- I started my 2018 Laneway day in front of the colourfully badass Dream Wife. The English / Icelandic band looked liked they’d strode off the set of Kill Bill and brought a musical pedigree to match. Leaning into the tuneful side of the more ferocious female punk outfits of yesteryear, their mixture of seductive vixen and stabby assassin worked really rather winningly on stage.
Missing half of Dream Wife’s set I was more than adequately compensated by what I went to see instead, one of 2017’s best bands, Cable Ties. So often punk bands turn short, sharp and loud into just plain messy on stage, but the Cable Ties kids don’t. Equally at home on thirty-second thrashers and positively proggy six minute slow-burners, the trio kick it up there like they’ve been doing it forever. Call me a raving SJW if you must but, as society struggles to drag itself into the twenty-first century Cable Ties are the damn soundtrack for it: from the anti-sexual-harassment screeds on their t-shirts to that spoken-word f***ing manifesto from Say What You Mean, I felt … proud, proud to be there. Oh and they thanked 4ZZZ, which is like they were thanking me personally: rad.
The likely looking young men of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever rocked their designer stubble and did that feel heavy indie-rock that feels right for Sub Pop and uncommon in Australia. Listening to them live, well, they’re very good at it. I started thinking about how good the sound was, everywhere I was going: I think Laneway really stepped up their game this year; in general I’d describe it as ‘crisp’.
Miss Blanks took the stage like a juggernaut. Really, she’s about twice the size of her backup dancers and cuts an imposing figure. When her debut came out last year, I wondered if her in-your-face, bits out party-rap wasn’t a little gimmicky and whether it really stacked up against more experienced co-travellers like Jungle Pussy. On stage, there are still a few things to polish, but, yeah, she made me believe. The steady stream of guests (just about every other Aussie, female rapper at Laneway that day), kept it fresh. Nice to hear her beats trending away from trap and into older, dancier, clubbier stuff; feels grown-up.
My god did the heat beat down on the open-air stages. My shoes melted. They literally melted. Later they would cool into hideous new and un-foot-friendly shapes. I’m a pro tho, didn’t let it phase me. It was funny to watch the crowd slide into the growing patch of shade in front of the Future Classic stage, during the Kllo set. Chloe Kaul and Simon Lam and their latter-day heroin chic looked completely out of place in the early afternoon glare. Their music, that steady stream of soft, deep, ambient house, might have been a little better suited to two o’clock in the AM, but even if it wasn’t punchy enough to really hold the crowd’s attention, well, I don’t care. Kllo are one of my favourite dance music acts for a reason and I just blotted all the talkers out.
After a revivifying break I dropped in for a little TOKiMONSTA. The prolific producer is competent in any number of styles as she adroitly proved, moving from mid-tempo dance-pop to downtempo, to thudding hardcore, Missy Elliott remixes to wholly original material. On the flip-side I’ve never found her stuff to be really essential and as the set devolved into dance trap bangers I sort of lost interest. The heaving crowd didn’t give a goddamn about what I thought.
I’ve always had time for The Babe Rainbow. They embody a lot of psych cliches, but there’s a reason King Gizz put them on their own label and I can hear it in the depth of every record they’ve released. On stage a few more of the cliches came across and frontman Angus seemed kinda toasted which made the set, while still loopy fun, less engaging than it might have been.
I’d only ever seen Aldous Harding once before, on her first trip to Oz, doing an industry showcase at Bigsound. Stop me if I’ve told you this one before, but she had a fricking meltdown there, featuring her screeching “Why would you turn up to see something so sh**!” Seeing how she’d follow that up was reason enough to catch her at Laneway. I found her record last year to be stupendously mannered: the alternately deadpan and shriekingly nasal vocals were like a weaponised Joanna Newsom, but a lot of my know-it-all friends reckoned it was one of the year’s best releases, so, I thought I’d check it all out. Glad I did. The whole band waited, granite-faced, as Aldous arranged herself like some kind of spread-eagled praying mantis. I’m not sure what character it was she was portraying up there but she delivered it with uncompromising gusto. In the early evening mugginess as lightning struck and thunder crashed aboves she caricatured her way through an astonishing collection of glares and frowns as she whispered, thundered and shrieked her way through those skeletal, percussive songs. I’m still not sure what exactly I witnessed up there, but it connected in a way that the record, after many listens, did not. In a very strange way, that performance was like an incredibly controlled version of that original meltdown I witnessed. Very strange, possibly transcendental, definitely the most arresting thing I saw all day.
With so much good sound, everywhere I went that day, it was quite surprising that veteran UK shoegazers Slowdive would have just about the only issues. Monitor problems and regular spikes of feedback really had the band making spiky glances at the sound desk. I think though that the guy who barged down to the front yelling “you can’t hear the vocals!” maybe didn’t understand how shoegaze works. Fortunately the sound niggles worked themselves out and the crowd hung on every note of songs new and old. So great to see their new stuff (off last year’s really excellent, self-titled effort) getting as much love as the classics. Some truly epic thunderers in there, making me wonder if we shouldn’t call Slowdive post-rock as much as anything else.
Speaking of great comebacks, I tottered down to hear Bonobo doing his dance doyen thing. The downtempo producer from the ‘90s has reinvented himself in the same way as Caribou and Fourtet and he’s really owned the opportunity. The full-band doing live renditions of songs, the fabulous Szerdene doing the guest vocals. Like Jon Hopkins or Tycho in previous years, this was, happily, comfort food and artistic satisfaction combined. The only thing that could have been improved upon was my sadly murdered shoes, which, much like my feet were utterly unfit for dancing at this point. Well, it’s not Laneway if you don’t finish exhausted. Hats off to them, really, I don’t know how you programme so many acts that I want to see and make money, but they do it, year after year; and this year was better than most.
- Chris Cobcroft.