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Live Review: Dreamtime, Ride Into The Sun, Sacred Shrines

12 February 2015 | 3:34 pm | Bradley Armstrong

Dreamtime's set at The Bearded Lady is worthy of making the group’s highlight reel.

Tonight at The Bearded Lady it’s all about the guitars and effects as a handful of locals come out to share a clove cigarette and devour some psych goodness.

First cab off the rank, five-piece Sacred Shrines trudge through their set in a rather Hawkwind-like fashion, mixing garage, psych and krautrock with some nice ambience courtesy a nice-looking organ centre stage. It’s a fleshed-out sound that, while not reinventing the wheel, is a good way to kick off the night.

Ride Into The Sun follow and the flow changes into a more accessible ‘60s-style psych-pop while throwing in lashings of heavy guitars here and there for good measure. The band has been quite productive since their inception on the recording front and the set draws from different points/styles throughout. At times it gets a little dangerously close to the cliché psych comparisons of Brian Jonestown Massacre and Tame Impala, largely on the guitar front, and the sound is a little bit jumpy for the band as well, but as a whole the set is well executed by the group, who are gaining a decent following.

Dreamtime have been kicking around the scene for quite some time now and over the years they’ve turned into a tight, original-sounding powerhouse of a band and tonight they’ve transcended all the highs that have come before. Everything about the group’s set is bar-setting and the sound does nothing but complement them throughout. The band seems to be taking more and more influence than before from the heavier side of things with hints of Sunn O))) drone and tone coming into play, and this is perhaps most evident in the form of a rather long new track on show tonight. The song uses dynamics to its advantage and sees some really interesting experimentation with pedals and sound with frontman Zac Anderson and newish member to the group Fergus Smith playing off each other so naturally and fluently. The band also nail Sun cut, Baphomet, from its mystical soundscape-style beginnings to its crunching guitar parts, executed so precisely, the tempo building and performed so perfectly it’s worthy of taking gold at the sexual Olympics. All in all, this set is worthy of making the group’s highlight reel and this seems to be a universal opinion among the audience. Dreamtime are a band that have never stopped growing and with that they’ve transformed from interesting psych upstarts to underworld mystical gods, with tonight’s set evidence of that.

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