Meredith Festival, Meredith 2011 - Live Review, Photos - Day 2 & 3

Meredith Music Festival
Supernatural Amphitheatre, Meredith, Victoria
Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th December, 2011

By Joshua Jennings, Ariel Katz and Marcus Teague

READ DAY 1 REVIEW HERE ON TheVine.

AK: Battling long lines for food and an early crowd on the hill, I grabbed a breakfast wrap and a fresh coconut juice (more electrolytes than Gatorade!) and took a seat for Ballarat's finest brass band. (Possibly Ballarat's only brass band.) Mr Mark Smith — the Ballarat Brass Band director — led the collection through renditions of 'The Final Countdown', the Rocky theme song, 'Sway' and a Queen medley, amongst others. Adorable, as always.

So too Oscar + Martin, who landed in what's traditionally the "buzziest" slot of the festival. With Oscar Slorach-Thorn on keys, guitar and aching croon, and Martin King in charge of the laptop and mixer - adding only a floor tom and mic each - the Melbourne band's set-up is a relatively simple one -- their minimalist "live cut n' paste" result reflects it. Bec Rigby's vocals on 'What I Know' were beautiful, as were the cooing voices of the Brown sisters (Otouto) as guests, and whose addition (along with some ever-enthusastic hip-hop flavour from Grant Gronewold) made the eventual team on stage a rag-tag, fuzzy, RnB early morning force. One of the best pop tracks of the year, 'Do The Right Thing' sealed the deal. As per the Saturday opening slots lottery goes: they won. And so will surely be back in a later spot at some point.


Adalita

JJ: It felt voyeuristic watching Adalita perform tracks from her self-titled debut solo album, co-produced by the late ex-Magic Dirt bassist Dean Turner. For a fair whack of the time, the stage was more like a fish bowl in which the audience watched her potter around with equipment, rather than directly entertain the crowd. We know Turner’s legacy is all over Adalita's solo effort, and so it felt apt to have Turner’s two little girls join her on stage amidst the funereal-sounding wash of atmospheric guitar loops filling up the amphitheatre. It felt like a very private moment shared publicly. And when Turner’s children joined Adalita in for a seat on the edge of the stage, and looked out into the sea of people cheering them on for simply being there (while Adalita wailed on a barren guitar line), it was hard not to be affected by the significance of the moment – which was that they likely wouldn’t have been there if their dad still was (although admittedly, they have been on stage for several Magic Dirt moments in the past). Sad as it all was, it was perhaps the most triumphant moment of the festival too.

AK: So heavy was the overwhelming sense of nostalgia and melancholy pulsing through Adalita's set, that men and women alike were dabbing at their eyes. The sheer sparseness of her sound seemed to amplify the significance of everything -- the single beat she pounds in an otherwise bare 'Fool Around'; the way she sat on the end of the stage with the kids during the long looping guitar part in 'Hot Air';  even the waves she threw the crowd seemed loaded, however endearing. "I fuckin' love ya, Meredith!" she said, before finishing with 'The Repairer' -- Adalita sprawled over her pedals, the kids banging on tambourines and woodsticks without a care in the world. Amazing.

JJ: Nobody at our camp site had really invested much time into getting to know hardcore US punk band Off! in advance, but we all expected them to be nasty. Friday had been a late night and, predictably, bodies were strewn around the camp site like carcasses much of Saturday AM, which led to the suggestion that being within a one kilometre proximity of Off! at the early hour of 2pm might do more damage than good, to the more fragile dwellers. Maybe it was the beer I had for breakfast or maybe it was my primal instincts coming to the fore in the wilderness (elbow to elbow with so much fellow cattle), but I was surprised to discover that the more viciousness Off! doled out through their chainsaw-barking rock riffs, the better I began to feel.

