Live Review: Dwarves, Flangipanis, The Lost Cause, Goon On The Rocks

On a particularly quiet Sunday night (perhaps all the city’s fearful fathers have locked up their young daughters), punk rock geniuses Dwarves make their way back into town. Locals Goon On The Rocks kick things off to the growing assembly of scum punk aficionados. The outfit take cues from the headliner’s genre-bending punk styles to put on a short, powerful set.

Gold Coast street punk act The Lost Cause are up next. The band turn up the tempo and the aggression and burn (because you gotta burn) through their time on stage before demented thrashers Flangipanis use their main support slot as an excuse to swear a lot and create a lot of noise.

Dwarves are a band who once hit the track boasting “fuck life and death, we transcend time and space”. And for the most part of their 30-year career, the hubris of that statement seemed warranted, but not tonight. When Dwarves toured here five years ago they seemed dangerous. Tonight, there’s none of that danger. And that’s a bummer, no matter how good Dwarves are. And they are still a very good band. The songs are still top-notch; Blag Dahlia and his cohort rip through the back catalogue featuring nothing but hits without delay. But Dwarves should hold themselves to a higher standard than just putting on a great show. These guys are self-professed rock legends, so the crowd tonight should be walking up the stairs out of Crowbar thinking how what they have just seen was truly legendary, not just great.

Even as the band work to overcome problems with a sub-standard sound – Dahlia’s microphone irksomely cuts in and out – the gems they serve up all hit home. From the scummy rumblings of Drug Store and Let’s Fuck to the polished pop punk veneer of Anybody Out There and Everybodies Girl, everything the band play tonight hits home. But what else is there? The most unexpected thing that happens while the Dwarves are onstage is that Dahlia switches up the lyrics in Act Like You Know to sing about riots: this from a band who obtained punk rock notoriety from actually inciting riots.

Tonight there’s no nudity or violence on the stage, just four guys (there’s no second guitar here to round out their sound) playing a furiously tight punk rock show to a room full of appreciative fans. There’s not even a threat of nudity or violence to get the blood pumping.

By no means is tonight’s set an indication that it’s not time for Dwarves to hang up their jockstraps and fingerless leather gloves, but it is an indication that they might be entering into their twilight years, which is kind of a bummer.