Live Review: The Break

The Queensland Art Gallery is an amazing place to spend a Friday night. What better way to forget about the week of drudgery that's just passed than to take in some art, have a cocktail or two, sit and chat in the lush gardens and generally feel like a more civilised person than you probably are?

The California Design exhibition presently showing lends itself to a solid program of contemporary music, much of which has been programmed for this series of UpLate performances inspired somewhat by the music of California from the 1960s. A specially programmed soundtrack has us all jovial as we await the (mainly) Aussie rock legends who make up (mainly) instrumental surf rock band The Break.

The band come onstage to the chanting of the Gyuto Monks of Tibet – who contributed to their latest LP, Space Farm – and bassist Brian Ritchie, who you perhaps know as a member of the Violent Femmes, gets us started with an atmospheric solo on the Japanese shakuhachi, which is kinda haunting but is great at building anticipation for the explosion of jagged surf rock to come.

The band sound a little looser than usual for the first couple of tracks tonight and the sound in the packed gallery space booms a little too much for the guitar interplay between Midnight Oil axe slingers Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey to be distinguished clearly. By the time the Oils' classic Wedding Cake Island comes around though, it seems as if the band are locked right back in where they belong and things start to sound a little more like they should.

The visuals that accompany the performance are perfect; surfing footage, sci-fi oddities and, at one point, some frighteningly fucked-up footage of Englebert Humperdinck all contributing a refreshing visual accompaniment to the driving tunes.

A set highlight comes almost immediately after when they kick into Face The Music, a driving rocker that draws just about everyone's undivided attention. It doesn't hurt that the raw power of Rob Hirst's drum solo is absolutely life-affirming. The opener from their Church Of The Open Sky debut, Cylinders, remains one of the great surf rock songs of any era and any place and it sounds as good tonight as it always does before Ritchie brings in Space Farm – a heavy hitting spaghetti western-inspired rollicker that closes the set proper.

They're convinced to stay for a couple more songs, treating us to a very different rendition of Kraftwerk's The Model and a very faithful version of Dick Dale's Miserlou – such a fittingly Californian way to close up this particular show.