BigStrongBrute, Ambitious Lovers @ Black Star (15.05.09)

Last Friday's show at Black Star Coffee in West End was perhaps the fourth time I'd been to the venue since it started featuring bands at the start of the year. It's a cool little cafe just near the Boundary St / Vulture St intersection, just off the main drag on the cusp of suburbia. All of the gigs I've attended at Black Star so far have been great fun, as there's something really enjoyable about sitting having a chat with some friends and drinking hot coffee / chocolate instead being in a hot, loud club drinking a beer. The layout of the cafe means that the band sets up essentially in the middle of the audience, providing an extremely intimate environment for musical performance.

Ambitious Lovers were the first band to play on this particular Friday night. Lead Lover Joel Saunders is no stranger to Black Star, having played the venue previously and also being the curator of the regular 'Foot Foot Foot' shows that take place there every few weeks. For this night he was joined by his two regular female vocals & percussion companions, Kel and Elise. The band has been playing as a three-piece for almost a year now, and it's helped them to become a more solid band. While Ambitious Lovers have been (and will most likely always be) a ramshackle act both live and on record, having a third member seems to have made the band somewhat tighter - no longer do most songs have a section where the different musicians seem to be completely out of sync with each other. They're still wonderfully shambolic, but no longer in a way that gets in the way of their, quite frankly, astoundingly beautiful songs.

Many people don't attempt to take Ambitious Lovers at more than face value. They hear Joel's cracked vocals and distorted ukulele, they see the percussion kit made from milk crates and bottle caps and fly swatters, they watch the band descending into a noisy freakout at the end of a beautiful outsider-folk song. They make up their minds that the musicians are being 'difficult' and that this is music that is too amateur to be worth trying to dissect. They never take the effort to hear the actual songs underneath the facade of 'experimentalism'. I don't think the band care in the slightest, but it's still a damn shame because there's actually very little to Ambitious Lovers that is all that difficult to enjoy. So many of their songs are wonderfully melodic and heartbreaking in their vulnerability. Their sets contain more emotion than any other Brisbane band I can think of.

BigStrongBrute haven't been a regular fixture on the Brisbane live scene for a while now, with their only semi-recent appearance being their support slot for Mt Eerie in October last year. Back then they showed off their rusted take on folk and Americana with a full 'rock' band lineup. On this particular night, however, they brought things right back, with the band featuring Paul Donoughue on vocals and guitar (since BigStrongBrute is essentially his solo act) plus a flautist and trumpet player. I found it to be the most effective lineup of the band I'd seen, allowing Paul to strip the songs down to their bare essentials while still allowing them to swell up when necessary. All of the BigStrongBrute shows I've seen in the last few years have engendered a great degree of goodwill towards the band - they just seem to be that sort of act, the sort where their enthusiasm for playing is easily transferred to the audience. This particular show had something more to it than that though, there was a palpable sense of sorrow mixed in with the usual celebratory feelings. Maybe it was just the affect of having the brass and wind instruments with no pounding percussion to provide a counterpoint. Whatever the reason, despite being only six songs long, it was one of the most beautiful sets I've seen in recent times. There were quite a few songs that I didn't recognise (although there were still some old favourites such as 'Everything All At Once') so hopefully this bodes well for an upcoming release from the band.

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Favourite Brisbane Bands - Cam's Top 5

Recently we here at Before Hollywood were requested to list our favourite Brisbane bands by a local music-related company. Since we are nothing if not beholden to the machinations of the music industry, we graciously complied. Therefore, let me present to you my 5 favourite current Brisbane bands (Gav's will be forthcoming).

Note: this is not an 'of-all-time' list, I'm just talking of bands who are releasing stuff right now. Also, even though Ed Kuepper, Robert Forster etc are still releasing music, I thought it kind of went against the focus of BH to list them here, since they don't really need any assistance from me.

Turnpike:
Is there a better band in existence than Turnpike? If I'm being objective then the answer is probably yes, but if I let myself give in to sentimentalism then the answer is a hearty 'NO!'. They're the sort of band who seem to inspire fanaticism in a percentage of people who chance across them, but equally seem to be fated to remain on the relative fringes of the more 'successful' aspects of the Brisbane music 'scene'. I think the band are perfectly ok with this, though.

