Jeremy NealeSummery surf rock and Halloween don't traditionally mix, but on Thursday night the back room at GoodGod was packed to the ceilings with both.
Okin Osan – aka Sydney musician Rose Chan – hit the stage with her sister, Rainbow Chan providing harmonies to her jangling guitar tunes overlain with a tinge of teenage nerdiness (think song titles like the Pokemon catchcry Supereffective). At times they evoke The Strokes at their sunniest (Sunset Song) to Buddy Holly (All I Want).
Richard Cuthbert Music is the solo project of the frontman of Sydney indie band Cuthbert & The Nightwalkers, who broke up last year. Cuthbert has an enthusiastic band behind him, all wearing, on this spooky night… air steward hats. It's sunny, easygoing indie rock verging on the inoffensive, from the soft folk of With You I Feel Like I Have Nothing To Hide to the backyard summer anthem, Swimming Pool.
Brisbane band Major Leagues wear the odd clever Halloween costume and a healthy dose of shoegazing irony. “You're an endless drain/And I'm a waste of space,” laments the refrain of their best known track (Endless Drain). Fronted by three girls with a male drummer, their scuzzy slacker rock bears a lot of similarities to Best Coast. Their final song, a cover of Splendora's You're Standing On My Neck, otherwise known as the Daria theme song, is teen apathy perfection – fits them like a beanie embedded with a fake kitchen knife.
Jeremy Neale's band take to the stage dressed uniformly in black with vampire capes. The lanky Brisbanite spits out his fangs about ten seconds into his set – all the better to sing with – but retains an air of intensity that recordings of his upbeat, beachy tunes can't replicate. He screams demonically in Merry Go Round and throughout the set fixes his wide eyes on the crowd, his head twitching with every lyric – which comes off as delightfully deranged in his costume. The set ranges from the sweetness of Diamond Girl to the snarling enunciation of Swing Left. Then there's the old-fashioned rock'n'roll fun of the popular favourite: “I say 'dance',” he instructs the crowd, “you say 'baby'” – and with that he launches into In Stranger Times, with a few keen fans rushing the stage, Neale happily sharing his microphone and high fiving them at the show's end. It must have been Halloween – there sure was a whole lot of spirit in the room.
