Live Review: The Jezabels, Ali Barter

"Are you guys going to get sweaty? It's hot in here!" Ali Barter speaks truthfully. We don't cool off any as she and her band simmer through their workmanlike set. The Melbourne local wails like a rocked up Katy Steele, but the band's relentless mid-tempo-ness is a bit wearying. Recent single Girlie Bits, with its ironic refrain "You don't understand what it's like to be a man", is a highlight.

There's a lot of goodwill surrounding The Jezabels' latest tour, after keyboardist Heather Shannon's treatment for cancer derailed their original tour plans earlier this year. Fittingly, Shannon is the first to appear, emerging from a haze of blue-lit smoke to assume her position. She goes right to work, laying out the plinking arpeggios that presage Stand And Deliver, the opening track from 2016 LP Synthia. The rest of the band joins her as the atmospheric, two-act epic swells and sways though its dreamlike perambulations. Eventually it gives way to the rollicking recent single Love Is My Disease, which sees the charismatic Hayley Mary at her most fundamentally rock 'n' roll, stalking and posturing in her black leather jacket and mop of dark hair.

The Jezabels embody feminine power, with a gut-busting sound built around Shannon's synths and Mary's bravura vocals. Themes of female agency and empowerment are heard explicitly tonight in songs like Smile, whose passages of epic bluster underline the simple, fearless injunction of "Don't tell me to smile If you don't know me, brother". At the same time, the supporting role played by the blokes in the band becomes even more important when they play live. Nik Kaloper's loud and inventive drumming and guitarist Sam Lockwood's ramped-up guitar are pivotal to transmuting The Jezabels' expansive studio sound. It becomes something that is veritably thunderous in the hangar-like space of The Croxton's bandroom. The versatility of all four band members is on display as they traverse from the structurally sophisticated Stand And Deliver and Smile, to the more direct poppiness of Look Of Love, to the dark electro pop of Unnatural. The sultry Pleasure Drive echoes Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's 666 Conducer; Disco Biscuit Love is great fun, while Hurt Me and Endless Love see the band unleash with raw power.

Someone requests The Jezabels' famed cover of Journey's Don't Stop Believing, and although Mary affirms that indeed we "should never stop believing", nonetheless "We 100 per cent won't be playing that song". Instead they close the main set with Stamina, which begins with a magenta murmur and builds to an emotional blaze. It's a fitting climax that even a belting two-song encore - including, of course, The End - can't top.