Live Review: Out On The Weekend

A curse on Metro Trains Melbourne! Some (probably deliberate) misinformation on Journey Planner and an absent connecting train means we miss a good portion of Freya Josephine Hollick's opening set, including the irresistibly badass Tough As A Sundried Dead Man's Skin. A curse on your house!

We can hear her signature holler on Long Gone Daddy-o Yodel while coming in the gate and leg it to the main stage in time to catch the song's beautifully cacophonous conclusion - Hollick's ability to hold a note is literally breathtaking. Forget hip hop, country music's where the real swag is and Hollick's decked-out in an awesome red flares combo with silver rattlesnakes running up the legs. Boss. Hollick shares that they've somehow ended up playing the first song last and we're glad they did. Hollick absolutely nails Jim Reeves' Welcome To My World and we wouldn't have even known what we'd missed. Hollick's been nominated for several The Age Music Victoria Awards this year. They should just give them to her now and save everyone the gas money - or, god forbid, the train ticket (curse!).

With the first set wrapped we wander around and have a little stickybeak. Outside the sun is shining and a fleet of cowboy hats and trucker caps bob along on a sea of double denim (guilty). It's clear that every bolo tie in Melbourne has made its way to Seaworks. At the end of the wharf the SS Steve Irwin's sea-camo bow juts boldly out of Port Phillip Bay. Festival regulars Beatbox Kitchen and Taco Truck are parked across from Pirates Tavern, which'll be pretty quiet until James Ellis & The Jealous Guys light it up in a few hours. Over by a pop-up bar there's a bit of a crowd building around some promising mandolin notes and we move in to investigate.

The outdoor stage is a flatbed truck in a covered storage bay and we imagine today's top-notch roster raining country on the inner city, tearing up Swanston Street a la AC/DC. Somebody should get on that. The truck has a crane arm that dangles a massive Out On The Weekend logo over Davidson Brothers. They roll into Back Where I Started, the opener from recent album All You Need Is Music, and the banjo/mando combo from the brothers is flooring. Add in sibling harmonies, Sam Lemann on acoustic and Isaac Barter plucking away at the double bass and the Davidsons put on a real good show. Lachlan (that's the one on mando) gives a quick introduction, "We're the Davidson Brothers and it's good to be Out On The Weekend," before they put their picking skills to use on breakneck instrumental track Brown Snake. It's deadly as its namesake and cops the day's first "yee-haw!" from one excited punter. They finish with a cover of Man Of Constant Sorrow that would make Clooney bow his head in shame.

At the main stage Raised By Eagles are playing their moody brand of country rawk, full of intricate imagery, brushed drums and gently wailing slide. It's music for drinking alone on the porch of your newly empty house. Before Every Night guitarist Nick O'Mara tells us his cat's just died and that "this one's for Billy". It's as lyrically rich as anything in their oeuvre and the chorus - "Every night/Through the darkness and the light/We say our goodbyes" - makes for an eerily fitting eulogy. Few pets ever had a better send-off. Older track Sugar Cane is a clear highlight, a heartbroke Luke Sinclair looking at the horizon while the rest of the band hum "already gone" in the background.

There's not much breathing space between sets and Raised By Eagles' final notes bleed into Lillie Mae's first. The vibe so far is amazing and back outside a friendly stranger dressed like he's headed to a Texan wedding tells us we "won't find any fuckwits here". He's not wrong, everybody is very chill — there's rugrats running through the crowd trailed by smiling parents, nobody needs telling to keep their elbows out of other people's personal space and most of today's acts step right off stage and into the crowd to watch whoever's up next.

Overlooking all this, Mae tells us the rollicking Honky Tonks And Taverns was inspired by 14 years spent playing in such around Nashville. The recent Third Man signee has her brother Frank and Craig Smith accompanying on acoustic guitars and all three display a dazzling mastery of their instruments. Mae's vocal control is especially impressive, her voice jumps and swoops like a feather in an updraught but never quavers. She slows things down with Some Fine Day before speeding it right back up again with Over The Hill And Through The Woods. Frank switches to a Telecaster and jerks the neck gleefully at the end of each lick, a big grin peeking out of his thicket of a beard. A song she introduces as Stop Asking Why sounds a little like Sixpence None The Richer's Kiss Me filtered through Neil Young.

