The Bakery
Friday, August 3, 2013
Kids are alright. On Saturday night they came out in droves and turned The Bakery upside-down. Surely lots of alcohol and substances were involved, but nobody was seemingly hurt, and everyone walked out with a big smile on their faces.
Dune Rats opened the proceedings around 10.30 and immediately won the crowd over with their blend of punkish pop. It was nothing we have not heard before, but it was done with maximum enthusiasm and precision. Despite not having terribly strong songs, this Brisbane trio delivered them in a super tight manner and even though the music they played is not extremely difficult, it needs that amount of confidence and joy required to acquire crowd’s appreciation.
In a 30 minute break that followed it was interesting to observe that vast majority of crowd consisted of young males and, if I’m correct, there was only one female stage diving the whole night. It seems that some things have not changed in last 30+ years of punk rock – from music to equally essential things associated with it.
Still, anyone familiar with Fidlar knows that it is a band of four guys in their early 20s singing about getting wasted and alike joys of living. A millennium old cliché that does work when the music is right. And the music of Fidlar is perfectly right. What makes them different from zillions similar bands is that their songs do not sound too similar and although a fairly new band, they have already mastered not only writing great hooks, but arranging and playing them as if they have been around for years.
They opened with Cheap Beer and, from memory, quite followed the order of the songs on their debut album. It was interesting to see how they handle not having material for playing more than 45 minutes and while it would have been much better if they just played song after song it was not meant to happen. Over excited punters occupied the stage at every chance they had, often tripping over the leads, gear and microphones, causing Fidlar to have long breaks between songs while they bring the equipment back to order. Often those breaks would go longer than the songs that followed, but admittedly, the crowd has pushed the band to perform even more enthusiastic.
Although covering Red Right Hand by Nick Cave was a rather odd decision, doing Blink 182’s Dammit as the last song in the encore worked perfectly well, with pretty much half of the packed venue getting on stage. Watching the youngsters having the time of their life, while the equipment was failing one by one until there was nothing left apart from Zac’s microphone, was a sight to behold.
https://soundcloud.com/fidlar/cheap-beer
