Live Review: Regurgitator Performs The Velvet Underground & Nico

Tonight local pop-rock eccentrics Regurgitator are celebrating the 50-year anniversary of seminal album The Velvet Underground & Nico, the 1967 debut from titular New York miserablists The Velvet Underground (with aid from German vocalist Nico).

While these two acts might at a glance seem miles apart in approach and demeanour - the absurdity-embracing Gurge having long ago mastered the art of not taking themselves too seriously, the Velvets conversely a bit more po-faced and serious - the latter's first statement is a wildly diverse collection of songs, and Regurgitator have always been a wonderfully malleable proposition, so there's plenty of common ground as well.

They're aided tonight in their quest by two major outside forces: guest musician Mindy Meng Wang offers massive sonic variety on the massive and unwieldy Chinese guzheng, which she bows or plucks to conjure up all manner of sounds and tones, as well as visual artist Ken Weston who's concocted an incredible array of immersive, psychedelic visuals that play behind the band for each song.

At least the setlist is no surprise tonight, a sprinkling of guzheng opening the fray before bassist Ben Ely takes vocal reins for the laidback paranoia of Sunday Morning, his best Lou Reed drawl conjuring the recalcitrant perfectly. Next frontman Quan Yeomans' deeper voice also takes on a Reed lilt during the edgy I'm Waiting For The Man, drummer Pete Kostic providing a perfectly ragged-but-unrelenting backdrop for the seedy classic, augmented by keyboardist Seja Vogel banging her synth in unison as the song builds to a massive crescendo. Next up is Femme Fatale and Vogel does an amazing job of channelling both Nico's Germanic deadpan delivery and austere demeanour, a massive image of her face and flowing locks projected into the psychedelic visuals morphing behind her with stunning results.

The way that the entirely black-clad Regurgitator have banked their usual bouncy live verve in favour of detachment and feigned disinterest adds the perfect veneer of pomposity to proceedings, Ely attacking Venus In Furs as a mournful dirge before guzheng dominates the intro to the upbeat Run Run Run, Yeomans strangling out nasty guitar squalls as he sneers the song's squalid imagery.

The visuals are getting more intense and complex as the set progresses, while the band perfectly run that gamut between ramshackle and tight-as-hell throughout, building up a massive drone for Vogel to go "full Nico" during All Tomorrow's Parties, which concludes with a raucous guzheng solo. The oil-based backdrop helps the trippy vibe for the drug-eulogising Heroin - Ely's vocals drenched in reverb - before harmonies come to the fore on There She Goes Again.

It seems incredible that these songs (and the album they came from) were all but ignored upon their release five decades ago, the adulation now for the band and their material even reaching to lesser-known cuts like the sparse and dreamlike I'll Be Your Mirror and the rough and pummelling Black Angel's Death Song, which is driven by robotic vocals, dense percussion and a wall of strange clangs and pulses.

The band offers the obligatory thanks and farewells before building into an incredible instrumental cacophony on the album's finale European Son, the tunefully atonal racket of distortion and feedback mixing with the swirling visuals into a thrilling sensory overload, the whole thing tumbling back to earth after a few frantic minutes and leaving us with one final lengthy drone that continues to reverberate long after the band have traipsed back into the darkness. A fun and fascinating homage.