Live Review: Feelings, Milk Teddy & Dumb Blonde

Despite starting nearly an hour later than advertised, there are still more people on stage than the audience by the time Dumb Blonde kick off their idiosyncratic set. Actually Sydney's Kite Club playing a secret gig, Dumb Blonde are immediately arresting for a number of reasons. Opening song, I'm Aligned, bursts into light, full of jangling, stinging guitars, a surging rhythm section and above, the galvanising falsetto of guitarist, singer and really very smart blonde Nicholas Futcher.

Milk Teddy, another five-piece making resolutely '80s-infused guitar pop, are on equally top form. Curious, twisting guitar melodies anchor their breezy, shouty pop, giving them an intriguingly forceful energy with any sense of seriousness countered by hilarious internal banter. Singer Thomas Mendelovits' voice sounds as though it's battling isolation with every stretching lyric and hollow-echoed vocal, verses coming between breaks of spiralling guitars and light brisk beats; it's a strangely dour instrument. The final songs, XTC and Sparks – reminiscent of British band Arctic Circle – are fine encapsulations of this contrast.

From the ashes of Philadelphia Grand Jury, bassist and vocalist Simon Berckelman's latest incarnation, Feelings have a tight line in stripped-back pop punk. Bracing, but almost too sparse at times, the songs lack guts despite being full of momentum. Berckelman's charisma almost lets them get away with it, but far too many songs sound a lot, but not exactly like, songs you know. City Hall rips off its melody from Summer Cats wholesale, and Going To The Casino (Tomorrow Night) and I Want To Chill But I Can't Relax are, like many of their songs, little more than some decent riffs, underused musicianship, and an unexplored repeated title. Between-song chat is a triggered sample of pre-recorded talking which is a wry trick, but too often the golem of tedious pub rock lumbers through their sets. This, however, doesn't stop the gig from being a joyous event with a now-packed room fuelling the fire. The hot-stepping disco of Don't Be Mean To Me underlines this overt energy and positivity but also the songs' inherent emptiness. Simplicity and shallowness can be a virtue in some people's hands, but not these, or not yet. Granted, they're not aiming for anything higher than 'good times', so in that sense the show is a success. But they could be so much more.