Totally MildThis is one of few times Trainspotters has held a show in the front bar of The Grand Central Hotel (Nite Fields are holding their album launch in the big room tonight, making for a pretty packed and hectic evening) and it has kind of a house show vibe, with hardwood floors and couches everywhere and the narrow standing area in front of the stage.
This suits tonight’s first act well. Pool Shop used to be a full band led by Major Leagues’ Jaimee Fryer that played every now and then in Brisbane, but now she’s stripped it right back to a one person shoe gaze-y guitar thing, wondering through stories unconstrained by pop music structure. Fryer’s whispery vocals are intimate and relatable and by the end she draws a strong and attentive crowd.
Workshop are a band that has nailed their aesthetic and sound so hard it’s impossible not to be impressed. They know exactly what people like and are giving it to them, with a consistent driving beat that cuts hard, lyrics that sound like they’ve been randomly generated but with the same serious futuristic vibe, sung in cold non-bullshit voices and synth that’s aggressive but not abrasive. Every part is poised to make you think, “Oh shit yeah, this is cool.” Sure, it’s tough to single out individual songs, but why would you want to when the set as a whole works so well?
Thigh Master play a lot of goddamn supports, and somehow manage to be always solidly great but not boring – you feel like shit could definitely go wrong, that that menace that’s under these real grimy jangle-ish songs could boil over. Tonight they’ve got guitar problems, which are a bummer, but they struggle through with true ‘fuck it’ spirit.
Totally Mild are up against it from the minute they get on the stage – they’re playing in a slightly widened hallway with not great sound, they’re the ninth band to play between two rooms and everyone’s pretty drunk and sick of standing by now – but still they manage to put on a really special show. Their sound is delicately spacious and every element seems self-contained – Elizabeth Mitchell’s perfectly on-pitch vocal, sweet and sultry guitar melodies, the minimal vaguely jazzy drumming – but they all curl around each other and form a something that’s so warm that it makes the sadness of the lyrics a softer kind of heartbreak. More sighing than sobbing. It’s a shorter set than most would probably like, but expressive highlights like Nights and In The Night (luckily not judging on song name originality here) show the incredible range and control of Mitchell’s voice, and Move On is an actually interesting pop song, and they all stick with you long after they’ve finished playing.
