Review: Amplify WA at Rosemount Hotel

RTRFM’s Amplify WA at Rosemount Hotel
w/ Last Quokka, Spacerhead, Nigella Screaming, Nici Ward, RTRFM DJs
Saturday, January 24, 2026

Events like Amplify WA not-so-quietly outline the terms of engagement for local music right now. Free entry. No “industry showcase” varnish. Just access—to bands, to rooms, to one another. In a city where the cost of living keeps pushing culture towards the margins, this event’s value wasn’t nostalgia or goodwill; it was infrastructure. It was about holding space for local music to exist without a paywall, even as capitalism kept narrowing who gets to participate.

The evening unfolded deliberately. RTRFM’s drive-time DJs warmed the room first, followed by an early set from Nici of Lonesome Dove for the committed punters filtering in. It was a generous, informal start—but the teeth didn’t really sink in until Nigella Screaming hit the stage. A relatively new duo, they worked the room with restraint rather than the squall their name might otherwise suggest.

Veering through familiar shoegaze terrain by way of the Roadhouse, their drum-machine backing maintained a bedroom-pop allure delivered with retro, coquettish cool. Twangy guitar lines and looped beats underpinned vocals hovering between detachment and resilience, fleshing out texture without a scream to be heard. The absence of an actual scream felt pointed—a quiet refusal of the gendered expectation that intensity from women must arrive loud, broken, or spectacular to be taken seriously.

What made the set compelling was its emotional refusal. No longing. No romanticised ache. Instead, a cool, almost matter-of-fact delivery let repetition become a test rather than a comfort. La-La-La Love You pushed a simple refrain to its limit, while a brief pick-sharing moment mid-set hinted at the duo’s connection as guitars thickened and effects swelled. The dance-punk inflection of LA Iceruptured the hypnotic haze before the set circled back to the clean, 90s-referential melodicism of High Up in the Skies, its economy and sincerity doing the heavy lifting.

Where Nigella Screaming sketched a chic, restrained atmosphere, Spacerhead obliterated it. The room thickened—bodies pressing forward, anticipation humming—as they took the stage. For a band whose sound already carries industrial menace, the Rosemount’s scale only sharpened the impact. This was Spacerhead with room to move: to stretch, fracture, and rebuild in real time.

Lindsey Claridge’s aggrieved hollers percolated just below the surface, starting off the set with new material testing extended patterns and building rhythmic pressure. Elemental and angled, the penetrating bass throb recalled Shellac at this very venue. The interplay between the Halliwell brothers on bass and guitar functioned like magnetism—lines pulling apart, snapping back together. Jordan’s drumming was all muscle memory and commitment, hair completely obscuring his sightline as he locked into long, sustained passages. Bass-led tracks swung violently, momentum carrying us all forward whether you were ready or not. The menace here wasn’t theatrical; it was structural.

Where Lindsey’s vocals broke through on familiar tracks (Threadbare and Disco in particular), Tyson’s vocals on Kettle Boils remained deliberately submerged, treated almost as texture rather than instruction. That nod to the domestic and everyday, embedded within such heavy terrain, grounded the band’s complexity in lived experience rather than performance. Spacerhead resist tidy crescendos, letting sections boil past comfort—this isn’t escapism, but immersion.

If Spacerhead’s pressure felt close to imploding inward, Last Quokka turned all that force outward, explosively involving the entire room. From the opening Gina Rinehart / Rupert Murdoch anthem, the band framed the night around class—not as abstract ideology, but as lived condition. Trent Rojahn wasted no time collapsing the distance between stage and floor, vaulting the barrier early and weaving through the crowd with mic cable trailing dangerously behind him. If the audience wouldn’t come forward, he brought the confrontation to them.

Last Quokka’s strength lays in the collective gears of the machine. Yes, Trent was the polemicist as ever, but the band never read as a backing unit. Dual guitars (Justin Zanetic and Dion Mariani) churned relentlessly, and Max Taylor’s bass hit physically in the chest, while drummer Carlota Rivera drove everything forward with infectious ferocity. Songs centred on protest and anti-capitalist sentiment landed not as slogans but as continuations of a larger argument: this is what culture looks like under capitalism, and this is what resistance sounds like within it.

Calls to Save Our Pubs weren’t nostalgic—venues like The Hydey and the Flying Scotsman weren’t lost to time, but to gentrification, to capital finding higher returns elsewhere (Where the Rosemount sits within that divide I’ll leave to you to decide). Jokes about the cost of living cutting into raffle-ticket budgets landed because they weren’t jokes at all. This was the terrain being navigated, whether anyone liked it or not.

What makes Last Quokka so effective live is their insistence on participation. Call-and-response vocals flattened hierarchy, turning songs into shared declarations rather than sermons. Yankee Satellite saw Trent threading through the room once more, locking eyes and roaring directly into punters’ faces. There was something uncomfortable—and honest—in how the band often preached to the converted, but the point wasn’t persuasion so much as activation.

Veering towards the pointy end of the set with Nazi Scum, dragged back into rotation after recent public marches, and Eat the Rich, the message sharpened: there are more of us than them, but only if we show up.

RTRFM’s Amplify WA wasn’t about balance or breadth. It was about friction, access, and the refusal to sanitise culture for comfort. Under capitalism, this is what we get—unless we fight to keep spaces like this alive. For one night at least, the Rosemount held.

CAT LANDRO

Photos by Sethen Sheehan-Lee