Live Review: The Peep Tempel, Horror My Friend, Battlehounds

What a pleasure to see bona fide rock’n’roll pub The Crown & Anchor (that’s “The Cranka” to locals) being used for a bona fide rock’n’roll gig. The band room could stand to be bigger, but what it lacks in design it makes up for in scungy old posters, stale beer odour and a pummelling sound system. 

Three flavours of power-trio rock were served up tonight, the first from locals Battlehounds. During high points they tapped into a sort of sub-Sabbath groove probably best enjoyed with grass and a lava lamp. But mostly they stuck to familiar blues-rock scales, tried-and-true i-iv-v progressions and standard mid-paced rhythms that might have benefited from a little more variation. 

Ditto Horror My Friend, another local trio, this one fresh from recording an as-yet unreleased debut album. HMF continues to grow in confidence and delivery. Tom Gordon and Josh Battersby now yelp and holler with studied conviction and even a hint of melody. Drummer Sam Kolesnik has been on board for about a year and it’s obvious the three have a kindred chemistry. Frustratingly, their new material doesn’t exactly leap out from the older stuff — it’s as if the band is too comfortable with its song formula. Typically they’ll lurch from A section to B section and back again, over and over, with variety provided by an array of fuzz pedals all dialled up to 11. Take for instance A Thousand Hands, the title track of last year’s EP and still their set-closer. Audiences do respond to its perceived epicness, but it lacks the true tension and satisfying payoffs of the Sonic Youth sagas it emulates.

Even so, this audience is here to ROCK, and everyone is happy with Battlehounds and Horror My Friend. It’s a refreshingly diverse audience too, with a healthy male/female ratio to boot. It’s a pleasant surprise to this reviewer, who assumed The Peep Tempel would attract a mostly white, male, macho crowd: on the radio, they sound aggressive, muscled, uncompromising. There’s tangible threat in the way vocalist/guitarist Blake Scott implores his imagined muse Carol, “I don’t think Trevor is good for you.”

Scott is unnerving on stage too. He makes us laugh one moment and confuses us the next, like he might be Chopper Reid’s skinnier cousin. Meanwhile, his rhythm section pounds out concentrated and pure punk rock that takes its cues from Sub Pop’s ’80s heyday, which, as it happens, was itself influenced by Aussies like The Scientists and Cosmic Psychos. The Cranker crowd loves every mosh-worthy minute of it. 

The Peep Tempel certainly delivers on stage. This scribe’s only real reservation concerns authenticity. The band’s radio singles are delivered with an outrageous Aussie accent that flirts with novelty, yet on stage Scott lapses blatantly into cockney and other dialects without warning. Maybe it’s all part of the fun and confusion, and after all, Scott did grow up in blue-collar Western Australia. Tonight, it was hard to tell if he was channelling Ian Dury or John Lydon, or Bob Hatfield from A Country Practice, but when you’re this compelling live and your band rocks this hard, I don’t suppose it really matters.