopen Hamer Hall's bar fails, and the house lights come on, then off again, the band reluctantly ease to a close with another track from their new album, the delicate and surging Love Changes Everything VI before returning for an encore of Sue's Last Ride. A stunning end to a show that was a lot more than, as Ellis facetiously referred to it earlier in the night, "the best show we've played in Melbourne for 12 years". It’s maybe the best show they’ll play anywhere for the next 12 too.

LIVE REVIEW: Good Morning, Cool Sounds

Photo: Danysha Harriott

Good Morning, Cool Sounds @ Melbourne Recital Centre, June 6, 2024

 

One of the great coups of this year's Rising Festival was luring Australia’s most internationally hyped indie band of 2024 back home for a one-off performance. Fresh off a 26-date North American tour with Waxahatchee, Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons' "lil band/recording thing", Good Morning, is now ten years into its amiable and quietly impressive existence. The duo's fourth album, Good Morning Seven, was released in March and showcased imaginative and intricate arrangements that, for a band best known for its jangly guitars and afterthought lyrics, was going to land either on revelation or ambitious mess.

 

But before we can learn how the band translate their latest and greatest album live, early-comers are treated to a deft set from Cool Sounds. For some bands, playing a venue like the Melbourne Recital Centre is the gig equivalent of being thrust under a microscope. The fidelity and separation of the sounds here are so profound they can reveal sloppy playing, slapdash songwriting, an over-reliance on effects and lazy arrangements. Cool Sounds are guilty of none of these things. The range of sounds, the respectful instrumentation, sense of humour and sheer musicianship that runs throughout the sextet's beachy funk makes tonight’s set a revelation. Each member seems to be thinking of the combined sound of the band, so they play quietly, actively listening to each other as they slip into a sweet, exsanguinated funk, reminiscent of Chic or Talking Heads. Instead of any sense of urgency or demands to get up and dance, Cool Sounds simmer away like an inviting spa bath. 

 

“The rumour going round is that Good Morning spent all the money they were being paid for this concert," says singer and guitarist Dainis Lacey. "So instead of getting paid, the support band got ten of these." Lacey jokes, lifting the cap off his head and reading the words across its front. “Shut up and fish,” he frowns. “So, if anyone wants one…”

 

Following the first song, as the applause is still dying down, a roadie wanders onto the stage, holding a recorder. He offers it to several members in turn who shake their head before the roadie returns backstage. We're later told this is "our first show with our new tech, Borichek." As the band peel through a series of steady, appealing grooves built around percussion-heavy rhythms and simple backbeats, Borichek returns holding a trumpet. "I just know I am going to use that trumpet," says Lacey. "But not right now." Borichek wanders off again and the band launch into their closing song, 6 or 7 More, another that is easy to love. Musically, Cool Sounds sound like they could be from anywhere and anytime in the last 40 years, but the personality of and around their songs couldn't come from anyone else.

 

With seats filled and lights dimmer, the strains of Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman eke out of the speakers. The stage lights ignite, and the ten members of Good Morning arrive. Opening with Arcade, the first song from Good Morning Seven, it immediately becomes apparent that there are no cut corners here. The arrangements that helped make that album one of the best of the year so far, will be brought to life in all their rich intricacies. Dual backing vocals, saxophones, clarinet, viola, percussion, layers of keyboard and two, sometimes three guitars; whatever the song needs. It is all wonderful stuff. As the Rising program promised, "Think Dick Diver, Liz Phair and Brian Wilson soundtracking a black-and-white musical about drifting into your thirties."

 

Stretched in an arc across the stage with Blair and Parsons at either end facing each other from across the stage, Good Morning is another band that benefits from the audio microscope of the Melbourne Recital Centre. Even as the same sounds anchor many songs (the trebly twang of a Gibson SG guitar, the muted thud of a hollow-body bass and the drumming of Dylan Young – so solid he seems to invert time), each shift in the context of the song's arrangement and the attentive live mixing of Lara Soulio. It is a mesmerising immersive experience for a band who have always been the aural equivalent of a good hang.

 

 "It’s really nice to be here to play a hometown show in a fancy fucking venue," says Parsons with a grin. Full of nervous energy that he channels into his vocal performance, Parsons leads the band into highlights from the new album, Ahh (This Isn't Ideal) and Excalibur before handing vocal duties over to the rich expressive baritone of Blair for Diane Said and Monster of the Week. The way Blair and Parsons work together, in what seems to be an ego-free example of respect and making space for each other. In a concert, it is wonderful to watch. A subtly compelling Real I'm Told, a triumphant Just in Time and the closing trio of Escalator, Baby Steps and the closing low fi pop of $10 are all highlights from a set that never disappoints. That the band didn't play, and no one requested the song that has 109 million plays on Spotify, Warned You, speaks to how far they've come and their (and the audience's) love of what Blair and Parsons are writing now. The duo's very strange path to success is too long to relay here and would seem ludicrous if ever adapted into a biopic, but tonight it feels like we've taken a tiny part of that journey with them. Tonight, before a near sold-out Melbourne Recital Centre, that felt like a very fortunate place to be.