Live Review: Violent Femmes

The members of Violent Femmes emerge looking more like a comedy trio than a rock band. Frontman Gordon Gano begins playing the wiry riff for Confessions, which is soon joined by Brian Ritchie's iconic, show-stealing bassline and suddenly it sounds like Violent Femmes and no one else. The trio is joined mid-song by dual saxophones and various other brass instruments, and the song reaches a chaotic, clamouring crescendo. Anyone with doubts about whether the Femmes are still worth seeing can assuredly lay their concerns to rest.

Next up, bafflingly, is Blister In The Sun. It would be totally understandable for the band to omit the song completely from their sets, yet here it is! And they don't appear to be hating it. The audience certainly isn't, with plenty of people vacating their cushioned seats in favour of dancing in the aisles.

The band do without a setlist and remain crowd-pleasers with an acute understanding of what we came for, which means we hear eight of the ten songs from their undying, undeniably great debut album. This tossed-off approach also allows for the inclusion of ill-advised, late-career lowlights such as Freak Magnet, which is worth it for the exciting, improvised quality this adds.

Gano picks up a violin for a couple of songs, including Jesus Walking On The Water, which inspires a spirited singalong. He may not be as technically proficient as the violinists Hamer Hall usually hosts, but Gano wrenches plenty of emotion out of a simple-but-affecting solo in the glorious Good Feeling.

John Sparrow, the most recent in the band's revolving door of drummers, more than capably does the standing-drummer-with-brushes thing. His set-up notably includes a Weber barbecue and a cajon, demonstrating how little the band has strayed from their street-performing roots. Local singer-songwriter Paris Wells provides intermittent backing vocals on a few songs, but these songs don't easily accommodate a female voice, particularly one that's on-key. Ritchie plays xylophone on Gone Daddy Gone, which includes a note-perfect rendition of its solo and is followed by a cathartic Add It Up and a rousing rendition of American Music.

The band's obvious affection for these songs and their audience — if not each other — translates to the warm, joyful and, uh, good feeling pervading the room tonight. Their shambolic songs about sexual frustration are quite incongruous with the grand surroundings of Hamer Hall. It feels strangely subversive in a way that rock music rarely does in 2017, a considerable feat for a band deep into their fourth decade.