Homebake
The Domain, Sydney
Saturday 3rd December 2011
It’s only upon entering the gates to Homebake after a long absence that you realise how much you’ve missed the damn thing. Homebake was the very first festival this reviewer ever attended (at fifteen! Why no underage wristbands anymore?), and despite issues with ticket sales and the big gamble of taking a year off, Homebake remains the most quintessentially Australian festival, right down to its choice of Strongbow – the cider of bogans – to stock the bar with.
With such local successes on the international stage this year, it’s only fitting that Homebake, with its plethora of Kiwis and other non-Australians (there isn’t one in Unknown Mortal Orchestra) return in grand style, lacing the shelves with oldies and flooding the main stage with new kids on the block. It’s a shame then, that for some of the biggest acts, the sound was so terrible.
That the triumph of Homebake came from the smallest stage at the back of the endless fields of The Domain is no accident. The Roland S Howard tent, which comes off a bit like a rural square dance meets shotgun wedding, nonetheless had the vibrancy, quality and audience participation that none of the other stages could muster. The three best performing bands of the day were all on this platform.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, rising out of the ashes of Mint Chicks and as completely self-assured, impressed early in the afternoon, as singer/guitarist Ruban Neilson’s psychedelic excursions with his American teenage compatriots, let forth waves of groove in the style of Holy Fuck but with more Cry Baby pedals. Neilson’s voice, simply amazing no matter how you slice it, carried the entire set and appeared to resonate with all the skater bros who seemed to have coasted in just for the occasion.
They stuck around to watch Papa Vs Pretty in what must have been the crowning show of their already uber-successful year. Loud, tight and thrashing like Incubus never went out of fashion, the Sydney trio finally had an audience with which to show off their incredible chops, particularly the guitar solos of frontman Tom Rawle, who attracted whooping cheers from many of the older set who wandered in by accident. Both these bands had something in common, they played rock music without pretence and the sizable audience at a stage far too small, loved them for it. Things got even messier when Hungry Kids Of Hungary closed out the tent, with a full house singing, clapping and dancing gleefully as the Brisbane five-piece demonstrated how to put on a gig focused craft rather than fireworks. Triple J favourites and seemingly Sydney’s too, HKOH were animated, exciting and genuine.
So that’s the good. Most of the bad came from the main stage, which had easily the shittiest sound at a festival this year. If you weren’t front five rows for The Jezabels you could forget about trying to get involved, as the band pummelled through their renowned live set the meagre sound just disappeared into the ether. It’s a real shame, given that they are perhaps one of the most deserving groups to grace that stage; it’s obvious how much better they would have sounded at an indoor tent. The issue was only compounded by Gotye’s performance, plagued with sound issues from the outset and having to deal with a largely passive audience who were just hanging out to hear That Single. As it turns out, Wally put in a lot of work for the set, bringing a singing horn section, syncing videos to his movements and utilising a second drum kit while he sang. If you could hear him properly (or anyone in the band apart from the omnipresent bass drone) it would have worked, but instead if fell flat and stayed there. Salvaged by a few cuts from Like Drawing Blood at set's end, it perhaps revealed that despite the technical issues, De Backer’s new material is too much of a pastiche to translate effectively to a festival crowd.
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