Inner-West girls? Who, Emma Tom?

Republished from butterboxmedia.com

Dave McCormack & The Polaroids: Hopetoun Hotel. Saturday 12th December, 2004.

If I didn’t know any better, (granted, an unpersuasive opener) I’d declare covers the new black. Not cover bands, which whatever colour they come in - and puce immediately springs to mind - are insipid and toothless. But cover versions of mutant translation that tint a set with diversity extending it to the stars and creating an engaging musical mongrel. But then, ain’t that new black thing kinda redundant?

During their set Dave McCormack & The Polaroids covered Iggy Pop’s, “I’m Bored” and, “Sister Golden Hair” by America. Dave also downed tools to harmonize for Miss French during a melancholic rendering of Wham’s, “Last Christmas.” “Living La Vida Loca” closed the night’s bill as Dave fronted Astro Tabasco who had reappeared after a speedy setup following The Polaroids’ encore.

In searching for integrity Dave’s knack of writing graphically about his past in terms of the present blows out to barbwire hilarity on his latest album, The Truth About Love. From which a few songs were incorporated into the night’s set. While the remainder came from the alien-in-paradise miscellany of its predecessor: Candy [DasKong p/l; 2002].

From the blood-on-the-ground stance on gender relations he took on his previous album, Dave’s emerged with a poolside repartee-type of dryness on this latest release. Still, they’re a great bunch of stories, if only crying out for a coherent thesis strong enough to hold them together. He consciously frames obsession around the inevitable fact that he isn’t a wartless paragon in concise and approachable ways without overwriting, but their live auditory interpretation failed to rile up the emotional core like the songs from Candy did. And particularly like the stuff his earlier band Custard once did. Standing against the Hoey’s brickwork, below the sign announcing what feedbag possibilities are available in Tong’s Kitchen, these new songs sounded to me like a 50-something hormonally ‘challenged’ woman of low self-regard, bolstering her self-imposed mediocrity by complaining, unconvincingly, to her equally barren peers about some received (and sought, obviously…) attention from past lovers. Admittedly it’s a role reversal, but still, it’s a narrative and analytical equivalent of crying somewhat incoherently into a beer. Despite this periodic ungainliness, his music, particularly at the top end with its emphasized melody over the steady beat of drum and bass lines unquestionably suits his voice, which hacks its way sentence by sentence through blues, R&B and soul towards pure rock and roll, (where there’s always gonna be a little quasi-noble bitterness anyway). To me though, the earlier girlophobia stuff showed more honesty on the night than The Truth... did.

The song, “The Inner West,” with its implacable bass and sixties-style organ sounded great. Demonstrating many of the details that made (shrewd observers may notice the unfortunate use of the past tense) rock so genuinely powerful. Like when a situation specific to the songwriter is turned into a universal while narrowly avoiding the tag of perpetual (Pop) adolescence. With a credible human understanding - all of his own too - he sang as if the song were new to him when he intoned gravely, “The inner west man, they (sic) got the beautiful girls” and then, in a side-of-the-mouth deference to first person preservation he added “And I wish I’d never seen them.” All the time his Strat’s notes fell forcefully into the air as his innocence curdled into cynicism.

The set’s ducking, weaving and surmounting despair disappointingly gave way to fraudulence as uneven as a failed Vegas lounge act doing folksy shtick at a seaside hotel. In fact, it was so cover band it belonged somewhere else entirely. (At this point I’ll forgo suggesting North Sydney’s Rag & Fanny Late Bloomers Late Night Lonely Hearts Club, but it’d be a likely starting point).

Kurt Cobain once remarked that the difference between Indy music (in the strictly genre sense) and rock music (in The Rock sense) was: Indy bands usually title a song with no reference whatsoever to its subject matter. It’s a manifestly obvious opinion, or at least it was. These days however, especially in the area of performance, it’s a complication. Dividing preconceptions - those of the artist and his or her audience - can overlap into a variety show format tightrope walk that often drags a good rock show down. Anyway, coupled with a vastly annoying and pointless monologue, Dave launched into some kinda Harpo the Hypnotist enterprise hinting to the girls in the audience that nirvana would be found in his eyes if only they’d gaze, longingly, into them. A joke no doubt, but with his complaints about it being, “Too hot to play…” (from someone who proudly announced his BrisBoganVille - that is to say: sub tropical heritage) and a throwaway line about how his fellow band member had, “Wrote this next one in the van on the way over tonight,” (said twice in case the implied piquancy fell on deaf ears) the gig derailed and, erm, shortsightedly, the opaqueness of his conviction acted as a counterforce to the desired continuity of rowdy rock resonance. In a sense it was one of those music-biz betrayals, in my opinion it was more laziness than anything else.

Anyway, backed by Astro Tabasco and taking a stroll through the crowd during the final songs he closed the night. I decided to temporarily abandon the age-old joy of picking who was a fake and who was for real in favour of some real tongue-in-cheek fiction.

- Peter Thornton November, 2004