Meredith Music Festival - Day 1
Supernatural Amphitheatre, Meredith, Victoria
Friday 9th December 2011
By Joshua Jennings, Ariel Katz and Marcus Teague
MT: My friends and I have taken to summing up our experiences at the Meredith Music Festival in loose, overarching terms. 2008 was "The Wet One." Which followed, of course, "The Hot One". Last year was "The Windy One", and so on. This year's event then, was tagged as "The Nice One." Forecast thunderstorms failed to materialise, overnight temperatures verged on t-shirt weather, punters seemed in a perpetual state of friendliness and the varied line-up provided constant pockets of satisfaction wherever you were. If there was a template with which to base future Meredith experiences on, this was probably it.
JJ: The days when you could quietly ease into the Meredith Festival experience amongst a relatively sparse crowd to catch the opening act are well and truly gone. This year's local openers, psych-garage act
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, were greeted by what appeared to be a near-capacity amphitheatre (at a glance) and proved serviceable tonic in the party-starting slot. A slew of punters up near the front received the Melbourne septet’s rather messy and rollicking riffage as a cue to dance on the dirt, with all the demonstrativeness of mung bean-eating Woodstock acid casualties -- the set's signatures of pummelling guitar interplays, frenetic wig outs and visceral stage movement providing an apt soundtrack. A translation of The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ as a closer song was a welcome, early highlight.
The creation of such a juiced-up vibe proved fortuitous for
Cash Savage and The Last Drinks. The local singer's wardrobe of jet black jeans, jet black shirt and jet black aviator shades scanned as so bad arse it’s a spectacle in itself. She did the garb justice, performing with a swaggering no-bones convictiom, and her wide-eyed enthusiasm about playing at the festival (her family were in the audience) was infectious. The band’s flourishes of violin and banjo enhanced the smoky barroom flavour of the set and Savage’s gutsy hard-livin’ pipes were fundamental to some epic Janis Joplin-esque moments.
MT: Despite a late departure from Melbourne and an unnervingly long line of cars poking their way towards the festival entrance, once inside the gates the installation process for our party was relatively quick. With a tent up and tarps fastened, we quickly set about...talking. If there's one hidden belly rub Meredith provides, beyond the obvious trappings, it's the chance to simply stop life for a moment and talk with your friends. It's the heart around which the festival orbits, and whether it's on a stone at the clifftop, a blanket on the hill, legs akimbo over car seats or sharing the edge of an esky under a flapping tarp, the setting for unhurried reconnections is probably the unspoken lifeblood of the thing.
We managed to finally amble down to the amphitheatre in time to see NZ via US'
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, who put on a perfectly pitched display of fizzy pop. Frontman Ruban Neilson wears his red Mustang guitar at chest height, snapping fingerpicked chords that go along way in helping his trio avoid comparisons to any other similarly skewed indie-pop strummers. Tumbling verses into itchy choruses + pre-finger-picked, echo laden breakdown = repeat. Nielson's "other" more ADD band the Mint Chicks might have once been a good idea for a late night slot here, but UMO's inherent cheeriness proved a perfect entry point into the now slightly steamy arvo.
Kurt Vile
JJ: Archetypal indie-folk slackers
Kurt Vile and The Violators were next up and it has to be said, the more I think about this act, the more sceptical I become. I increasingly wonder if part of their their appeal isn’t more about what they symbolise than the actual music they make. I can understand the appeal for pot-smoking long hairs who can pledge their allegiance to a band that so starkly romanticises counter-cultural demeanour, but the apathetic and bored-sounding tonality of the songs sure made for an arduous downer from time to time. Vile did manage a sincere-spirited performance, but the lazy vocal delivery was somewhere between vanilla and flat -- the wooden-sounding guitar mix not helping either. Some might argue this is all part of the band's appeal, but you do wonder which glitches are deliberate and which are simply convenient mistakes dressed up as masterstrokes after the fact.