I think that the thing about Turnpike that equally turns some people off and lures others in is the ugliness to their music. Adam's guitar verges on white noise a lot of the time, the music regularly goes through 90 degree turns to take you somewhere unexpected, and the band walks this weird line between being completely shambolic and incredibly tight - somehow they manage to be both at the same time. But when you get past that there's also a strange sort of beauty in there; you realise that there are actual melodies in the haze of distortion and screaming, that some of the time they're playing a fractured form of pop music, that the jarring transitions actually make perfect sense, and that the push and pull between the three players is what makes the band so thrilling - there's that constant sense that everything could fall apart, or that something completely amazing could be about to happen. Sometimes you get the former, but more often it's the latter.

The Rational Academy:
It's been a long time coming, but The Rat Acad are finally going to be releasing their debut album in a the next few weeks. I remember seeing my first (the first?) RA show back in the little room near the entrance of 610 back in 2004. I was super excited about the band, as it featured members of the recently disbanded Autumn Giants, Delpino and Iron On. It was a Brisbane indie-rock supergroup, and the descriptions I'd heard of the band sounded fantastic. For me, they lived up to those expectations. Through the years (and countless drummers, plus the recent addition of bass and occasional flourishes of live glitchy laptop... stuff) they've retained their core sound of distorted, down-tuned guitars married to loud drums and relatively meek vocals, creating a dreamy pop soundscape. They've also managed to move into some interesting new territory, especially on record (see: the cut-up folk of their debut EP '(drums)', as well as the synth-pop of '2004' from the upcoming full-length 'a heart against your own').

Ambitious Lovers:
Last Thursday the Ambitious Lovers returned to performing live, and it was a heart-warming thing to witness. While the lineup has changed, the core vibe has remained the same: mostly beautiful but occasionally cathartically ragged ukelele underneath boy-girl vocals, with 'junkyard' percussion accompaniments (ie: drums made out of milk crates, wine glasses, kitchen utensils, etc). Where it can sometimes seem as though most local bands are just trying to rip off their favourite international acts, Ambitious Lovers seem to be able to effortlessly carve out their own unique sound and feel, even though they may be fairly comfortably lumped in with the whole 'freak folk' thing. Equally, they don't ever come across as being willfully difficult - there is always a beautifully written song at the core of even their most wayward moments. And when they do 'pretty'... well, they do it like noone else in town, with an authenticity that convinces.

Nova Scotia:
They're by far the newest band on this list, having only existed for a matter of months, but after (self-) releasing two pretty amazing indie-rock/pop EPs and playing a handful of quality shows they've convinced me that they're a band to love. And really, with the pedigree behind the members of the band Nova Scotia was always going to be at least 'pretty good'. Luckily for us, they've pretty much surpassed all of their previous groups - they've somehow managed to take many of the best aspects of those bands and then add in new elements to take the whole thing further.

Iron On:
My review of Iron On's recent release 'The Verse' may not have exactly been glowing, but make no mistake: Iron On are a really good band (in fact I'm listening to the EP right now and liking it a lot more... though the things that I didn't like about it before still grate on me). They've been releasing quality music and playing quality shows for too long to be discounted, either by any perceived 'stagnation' in the band or purely because they've been around for so long that they start being written off due to their ubiquity in the 'scene' or, even worse, the fickle nature of the indie rock community. Iron On's sense of pop-songcraft is strong, and experience has polished it to the nth degree. The only question is whether or not they can continue to release music without things getting stale. We'll all find out later in the year, when they release their sophomore album. I'm hoping they release the sort of album that they've shown they have the potential to make.


Special mentions: Nightcrash (too recently disbanded), Scul Hazzards (too recently relocated), Rialto Decibel Choir (too new), Bloon (too 'reportedly finished' and too 'plays once in a blue moon', but still awesome), Shiver Like Timber, a whole host of others.

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Weekly News - January 20th

• 2008 is getting along well, and so are Brisbane's premier grunge revivalists, Violent Soho. The band have just posted another excellent track, 'Muscle Junkie', on their myspace. Hopefully this burst of activity is a build up to some sort of release, but for the impatient ones among you the band will be touring next month.

• An Horse have also been busy. The duo or putting the finishing touches to their new record with Brisbane's own super-producer Magoo. As a teaser the band have uploaded the unmastered yet unquestionably brilliant 'Company' to their myspace.

• Psych-popsters New Manic Spree are gearing up for their debut release next week. The three track demo EP will be launched next Friday at The Zoo.

• The Ambitious Lovers are also recording and have posted a bunch of demos from their forthcoming 7".

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