Live Review: The Growlers, Tomorrow Tulips, The Kramers

Black Bear Lodge is sold out tonight for The Growlers' first foray to Brisbane, so you know what that means: hot, cramped and shit-all chance of seeing the stage from more than a metre back. Before things get truly hectic though, locals The Kramers give the early crowd a master-class in not giving a single fuck. Guitars howl, strings break, interludes between songs are long and chaotic, and frontman Ethan Kernaghan is brash and self-deprecating, announcing, 'We're the worst band to ever come out of Holland Park' (almost definitely not true). There are plenty of early garage and rock'n'roll influences to be had here; The Sonics with a touch of The Cramps, and for the most part the band are haphazardly entertaining and watchable. When Kernaghan's guitar breaks though they should just end the set, and spare us a strange closer consisting of only drums, bass and hysterical wailing.
Tomorrows Tulips are billed as 'G-rated grunge', and apparently this means muted late '60s psychedelic rock with moments of distorted guitar. They're pretty tight, but the drums and bass just plod along and nothing much happens to differentiate one track from another. For the most part it's boring and mildly pretentious, and even when the big riffs do come towards the end of the set, they're delivered in such a cursory, by-the-numbers way it's hard to get very excited.
By the time The Growlers arrive on stage the crowd is so amped (possibly because of the almost complete lack of hooks or fun so far tonight) that the reception is nothing short of frenzied. They start out slow, with older stuff from 2010's Hot Tropics and 2013's Hung At Heart, but the real gold is from latest record (which the band insist on calling an EP, despite being nine songs long), Gilded Pleasures. Songs like Humdrum Blues, which starts out sexy with heavy drums and singer Brooks Nielsen crooning in his deeply charismatic nasal drawl, and then turns into a heartfelt lament of the tolls of being a touring musician, or the slinky surf of Hiding Under Covers, and the mildly deranged Ol' Rat Face, are far beyond the vast majority of their previous output.  The band mishmash genres so effortlessly, walking a tightrope of blues, surf, psych and even some kind of circus-style reggae on One Million Lovers, that even though we've heard a lot of notionally similar stuff in the last few years, the set feels fresh and immediately likeable. They definitely play for too long (a 90-minute set on a Wednesday?), but the crowd leave spent and thoroughly satisfied.