Barbarion
MT: With darkness now falling (and a chicken taco in the belly)
Barbarion fell somewhere between instant rock royalty and theatre restaurant. In fact they're probably a lot closer to the theatre of Airbourne than Airbourne would like to admit -- rock posturing, heartfelt proclamations of "rocking" and more guitar-noodling than a factory radio at smoko. The difference is Barbarion wholly commit to the silly folklore of metal, in a way that blasts all the senses. I mean, this was their Facebook rally-cry before the gig:
And the long boats prepare to set sail, 'merry death' in our sights minus the almighty beard so brutally stolen from us. Warriors who will joining us for battle, make yourselves known! AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH
On board. The first band in living memory to have pyro at Meredith, backed it up with helmets, beards, blood, skulls, leather, studs, solos and so-bad-it's-great CGI on their video screens that it was impossible not to throw a devils horn in awe at the damn
show on offer. 'My Favourite Wife' (Answer: Matilda) and 'Barbarion' were highlights in a set that made it hard to focus on the music. "Cop that Meredith," the band declared at their finale. Yep. AK: Overheard at Barbarion: "They're losing their Viking shit all over the stage!"
Ladyhawke
AK: Pip Browne, her
Ladyhawke pseudonym up in lights, opened her set with 'Magic' before wading into some new stuff from the album she's been recording this year (appropriately titled,
Anxiety), as well as those plastic classics 'Dusk Till Dawn', 'Professional Suicide' and 'Paris is Burning' from her 2008 debut. But despite writing fun, synth-heavy indie pop songs that you can dance and sing along to, live, Browne just doesn't have a great deal of stage presence. Or any. She stands still, awkwardly so, throughout. Which is odd because — despite the fact that having more confidence would make her so much better — the hedonistic overtones of her music struggle to compute as a result. I guess we can't all be Barbarion though, can we? Overheard at Ladyhawke: "I feel like I'm watching a Wrangler commercial."
Future of the Left
MT: Ladyhawke seemed an anomaly on the Friday night, an overcooked reminder of the detached pop so prevalent fifteen minutes. But if there was any still-dispersing fluro-gas left over in the amphitheatre as we approached midnight,
Future of the Left immediately torched it. From the moment 'Arming Eritrea' dropped, the Welsh four-piece detonated the joint with a precise rebuilding of post-indie-punk-pop (?) in their image. Frontman Andy Falkous seemed less chatty than usual, perhaps soaking in the moment where he found his kind've unsung band commanding a headline performance at a rabid festival on the other side of the world. But perhaps it was because the new-look Future of the Left (now with keyboard! A second guitarist! A girl on bass!!) seems to have clicked in a way that people always loved mclusky for. There's a tightly-wound ruthlessness that was missing in the new line-up's set here earlier in the year; be it now performance, attitude, the crafting of song-lengths or just those fantastically sarcastic lyrics. A couple of mclusky tunes ('Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues' and 'To Hell With Good Intentions') sparked a "Should they really be playing those songs anymore? post-set discussion. But beyond the "covers" simply sending a whole lot of people spare, the real result was how they're not even the highlights so much anymore. It feels like Future of the Left should play every Meredith.
MT: The genius/difficulty in the location of the Pink Flamingo bar (which this year has grown to be a far-bigger superstructure, rather than the delightfully saggy tent of old) is that you can watch the band from a distance. The trouble is you can also watch a band from a distance. Despite
Gang Gang Dance being one of the more anticipated acts on the bill, nothing they managed in the first 20 mins or so could pull me down the hill to inspect further. Preferring the faceless, synthy wash of their latest LP
Eye Contact over the tense twists and turns of 2008's
Saint Dymphna, the slot was a surprising buzzkill, further suggesting that the experimental slot (Animal Collective, Broadcast, YACHT) can often be the underwhelming red herring in practice. With the pink drink doing its thing under the soft glow of the rosy lanterns, we turned our attention then to the night and all its stupid friends.
MEREDITH FESTIVAL 2011 - DAY 2 & 3
(Pics: CC Hua)