There's a surprising amount of crime detailed in Fanny Lumsden's songs - from the sounds of it she's a hardened speed-limit breaking, Juicy Fruit thieving crim. There are also a lot of roads; long, back, red dirt, outta town. That's not so surprising, Lumsden shares that she and hubby/bandmate Dan Freeman have racked up warranty-voiding kilometres this year. That's not to say it's boring either, Lumsden's outback drives roll through sincere Australiana landscapes. Freeman plays a travel upright bass that looks a bit like a cricket bat with strings; turns out someone dropped a ladder on his usual instrument in the last town. He proves it works fine on Elastic Waistband, though. The track is big live. Lumsden's backing band, The Thrillseekers, have fleshed out to a six-piece and all their parts are dialled up to match the track's rumbling guitar solo on the record. The lap steel warbles lazily on Shootin' The Breeze and we spy an older couple two-stepping. Our heart is a puddle. They wrap up with a brilliant cover of Love Is In The Air and their own Roll On.

Robbie Fulks is off to a cheerless start with The Buck Starts Here, which has been collecting tears for 20 years now. He then immediately chastises us for not killing off the cassowary. He's fine with bats with curtains for wings and spiders that melt your insides but he only discovered Queensland's dinosaur bird a couple of days ago and he's not impressed. The best country musicians can break your heart one second and have you laughing through the tears the next and Fulks is up there. Soused lament I'll Trade You Money For Wine leads into a long, endlessly amusing story about the only time he met his freshly widowed, newlywed, nonagenarian great aunt. She told Fulks he was a shitty banjo player and the experience inspired set highlight Aunt Peg's New Old Man. I Just Want To Meet The Man brings us low again before a kind of drinking shanty praising Australia and bemoaning the dreaded cassowary puts us back in high spirits. Cigarette State — "The Georgia peach is fair/Kentucky beyond compare... But North Carolina is the cigarette state" — punctuates his set and puts him firmly in contention for Best Lyrics In Show.

Speaking of country western swag, Joshua Hedley's turquoise nudie suit is absolutely mint. It's stitched with glittering cranes and red rattlesnakes on the limbs and with huge orange cougars snarling on the jacket's front. Add in the rakishly slanted Stetson and he's a pretty dapper dude. Weird Thought Thinker shows he's more than just a snappy dresser and we're immediately hooked. Much like Lillie Mae, Hedley's got a long history playing in honky tonks as well as with some of country's biggest artists. He's also been picked up by Jack White's Third Man Records this year. He shares the stories behind each song, including a two-step called This Time; he had a cameo in Aziz Ansari's Master Of None that unfortunately meant he had to say “Hey ya'll, we're Fletcher & The Fixins, let's honkytonk!” for hours on end, among other indignities. His voice is a force of nature. Its classic country timbre and pathos perfectly suit songs full of sorrow like Hank Williams Jr's Old Habits and Hedley's addition to the "five hundred songs called If These Walls Could Talk". A couple of forlorn tunes in we overhear someone describe Hedley's style as crestfallen, and "rare not sad song" I Love You might not be sad but it's not happy either. His closing cover of Mickey Newbury's Sweet Memories is a showstopper. Robert Ellis - in an equally smashing nudie covered in planets and nebulae - comes out to take over the guitar so Hedley can focus on the big notes and he milks it like he's been doing this since he was ten (he has). Every time he belts out the massive chorus the audience erupts in applause. A quick search doesn't reveal much of his material online, but we're betting that'll change very soon.

Outside The Deslondes are starting to sound real attractive, festival fatigue is setting in however and Lillie Mae and co are playing a lowkey second set in Pirates Tavern. We become a temporary member of Williamstown Maritime Association and duck into the shade. Looks like a few people have had a similar idea and the first few rows are seated on the floor contentedly, while others lounge on couches and bar stools.

We're feeling refreshed and ready for All Our Exes Live In Texas and their vocal skills are genuinely next level. How good are cascading harmonies? The four singers roll lead and backing lines back and forth in pure polyphonic harmony and Tell Me sets the standard early. They break in the middle of the song and everybody strikes a pose, before admitting they've just flown in and they're all "a bit braindead" - there's plenty such cheeky banter to punctuate their clever, catchy lyricism. They play through most of this year's When We Fall album and it's difficult to choose a highlight, although the accordionist Elana Stone-led I’m Gonna Get My Heart Cut Out and mandolin player Georgia Mooney's Boundary Road are both mesmerising. Katie Wighton takes the reins on another standout, Candle, the guitarist warning a couple little girls dancing down the front that they'll understand the lyrics all too soon. They send their accompanying drummer and bassist off stage - "you're fired, boys" - for new track and feminist call to arms World War III, which gets another rousing cheer.

