Live Review: Regurgitator

Regurgitator

With NGV's fabulous Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei exhibition closing soon, it's hard to imagine a more fitting finale than to enlist Australia's own genre-mashing iconoclasts Regurgitator to take a tilt at The Velvet Underground & Nico, the album with the Warhol banana illustration on the cover (produced by Warhol and Tom Wilson).

Sadly, there's no electric viola or ostrich guitar tonight. Instead the traditional Chinese guzheng, played by Lanzhou-born Mindy Meng Wang, adds an eerie, stringy weirdness to Venus In Furs and Run Run Run; while the line-up of Quan Yeomans and Ben Ely, drummer Peter Kostic and long-time touring member Seja Vogel build walls of well-orchestrated noise on I'm Waiting For The Man and the vertiginous, tempo-shifting Heroin. "I might roll my sleeves up for this one," jokes Ely before taking the lead on the latter. "Your life changes after you hear this record," he adds, recalling how as a teenage Metallica fan a friend got him stoned and played him All Tomorrow's Parties. Vogel plays the part of Nico tonight on that song, her beautifully clear voice and crystalline lower register rising above the band's mellifluous drone. She also nails the more delicate and melodious corners of I'll Be Your Mirror and Femme Fatale. Lest things get too serious though, the latter is tempered by Yeomans' suitably tongue-in-cheek backing vocals.

Yeomans seems to be having the most fun of anyone on stage. His pinched facial expressions when he takes the lead on Run Run Run and I'm Waiting For The Man, and well-drilled guitar work throughout, betray both an affection for the material and an understanding that, at the end of the day, this is all a bit of a laugh. If there's a criticism to be made, it's that the renditions have been routine; the reimagining kept to a minimum. As such, the Gurge-favoured transmutation of The Black Angel's Death Song comes as a welcome change of pace. In the absence of cacophonous viola, the band lay down a murky groove, while Yeomans pitches in with a programmed vocal track tweaked with freaky computer blips. "Quan went back to art school for that one," Ely jokes.

European Son closes the set with Ely again on vocals. The song's famous slowly-imploding, noise-jam climax is truncated but suitably bombastic and ends with a crash as Kostic drops a cymbal onto the floor from shoulder height. It's exciting enough to leave us chanting for more. Unexpectedly, we get more, as the band breaks character and taps into our all-too-fresh collective grief over the death of Prince to deliver a finicky, electro-pop-tinged rendition of When Doves Cry. As if the night wasn't iconic enough already.