Soundwave
Eastern Creek Raceway, Sydney
Sunday 21st February 2010
By Andrew Tijs & Sam Thompson
Soundwave today is, metaphorically (and, in one stage of the gruelling arrival process, literally) the equivalent of being packed into a bus, at 40-degrees and 90% humidity, swarmed by hyperactive 15-year olds boys who just learned how to swear. Then someone starts giving us beer.
Due to the barren hills of the outer-West’s Eastern Creek Raceway, Soundwave Sydney swiftly devolved into a punk rock and metal refugee camp. It was a cloudless, scorching day. The sun turned your skin into bacon after a minute and there was nowhere to hide. Less than one per cent of the acres of rolling crabgrass was in shade. Sweat-drenched, beetroot-red children were huddling against overflowing bins, toilet blocks, portaloos, in between food vans, or holding garbage and cardboard boxes over their heads as a last resort.
Then the water and food started running out (this was at 4pm, less than halfway through the festival). It seemed the vast majority of the toilets were inside bar areas that kids couldn't access and, due to licensing capacities, most adults had to line up for half an hour to get in. Punters were ID-ed every time they entered, making the wrist bands initially handed out totally redundant. At one stage we joined a line of people handing their water bottles over a fence to the outside of the venue where a staff member was filling them from a broken, gushing spigot.
This was just bonus horror added to the quotidian nastiness of rock festivals: suburban bodybuilders, with tattoos, hats and tee-shirt slogans so idiotic they should be illegal, packing their entire year's gig-going (and, seemingly, alcohol consumption) into one hellish day.
It can’t have been that bad, though. I mean, there were some pretty spiffing acts, right? This is true. You just couldn’t go out see them. The organisers had arranged a raging bushfire in front of every stage.
Regardless, the most anticipated bands were reformed icons Faith No More and venomous UK hardcore punks Gallows. Gallows were the festival opener. Faith No More were the last, scheduled ten hours later.
Gallows were briefly inspiring, as they, and fellow Brits Architects, tore up the stage and literally threw themselves at the crowd with unpretentious fury. Architects were more spastic and brutal, with a gut-wrenching guitar chug and squeal. Gallows just punished with nihilism and speed.
Sunny Day Real Estate hit the stage with an overwhelming pang of nostalgia. Few bands carry the weight of this much-lauded Seattle quartet considering their brief existence. It’s Sunny Day’s second reformation and their first visit to Australia. They’re humble and predictably gracious between near-perfect live renditions of classics from their debut Diary, however today’s audience seem to have arrived more out of curiosity than adoration... that and to get a good “posi” for Taking Back Sunday. Foo Fighter Nate Mendel and fellow Foo founder William Goldsmith are certainly a treat to see up close, but the five-minute sagas are wasted on the collective short attention span.
Over the hills and far away The Weakerthans are enduring problems with their sound check. John K. Samson and his bandmates appear bemused, since they’ve been added to yet another festival on the back of Samson’s fiery Propagandhi pedigree rather than his current musical direction. Touring as a six-piece, The Weakerthans are buffered by keys, a xylophone and trumpet, which is just enough to prevent their soft atmospheric acoustica from being lost in the bleed from the other stages. Pacy numbers like “Aside” (immortalized in the closing credits of Wedding Crashers) encourages much whooping from us and the three or four others who were paying attention. Their witty, wistful folk is quickly replaced by AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ and fellow Canucks Comeback Kid land upon the stage as the marauding, shirtless horde charge over the hill into a swelling moshpit. Much chest pounding and air punching ensues. Dudes. Dudes.
During a half-hour Bataan Death March from one end of the venue to the other and back in an attempt to watch Eagles Of Death Metal (a heat-stroke-y failure), LA prog-sludge heroes Isis lumbered through what sounded like one continual opus. So followed a quick retreat to a packed marquee half a click away from the meta” stage to watch a valiant but coolly-observed Clutch add some gutsy swamp blues boogie to the proceedings.
We then almost accidentally catch the entirety of a ludicrously-dated power metal set from Canadian battlers Anvil. They were overly appreciative of the accepting crowd but it was sad that they still don’t realise they’re a joke. Not one more sale of their thirteenth and most recently-ignored album Thirteen would result from this performance. Paramore’s impossibly miniscule frontgirl Hayley Williams satiates the more feminine third of the crowd on one of the barren wasteland mainstages, with a mousey voice but a strong backing band – the result being Evanescence without the edge and Avril without the songs. She’s very polite, though.
By now it was becoming clear that Mad Max’s desert apocalypse was bearing down upon us. The aforementioned kids were dropping like flies, the water lines stretched into the swarming crowds. We gritted our teeth in the vain hope that we could make it through jolly ska-rock buffoons Reel Big Fish to see The Get Up Kids. We were dead wrong. A fifteen-year-old girl galloped past us to the stage singing along to their opening track and one of the rare original songs they played; they seem to have become a party cover band since the mild success of their A-Ha cover. Her parents could’ve conceived her while listening to Reel Big Fish’s first album. It was then that we lost hope.
Peeking over the ridge from the merciful shadow of a hotdog van, we heard a muddy - and maudlin-sounding Brian Molko drily thanking the crowd for getting skin cancer to witness Placebo. Dusty, dazed and shirtless urchins littered the ground and we could see a small but steady stream of fed-up and fucked-up punters trekking toward the distant exit and the Guantanamo Bay-styled gravel-and-metal-fences charter bus area.
It beckoned us. We cursed, we wept a tear for The Get Up Kids, Anti-Flag, Whitechapel and Faith No More and finally, reluctantly, escaped. With, incredibly, no lasting physical damage. While other venues will provide respite, the human rights violation that is Eastern Creek has completely obliterated any remaining joy to be gleaned from day festivals. Baked it dead in the sun.
Andrew Tijs and Sam Thompson