Live Review: The Drones

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Drones’ breakthrough record Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By, Vivid LIVE let the Melburnian garage-rockers into the Opera House. “If someone from the hire company is here, we’ve got credit card details,” growling frontman Gareth Liddiard jests after dropping his guitar – on purpose. “It was Morrissey,” quips guitarist Dan Luscombe.

The Opera House is a venue that’s not really suited to a rock show – it was after all engineered for the opera, the symphony, the ballet. It’s an icon – Liddiard comments about the venue, the band having taken a detour/misturn, heading in their van to the Opera House via the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The grandeur of the venue may not be reflected in the music, in the spectacle of minimal strobes and some smoke, but the band themselves, somewhat reluctantly, take on the mantle of rock music icons. And an audience sitting down, at least until the final standing ovation, doesn’t dull their music’s power. The hyper-articulate Liddiard is your quintessential frontman type, howling into the mic, dropping his guitar, almost bouncing it on the stage, before getting down on his knees to cradle it and play with effects pedals.

The show was also billed as an album preview, The Drones playing songs from their forthcoming album, and adding to their already considerable canon. There are thus too many songs to play, and too many to name. They play Shark Fin Blues, Sitting On The Edge Of The Bed Cryin’ and Havilah’s The Minotaur, an obvious crowd favourite. Locust blows the show out of the water, a song that captures their particularly Australian brand of angst, ennui, and straddling the divide between rollickin’ rock tune and almost-ballad. It’s that tension, that dynamism, that makes songs in that vein the strongest, with a sense of juxtaposition between the discordant and the still.