Live Review: Deerhunter, Beaches

If you identify as a male you might not ever know how amazing and empowering it feels to walk into a venue to find four women at the front of the stage tearing it up on their guitars (plus one further back, thrashing it out on the skins). Beaches get the crowd accustomed to droning guitar and wave after wave of riffs; it's a heavier and noisier affair compared to their recorded material.

Despite not altering their songs much in a live setting, hearing Deerhunter's music direct from their instruments to your ears – unadulterated and at unsafe volumes – is a wholly different experience from Deerhunter on record. We feel the bass slide in opener Earthquake ripple through the fibres of our clothes, we swallow the lump in our throats during Don't Cry and we close our eyes and bask in Bradford Cox's delivery of the nostalgic Desire Lines lyrics. Everything's heightened.

Apparently Cox wants more though. He revokes his introductory statement that Melbourne is his favourite Aussie city and gives us another chance to impress him or he'll go through the motions for the rest of the night before heading “back to the hotel [to] watch YouTube videos of the Sydney show”. He then backpedals again, saying Sydney was “the deadest crowd [they've] ever played to”. Throughout the set Cox continues to crap on about our perceived lack of energy, goads sound guy Chris into calling his mum (it goes to voicemail and he leaves a cute message as we provide cheers between sentences), dedicates songs to “Aussie peckers” (“let's see if we can get a little length”) and playfully teases his comparatively reserved bandmates. A lot of it is entertaining and hilarious, but there's only so long you can listen to someone talk shit before you want them to get on with the bloody show. Indeed, one impatient punter actually yells the words, “Get on with the show!”, to which Cox responds: “Fuck the show, man, this is the show. I am the show” – a comment that sums up his attitude for the whole gig. At least he balances it out by being a magnetic and captivating frontman when he's actually performing.

The final three songs Streetwalking, Back To The Middle and Monomania are played back-to-back, outros bleeding into intros. If the crowd were withholding before, they're certainly not now. Cox screeches “mono-mono-mania” with his guitar balanced on his back. The wall of distortion builds and warps and speeds up, Cox wraps his mouth around the head of the mic and the crowd's in a frenzy until the five musicians leave the stage.

The momentum's killed because they take so long to return for an encore, but any complaints we have during the performance are more than made up for when they jam on the Jingle Bells riff while waiting for Lockett Pundt to change guitars due to technical issues. “I had a friend tell me once that I have a very annoying personality and I should leave people wanting more,” says Cox. How can we stay annoyed when Cox says to Pundt, “That guitar looks so low on you, you look like Kurt Cobain”, and then transfers the blonde wig he is wearing to Pundt's head, before the band launch into a few bars of Smells Like Teen Spirit. And two hours after Deerhunter first set foot onstage, they take us out with a perfect closer if ever there was one – the song it seems most of the crowd is waiting for: Helicopter. Moses Archuleta's slow but intense drumbeat and that unmistakable glassy, plinking riff immediately has everyone hypnotised, our heads and shoulders lolling to the ebb and flow, until the stage is empty once again and the spell is broken. After it's all over, Cox and co. have indeed left us wanting more.