Live Review: Harmony, Fungus Brains

Fungus Brains are a loose, shambolic bunch of rock'n'roll lifers who first played together in the early '80s. Singer Geoff Marks barks and bellows a single word or phrase over and over. Guitarist Mick Turner of the Dirty Three competes with a saxophone and trumpet, with everyone soloing pretty much at all times. It's a fun, messy, dissonant cacophony.

Harmony frontman Tom Lyngcoln starts howling the opening lines of Two Sides Of My Heart a capella over the din of the Saturday night crowd. His throaty vocals are joined by jagged guitar and the thump of a rhythm section, before Amanda Roff, Quinn Veldhuis and Erica Dunn - known as The Harmonettes - rise up to join the powerful, unsentimental ballad. Suddenly it sounds like Harmony and no one else.

Lyngcoln is clearly someone who feels life's ups and downs very deeply, and he's great at broadcasting both on stage. It all coalesces into a punk-ish, unpretentious Dirty Projectors without the window dressing. Or like Bruce Springsteen, if instead of being "The Boss" he was a disgruntled worker with a turbulent home life.

For tonight's album launch, the band runs through all of Double Negative, an album that truly deserves to be played in full. New songs like Fatal Flaw and Class Action are cleaner, simpler and more restrained than the band's earlier work. This is a major plus, because Harmony is more concerned about melody than most bands at the harder end of the rock spectrum. Some of the songs are even catchy, which isn't a word commonly associated with Saturday nights at The Tote.

On the title track, Lyngcoln wisely cedes lead vocals to The Harmonettes to showcase their miraculous three-part harmonies. It feels wrong to refer to The Harmonettes as back-up singers. They don't exist simply to accentuate Lyngcoln's shouts, but are absolutely integral to the band's dynamic, cinematic sound (it's right there in the band name). Mid-way through tonight's set, the other members depart the stage and The Harmonettes briefly become a three-piece garage band bashing out a couple of fun, thrashy songs including one called Love Me Or Die. 

The closing song Love Is A Chemical High is an indisputable highlight, and likely the song that'll be rattling around our heads for days, but it's on Double Negative that the band so clearly elucidates their worldview: "When two blue minds find something in each other's arms/it's not negative/it's double negative/resulting in a positive charge." These enormously fitting lyrics remind us that love takes many forms — including the thrill of seeing a great band truly coming into their own.