The Good brothers have been poorly labelled. Along with the rest of The Sadies, the siblings are fabulous. Ridge Runner Reel is just Travis Good seeing how fast a human can physically play - we'll bet the first time he tried it the guitar caught fire before he actually ran out of speed. At one point he and Dallas Good stand one in front of the other as though they're stand-up spooning and take hold of the necks of each other's guitars. Most folks struggle to tap their gut and rub their head at the same time but the pair play on unfazed, shaping each other's chords while strumming their own guitars. Surf rock/acid country mash-up Leave Me Alone is a winner, along with a closing cover of Blue Rodeo's Palace Of Gold.

There have been a few excited whispers about Traveller through the day, and we get up front and centre to see what the fuss is about. Jonny Fritz, Robert Ellis and Corey Chisel are fine and dandy solo but together they are so much more than the sum of their parts — a country western Megazord in a star-spangled nudie suit. They haven't been together long and for the most part they expand on their solo stuff. A lot of tracks from Fritz's 2016 record Sweet Creep rear their heads, already boss Fifteen Passenger Van and Stadium Inn only getting better with input from Ellis and Chisel. The former steps forward for regular blinding solos on his gold-hued electric guitar and in a day packed with masters Ellis shines. Even Fritz watches on with an ecstatic grin, clapping along whenever his bandmate lets loose. The new tracks have absorbed a lot of Fritz's swaggering weirdness, with the kind of tongue-in-cheek lyrics that would've made Tim Wilson hoot. Western Movies is a love song to all the lost Butchs and Sundances and sounds a little like Mooning from Grease, while another track is a boisterous plea to Get Me Out Of The South. "Hit song" Hummingbird brings it all together. It tells the story of a woman that "drives 80 in second gear because she's got that bumper to bumper 17-dollar insurance" and has her own ending for Thelma & Louis ("They don't drive off no cliff/They get away with it"). It'll be stuck in our head for days.  

The Sadies are back on stage supporting Justin Townes Earle, who hopes we're ready for something we've never seen before. You couldn't build a better backing band, particularly with the addition of Paul Niehaus on pedal steel. It does mean that Earle's signature pluck-n-strum style gets mostly traded in for simpler rhythms, but you can't have everything. Champagne Corolla, Maybe A Moment and What's She Crying For - the opening tracks from his latest LP - start the show and Earle's performance is faultless. He seems a bit tweaky between songs, though, his banter with the crowd ranging from erratic to low-key aggressive. People bob and sway to the upbeat combo of Move Over Mama and Black Eyed Suzy. It starts to feel a little like the train's coming off the tracks when he digs into an ex before Nothing's Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now - "here's to whatever her name is, wherever she is" - but if anything the strange contrast just powers the punch of his deeply emotional delivery.

The Sadies leave the stage for three solo tracks by Earle and he really is magnetic. He begins with They Killed John Henry, dedicated to his grandfather. He seems to relax a little into the set and looks a lot happier up there, although he does introduce Mama's Eyes with a story about his mother detaching his father's retina with a single blow from her off hand. People mouth the words in the crowd, and Earle's treatise on the curse and blessing of falling so close to the tree hasn't lost an ounce of beauty over the years. Earle finishes the solo portion of the night with his cover of Graceland and The Sadies return in full force for Christchurch Woman. Earle slows down a little to share that he wrote White Gardenias for Billie Holiday, and talk about the way we deal with people that are struggling:'''What's wrong with you?' should be, 'Why do you hurt?' Ask smarter questions, get better answers."

What Do You Do When You're Lonesome blows the wheels off before Short Hair Woman wraps the set proper. No one's going anywhere and after a brief wait Earle and co return for a three-part encore. Harlem River Blues has to be one of Earle's most enduring numbers and it's a fitting end to a massive day, finishing with a gospel a cappella harmony: "Lord I'm going up town/To the Harlem River to drown."