Review: BadBadNotGood at Astor Theatre
BadBadNotGood at Astor Theatre
w/ Sampology
Saturday, March 14, 2026
Returning to Perth not long after their Rechabite appearance, BadBadNotGood continued to stretch the lifespan of their Mid Spiral tour—a run that feels less like promotion and more like practice. The official framing gestured back towards the jazz-rooted ethos of 2021’s Talk Memory, but the reality was looser. This is a band operating in a live continuum: the material is a framework, not a destination.
That word, ‘jazz’, still seems to spook people. It’s one people often hesitate to use with friends when describing a gig—not because it’s wrong, but because of what it’s come to imply. Polite. Academic. Background. What BadBadNotGood do, very effectively, is dismantle that in real time. Groove, improvisation, interplay and technical fluency, the same qualities that underpin hip-hop, psychedelia and funk, just wearing a different label.
Brisbane’s Sampology opened with a DJ set that nodded towards that lineage without fully stepping into it. A spectral refrain of Nature Boy surfaced early—more disembodied artefact than recognisable standard—before the set thickened into beat-driven terrain. The lighting did much of the heavy lifting: shifting psychedelic patterns and colour fields folding and refracting until the room oscillated between states—submerged one moment, inside a rainbow the next.
Sampology’s taste is undeniable. A crate-digger’s sensibility stitched together jazz fragments, soul numbers, and global textures—Bill Withers’ Grandma’s Hands drifting through like a shared memory. But the set itself felt clunky in its transitions, the seams showing more than they needed to, never quite locking into a fully embodied flow.
For a tour leaning this heavily on jazz lineage, the decision to open with a DJ set felt like a misfire. While sampling offers global reach no single band can match, you couldn’t help but wonder what a local live jazz outfit—GunFu, say—might have done with the same slot.
By the time the Astor filled out, the room was buzzing—the venue’s bottlenecked layout becoming borderline inaccessible at this kind of capacity. Still, Perth showed up: curious, receptive, and yes—a lot of dudes in caps indoors.
Then, from darkness, BadBadNotGood emerged through a haze of grainy, flickering film—real 16mm textures, Stan Brakhage-esque abstractions scratching across the screen. Sparklers, planetary orbs, distorted overlays. Not just backdrop, but structure—an appreciated cue in a set where songs bled into each other.
From the outset, the groove did the work. The drums hit first—immediate and insistent. When Speaking Gently arrived, its opening motif—sharp, electronic chime tones, cold and faintly eerie—drew a wave of recognition. From there, the band slipped into a sly, stretched-out take on Bowie’s Fame—less cover than orbit, circling the original before drifting elsewhere.
What followed was a study in controlled looseness. Instruments shifted roles without ceremony—guitar to sax, sax to flute—while keys fractured in kaleidoscopic runs. Tracks like Confessions and Sétima Regra became less about virtuosity and more about exchange. The crowd’s clap-along was welcomed—a slightly naff, participatory beat prioritising shared energy over precision.
There is a slight tension in BadBadNotGood’s populist instinct. Their drummer, acting as MC and ranging from James Brown absurdism to genuine warmth, threaded the set with calls for peace, collective breath and shared energy. It was well-intentioned but occasionally brushed up against something more performative than profound—earnestness landing in that distinctly Canadian register of sincerity, play and irreverence, not unlike fellow Canadians Nirvanna the Band the Show, whose current film leans into that same wholehearted, slightly absurd optimism. Still, when the band locked in, none of that seemed to matter too much.
Later, Unfolding (Momentum 73) stripped the space to near silence, accompanied by film visuals of choppy water—the surface fractured, flecked with froth. The saxophone traced those movements uncannily, breath audible between phrases, notes rising and collapsing like the swell itself. Whether coincidence or perception, the alignment felt exacting.
It demanded a level of attention a Saturday night crowd rarely offers, but paid it back in detail. Earlier, there had been so many waggling boy butts it could have passed for the opening of Promising Young Woman—but here, the night never tipped into anything quite so dark. Just bodies moving, a little self-conscious, a little euphoric. All peace and love.
The closing stretch, from Kaleidoscope into Lavender, returned things fully to the body. A collective crouch-and-jump rippled through the room; slightly awkward, undeniably effective. Engagement you could see, measure, maybe even believe in.
If jazz still has a branding problem, BadBadNotGood aren’t interested in fixing it so much as dancing circles around it entirely. Call it what you like. On a packed night at the Astor, it felt like people dancing to something they understood instinctively, even if they’d never use the word.
CAT LANDRO