Live Review: The Drones, Harmony

Former Mclusky bassist and noise rock veteran John Chapple's six-piece Harmony kicked the night off in typically high octane fashion. Essentially a noise rock power trio with a three-piece female chorus, the band belted out loose and intimidating hyper-masculine rock'n'roll with a seemingly limitless energy. For every pop hook they clearly knew their way around, there was an equally impressive crushing wall of noise to drive home what they were really all about. The three female chorus singers added a beautiful juxtaposition to the crunching grooves and elevated the whole act beyond a simple noise rock band. Call and response passages between the raconteur vocals of Chapple and the chorus singers made for particularly satisfying songs. Outside their own brilliance, there could hardly have been a better opening act for The Drones.

Touring on the back of what may be their best album to date, The Drones opened with the impossibly brilliant opening title track from I Sea Seaweed. Swirling apocalyptic tones filled the Metro Theatre as Gareth Liddiard spun tales from another world. The band's records, as brilliant as they are, are really just pale imitations of the live reality. Songs become blueprints to be danced around with overdriven, fuzzy gusto, with chaos bubbling under every note. The newer material was punctuated with a handful of classics from their extensive discography, which now seems ridiculous to imagine without accompanying piano work from finally full-time member Steve Hesketh. It's brilliant seeing and hearing the band interacting live – on the record it occasionally feels like the Liddiard show, but each individual member plays an important and irreplaceable part of the band's sound. Very few groups exemplify the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The punishing existential beauty of encore Why Write a Letter That You'll Never Send drove home the fact that the band are truly one of Australia's greatest, and one we should be proud of. A finale cover of Leonard Cohen's Diamonds in the Mine was just icing on a very rich cake.