Review: ARSE at Seasonal Brewing Co.

ARSE at Seasonal Brewing Co.
w/ The Pretty Skints, Moyamoya, Spacerhead
Saturday, March 21, 2026

Since our last visit, the stage at Seasonal Brewing Co. had been flipped to back onto the garage door—a small shift that rewired the room’s logic. Less venue, more somewhere you might build something noisy with your hands. Fitting, then, for a bill curated by Permanent Residence—one that quietly does the heavy lifting of stitching local acts together with interstate kin, building circuits as much as lineups.

Opening the night, The Pretty Skints leant into a no-frills garage punk lineage, their set driven by hooky immediacy rather than reinvention. Mockingbird and Walk of Shame set the tone early, while a self-aware aside—“if you hate it, you hate Mission of Burma”—placed them squarely within that lineage.

There was levity throughout, particularly in (I Can’t Believe It’s Not) Butterman, a tongue-in-cheek centrepiece that stretched towards dance punk. More telling, though, was the intimacy: the vocalist stepping offstage mid-set to embrace a friend and the sense that this wasn’t performance so much as an extension of community. Even in the crunch of distorted guitars and punchy drums, there was something undeniably warm at the core—the kind of proximity that collapses the gap between band and room.

Moyamoya arrived slightly out of sync, though not without reason. Jetlag, a broken string, and a four-month gap between shows left the set unsettled in places. But there was still plenty to latch onto.

Angular guitar lines cut through with a Wire/Gang of Four sharpness, while the rhythm section shifted between propulsion and something looser, the drums veering towards a wobbly tantrum. A teaser for a forthcoming album, Whole New Land leant into their tongue-in-cheek slackerism without collapsing into apathy. A darker, more dissonant mid-set passage briefly grounded the room before collapsing back into anarchic chatter drifting towards beat poetry. Not everything landed, but there is something potent when fully locked in.

That sense of potential snapped into focus with Spacerhead as they once again rendered tension into its most articulate form. From the get, the band operated on a shared, non-verbal wavelength—taut, precise, and constantly threatening to spill over without ever quite doing so. The kind of interplay that edges closer to jazz logic than hardcore orthodoxy.

Drums cracked hard and metallic; guitar and bass veering into noise before pulling back into groove. Threadbare pushed into piercing, almost alien frequencies, tethered by a relentless pulse, while Disco let a flicker of funk emerge through the abrasion, the unstoppable grin on their drummer’s face underscoring a joy and playfulness to offset their cathartic purge. Even at their most chaotic, there was control—cymbals battered but held, distortion shaped rather than left to sprawl.

By the time ARSE took the stage, the room had been primed. The Sydney trio, with Party Dozen DNA running through the bass, wasted no time collapsing everything into impact. Opening with a barrage, “ARRRRRRSSSE!” belted with a near-metal roar, they drove straight into a set built on compression: short, forceful, unrelenting. Think ’80s hardcore with a distinctly contemporary lens and Aus slacker humour.

Visually, the reduction was immediate too. The bassist slung a heavy-duty chain over the shoulder in lieu of a strap—more industrial labour than ornament. Behind them, the drum kit was stripped back to essentials: kick looming front and centre, snare low and tight, hi-hat and a single crash.

That compression carried through the set. First World Fever landed with dry-throated insistence—“All I do is work”—cracking under its own weight, the sickness of surrendering to capitalist slavery laid bare. Who Comes Next? refracted climate denialism before collapsing into something sludgier, briefly playful in its guitar lines at the edges. Safe Word pulled back just enough to let its refrain breathe, the matter-of-fact delivery cutting deeper than a scream: do we need a safe word for how horrendously fucked the world is right now?

Elsewhere, velocity took over. Level Skipper surged forward with game-like acceleration, resentment baked into its momentum, their bassist’s power stance and guttural screams countering the guitarist’s unstoppable protest. On theme, Shit Future and Kaputt balanced nihilism with something approaching playfulness, in both moniker and form.

A brief aside dedicated to the venue’s voluminous air-conditioning duct encroaching onto the stage punctured the intensity, leading into deeper cut Dog. With a tremulous bass wavering underneath, like emergent dread, the slower, more deliberate energy enveloped a refrain of worn acceptance: “If you don’t get what you like/ You better like what you get.” Not surrender, exactly, but something adjacent.

By the closing stretch—NRVSNRG, Primitive Species—the band locked in fully, and any nervous energy transformed into something shared. Through the final breakdown, the bassist held eye contact across the room, one by one—no distance left to maintain.

Spacerhead stretched sound outward; ARSE pulled it back to its core. In between, The Pretty Skints and Moyamoya traced the space where those impulses meet—community, friction, and the ongoing work of holding it together.

CAT LANDRO

Photos by Adrian Thomson