Live Review: Youth Group, Day Ravies, Jono Lattin

It appears the nostalgia cycle is getting shorter, as the faithful gathered to celebrate an album from just a decade ago, Youth Group’s Skeleton Jar: a local favourite before they were lifted – then strangled – by that atmospheric cover of Forever Young.  

Associate member back then – and the headliner’s guest keyboardist tonight – Jono Lattin is of another time and place. That being Adelaide, now. Running a line in one-man-band loops and samples, it deserves a better word than ‘quirky’. He finished with a crowd request for Ambassador Of Love by La Huva: his day job band of way back then.

Day Ravies are more of now, their fuzzy pop with slightly ragged unison harmonies has been the stuff of Sydney indie from Pel Mel to The Hummingbirds and beyond. The boys are in jeans and Cons, the girls in smocks and sandals. As is ever so.

The room fills, there’s a Boxing Day sale crush around the stock clearance $5 band shirts on the merch desk, and the cheer is loud as Youth Group troop on and open with the syncopated rattle of Shadowland. Toby Martin’s voice is still plaintive, even when delivering a line like “…the Frankston Line is full of teenage crime”, or the puzzled observations of Baby Body. The album is duly run through, postscripted with a couple of bonuses, including the slightly unexpected – by everybody but the casually interested – of that song by somebody else that got them on the radio everywhere from Newtown to New Jersey. Then Daisy Chains, a more succinct distilling of the spacious pop with some guts they could – and apparently can still – make.