The Lamdba club night at Alhambra is a really great gig to open if you love playing to bar staff and your own personal friends, but Thee Hugs pull off a set worthy of a much bigger crowd. As usual. There's some surf here, but it's essentially a sea of black sludge, with a guitar tone so jarring it almost smothers the strong, ragged garage riffs fighting to be heard in every song. The fast tracks in this set are the most immediate, drum and bass barrelling along equally frantically, with the notable exception of I Know Where You Live, off last year's killer record, Drug Use & Alcohol Abuse, a sinister love song and one of the real highlights.
Man, it's really hard to review a band like The Bacchanales. They're obviously good musicians, the singer has an excellent voice and is giving this performance an admirable amount of energy and commitment despite a lacklustre crowd, and they haven't been around for very long. But the whole thing's way too big, way to earnestly 'rawk' and way too smacking of listening to too much Muse in high school. It's easy to see these guys reaching a crowd in the future; it just might not be full of cynical music writers.
The last time Bad//Dreems played in Brisbane it was at Ric's during BIGSOUND, so it's great to finally hear them in a venue where you can, you know, hear. As late arrivals straggle in, the band is sweaty and stoic from the very first song, and just so goddamn good. Bad//Dreems are like the kind of band you wish you could have seen at some pub in the '80s.
The band know their crowd and bring out first single, Caroline early, starting a ratbag dancefloor that stays jumping for the rest of the set. All the songs from Bad//Dreems's debut EP, Badlands are so powerful, with such thoughtful and perfect melodies, that it's hard not to see the new tracks played tonight as slightly less exciting. However, there's a strong indication that the band is moving into harsher, heavier territory and it'll be interesting to see how this translates to future releases. Alex Cameron's striking and often surprisingly delicate lead guitar works so well with Ben Marwe's rough and raspy voice, and if they could write ten songs like Too Old or Hoping For, Bad//Dreems would be one of the best bands in Australia. Whether they actually WANT to do that is an entirely different matter, but either way it'll be exciting to see.