The most pleasurable moment was when a friend returned from the front row near the speakers, to tell me that he urgently needed to return to the campsite because the band was making him physical ill. I was pleased by this, until I too took a turn for the worst. With three songs remaining, I began to feel quiet chest pains and my initial euphoria dissolved into panic and trepidation. As punk goes, Off! did a razor-sharp job of impressing themselves as a quintessential act, without trading on their spectacular heritage (Black Flag, Redd Kross, Hot Snakes). Another highlight was the failure of the Chihuahua-like and comically-earnest frontman Keith Morris, grandstanding about the likes of civil rights and people in the audience not being jerks. Preaching to the converted dude. Although the muscle-headed punter hissing in three bouncers’ faces as they strong-armed him away from the stage (after he came over the barrier) during Off!’s last song definitely missed the memo.



Despite the odd dud gig that's crept into Meredith over the years (Ladyhawke gets my vote this year for being the flop), there’s always at least one band that you go into the festival unfamiliar with, but come out a convert of. For me, that band this year was Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears. The Texas septet’s combination of bright and crunchy distorted guitar tones, neon-bathed horns and tonsil-tearing Motown vocal bursts were the key factors in their soulful brand of blues rock. It was Graveyard Train that got the boot this year in the prior timeslot, (and with their fun, cantankerous take on "horror country" ticking all the rootsy boxes for what seems to constitute a boot-worthy-performance, such a thing always seemed like a forgone conclusion). But if the amphitheatre had had a roof, the sheer force of Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears inspired physicality would have been the ones to blow it right off.



Mudhoney joined Icehouse as the acts to continue Meredith’s tradition of hosting heritage bands, and they showed that nostalgic inclination isn’t all bad. One of the reasons I’ve sparingly re-visited Mudhoney since their grunge era heyday is because their discography until then is a little too meat-and-potatoes to reward much repeat listening. In fact, having a favourite band you’re prepared to re-visit for 20-odd years is an exceptional commitment to make, period. But in the drunk and rowdy festival environment, the bare bones combination of big dirty riffage and guitarist/vocalist Mark Arm’s alarmist howls into the microphone got the kids rightly riled up. As nostalgia acts go, the quartet is strikingly well-preserved too, looking convincingly like they have just stepped out of 1992 and could step right back in without raising any eyebrows. They didn’t skimp on the classics either, with ‘Suck You Dry’, ‘In ‘N’ Outta Grace’ and ‘You Got It (Keep It Outta My Face)’ some of the highlights. Off!'s Keith Morris returned for a send-off in 'Fix Me'; a ripping reminder that when Meredith gets a couple of the heavier bands right, it seems to keep the whole day anchored somehow.



MT: By mid-afternoon the dust levels kicking about the amphitheatre were approaching lung-plugging levels of damage. So when the heavens finally opened during the latter part of Mudhoney's set, it was more than welcome. With the dust settled and the dark descended, we pushed our way through the throng for a decent spot at Icehouse. There were two suprising things about Icehouse. 1. That a great many people of the packed in amphitheatre knew pretty much every word to their songs. 2. That the band were so damn daggy. Soft corporate rockers plonked among the pigeons. It was hard to know which to recoil from first -- Iva Davies' regular Jesus Christ poses, his naff banter, saxophonist Glenn Reither's regular storms to the front of the stage for soggy '80s sax solos or the back-to-back congratulatory guitar wangling. Or just the shirts on offer. And still -- my they have some tunes. 'We Can Get Together' being perhaps the closest the amphitheatre came all weekend to full on family-hug-athon since Neil Finn's epochal set last year. 'Crazy', 'Electric Blue', 'Great Southern Land', 'Flowers'...one forgets how many songs are legacy-material. Sentiment was divided after their set, between greatest and worst thing ever. Depends, I suspect, on how seriously you take your sax.



