Richard In Your Mind
Pikelet
Seagull
Denim Owl
Curtin Bandroom, Melbourne
Saturday 17th September 2010
Facing competition from a Songs gig across town and perhaps the footy as well, the co-headlining tour of Sydney’s Richard In Your Mind and Melbourne’s Pikelet didn’t fill the Curtin’s expansive bandroom to capacity on a sporadically rainy Saturday night. Too bad, because it was the rare four-band bill where every band was well worth a gander.
The cuter sidecar to Aleks and The Ramps,
Denim Owl is built around the songs of Janita Foley with multi-instrumental support from Aleks Bryant. Foley played various keyboards and sang to Bryant’s standing drumming and looped assortment of hand percussion and much more. It felt magical as well as intimate, befitting the title of the debut EP
Dream Pocket. There were whiffs of Sweden’s Wildbirds & Peacedrums, another couple/duo with expressive female vocals. Foley’s brother Joe (also of Aleks and the Ramps) played guitar on two songs, and the set capped with the
Pitchforked ‘Knitted Soup’. Not every song entirely coalesced, but those that did were as radiant as gems.
Seagull played as a trio, minus auxiliary member Michael Zullicki. Because of that and the obvious absence of producer Nick Huggins, the trio had less going on than on their recent second album,
Council Tree. Compared to that record, which is so cleanly rendered within copious amounts of open space, the live set was more straightforward and rough-cut both. It was just guitar, bass, and drums, and even the bassist departed for two songs. The band was reluctant to try one song – a sort of math-y, Mogwai-ish, stop-start thing – but in the end they tried and pulled it off. While it might have been tricky for newcomers to get past the similarity to Radiohead in frontman Chris Bolton’s vocals, the ringing, repetitive interplay of instruments was a quiet source of magnetism.
The night’s lone out-of-towners,
Richard In Your Mind made the most of their third Melbourne stop in recent months, towing an amazing album in
My Volcano. Two of the five members performed barefoot, which suggests something about just how laidback these guys are. Then there’s the music, a sunbaked scramble of folk, pop, psych, electronics, and party tricks. Dreamed up and fronted by namesake singer/guitarist Richard Cartwright, the band nonetheless relies very much on each player, including SPOD’s Brent Griffin, who manned extra drums, drum pads, and samples. Loyal to the album - but not beholden - the band proved wildly vibrant on the early highlight ‘Birds’. It’s a typical – well, only for this band – slice of tropical chill-out balladry, complete with canned tweets and a casual listing of avian breeds.
Cartwright donned an acoustic guitar for most of the set, nicely coexisting with the more artificial elements. And ‘Losing Our Minds’ and ‘I Will’ both shined with his distinctly squeaky voice. ‘The Sun Broke Into Your Heart’ remains one of the year’s sweetest Australian songs, while album opener ‘Tiny Colossus Face’ oddly recalled Porno For Pyros, just this once. The set was understandably heavy on songs from
My Volcano, although Cartwright acquitted himself well with the humble rap flow of ‘Try To Make It Chill’ from last December’s digital-only
Summertime EP. There was a huge range of sounds, from the exaggerated whammy bar of an electric guitar amid some cosmic jamming to the clear-sky country strum of ‘Edge Off Dreaming’. The band finished with a sort of Appalachian hoe down, having long since blown almost every mind in the room.
Pikelet was great, making use of Evelyn Morris’s full-band incarnation every bit as well as at the album launch last April for second album
Stem. This was the second night of the co-headline tour, following the previous night’s kick-off in Geelong just as the Cats suffered defeat. Songs from
Stem flowed freely, with Joe Foley guesting again – this time on banjo – on the dreamy single ‘Red Pleather’. The album sounds better every day, and there was a new remix EP featuring mutations of ‘Gameland’ and ‘Pillow Castle’ sitting at the merch table.
On paper maybe, Pikelet doesn’t have a lot in common with Richard In Your Mind. But seeing them back to band, with so many terrific players assembled and doing their thing - all free-wheeling psychedelic pop - they seemed suddenly like the most kindred of spirits.
Doug Wallen