Live Review: Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, Run The Jewels, Citizen Kay

After Canberra's own Citizen Kay does a decent job warming the speakers up with his upbeat rhymes, Queen's We Are The Champions thunders out of the PA. El-P and Killer Mike – aka Run The Jewels – grace the stage, with El-P dropping to his knees to mouth Queen's lyrics with a bottle of vodka in hand. After motioning for the audience to hold up a fist and finger gun, RTJ drop their titular track and the crowd gets buckwild. El-P fluffs a line late in the song and immediately passes over to their DJ to handle matters, laughing uproariously and clearly having a blast. Continuing the looseness, Mike confuses Melbourne for Sydney, to which El-P swiftly counters, “We're in Melbourne, you drunk asshole!” Sea Legs is a highlight, the strobing lightshow kicking into full effect, and El-P's Tougher Colder Killer and Killer Mike's Big Beast are aired before Get It and A Christmas Fucking Miracle close out the set.
Danny Brown's DJ lubes the crowd as the man himself strolls onto the stage. From the moment the light hits Brown's AC/DC shirt, the crowd is officially his. Kicking off with Break It (Go), devil horns and a flapping tongue bring the track (and each one that follows) to a close. At no point in the set does Brown rein in the assault. Smokin & Drinkin plays to a crowd of thrashing bodies, and a crowd-surfer is passed about as liberally as the joint that's being sniffed out by goose-necking punters eager for a toke. Echoing this, Brown preaches the joys of “blunt after blunt after blunt” with the crowd chanting in sync. 25 Bucks and Dip end an overwhelmingly high-octane set that leaves the crowd a sweating, bedraggled mess.
It's a tough act to follow and props to Earl Sweatshirt for trying. Kill breaks the ice and sees Sweatshirt pacing in red cap and white shirt, gesticulating in a manner that befits his flow. Blade works its groove and the set continues with tracks taken from his mixtapes as well as last year's Doris LP. Energy levels in the crowd take a hit and mumbling onstage banter doesn't help matters, but Sweatshirt soldiers on as he gets the crowd to bring in Molasses and does his damndest to hype Earl. All acts deliver tonight, but Sweatshirt would have been better placed second instead of last tonight.