AK: Cut/Copy's set sure wasn't a surprise to anyone who's seen them before. Lights and music is about the depth of it indeed. Of course at 9:50pm on a Saturday that's exactly what's required, and so the amphitheatre bounced as they belted through 'Hearts on Fire' and 'Saturdays' to the great delight of pretty much everybody. Even when the heavens opened during 'Lights and Music' it didn't deter. Instead, the sea of raised hands and sweaty bodies lapped it up, perhaps even willed on by the notion of getting even filthier. One thing I couldn't help but notice though, is how slavishly Dan Whitford impersonates the keyboard kid from School of Rock. (Skip to 3.05 for required gestures).



JJ: The casting of Grinderman's lecherous mature-age creeps at the midnight hour (under a cloud-blanketed lunar eclipse -- we did get a video time-lapse and some confetti cannons though) was as good a decision as it was an obvious one. Nick Cave played the part of unhinged crackpot provocateur in the pin-striped dinner suit that you’d like to believe he goes to bed in; literally getting point blank in the faces of numerous punters and blasting them like a boot camp sergeant would. In any event, Grinderman’s pairing of murderous bent with a seething sonic onslaught was delightfully inflammatory and as they disappeared from the stage like bats into the night, they confirmed the notion that Saturday was a more eventful day for performance than Friday.

AK: Nick Cave looks like a hotdog. Overheard at Grinderman: "I feel manly listening to this music."

MT: Grinderman sounded a million times louder than anyone else. For all the piss and vinegar about whether a band of 50-year old's are worthy or not, here's the thing: from the first blast of 'Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man', Nick Cave and his hairy buddies were way tougher than you. 'Worm Tamer' sounded metallic, like aluminium being scraped along a concrete floor. For 'Get It On', Cave swopped his Telecaster for a couple of maracas and launched himself at Warren Ellis with a flying kick. By the time they got to 'Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)' kicked, Cave was harassing the front row, waving his scarecrow limbs about in fire and brimstone preacher mode. And lo, it was great. 'Kitchenette' was easily the funniest song of the weekend; bonus humour coming from the idea that, Nick Cave screeching "I just want to relax, TIPPY TOE TIPPY TOE" into some poor child's wide eyes in the front row, who had perhaps "prepared" for their "big night" of "dancing" a little too soon, were — suddenly, probably — on their way to bad place right now. And yeah for the record, here's exactly what Cave said upon exiting the stage:

"Thank you all very much. Goodnight. Thank you you've been fucking great. Uh, this is the last of Grinderman. It's all over now. Uh, see you in like, ten years, somethin' like that. When we're older and fucking uglier. Goodnight."

A glorious way to end a it then.

Which leads us to...

AK + MT: The fact that Big Freedia played 'Azz Everywhere','Na Who Mad', 'Rock Around da Clock' and 'Gin in My System' (featuring the call and response style that New Orlean's bounce music is known, for with the lines "I got that gin in my system / Somebody gonna be my victim"), is moot. She might be most known for her special brand of dance music, but few punters were moving during the set -- all eyes were busy trying to comprehend the scene. A stage full of perhaps a dozen girls bent at the waist, leaning on chairs with their backs to the crowd, furiously shaking their scantily clad arses in time to the beat. All the while, Big Freedia shimmied between them, pausing every now and then to join in with her own shockingly mobile buns. Further confounding the horde (Where to look? Who's in on the joke? It's not a joke? This is awesome? This is awesome.) was the music itself. Bounce music isn't exactly an oeuvre with peaks and troughs...it's a beat. That goes on. All you need really, in order to...watch.

MT: Does it get hazy between 3am and 7am? Well, yes it does. Virgo Four might come with a legendary pedigree, but if you were looking for a focal point — or shift in mood — it wasn't entirely forthcoming. The duo stayed head down at a couple of keyboards emitting pulses that never told a story, but rather paddled around in the ether. More successful was Tim Sweeney, who flipped the switch on several minds with a playful set that felt like he was playing with and for the crowd rather than at. Come sunrise, the zombie faithful were still shuffling and, to his credit, by the 7am curfew, were growing even more in number. Terrifying, the things a body will do.

(SUNDAY REVIEW - Continued next page)