I am the king of the divan

Saturday 9th May 2009 - The Old Bar, Fitzroy
New Estate
Elizabeth Pistol Club
Midnight Caller
Ashtray Boy

Tram downtown and then over to Brunswick Street. It is the first time I've been over in that area. My current area is a bit posh/fake/cafe culture, so it is a welcome change. Dinner first at a Chinese restaurant. I have been looking for mapo dofu as good as I ate in China. I try it here and it is fine but not the same. They also have lots of Mao things scattered all over, I feel souvenir regret again, not buying that cool Chairman Mao poster of him waving hello with sunlight coming out of his fingers from that one shop in Beijing. Damn. We bought lots of Vietnamese posters which are pretty cool but that doesn't completely make up for missing that. You know, it was the first week of China and it was all over the place, but once we got further south, there wasn't as much cool stuff like that around. And carrying it around for another few months (or shipping it home), put us off a little bit. Oh well, next once in a lifetime trip then. Dinner takes forever, which is another difference from China where most meals arrived a few seconds after ordering. Also, it was rather expensive, unlike China. But I should stick to the subject here.

Ashtray Boy is already playing when we get there. Apparently they have been around for decades (mid 80s), constantly shifting lineups except for Dr Lee, the guitar player. Liz Phair sang on a few of their songs back before she was famous. A friend of C's is playing drums for them now. They are nice. A bit mellow, indy, jangly, low keyed. I wish I could hear more of the vocals, just barely above the music in the mix. I guess I think they are a bit like the Feelies but a little bit slower.

Midnight Caller are up next. Damn, I should have brought ear plugs. I need to include that in my going out kit in the future. Now I like loud music and all but I feel a little cheated about this one. I think there was something about the bass player that really bugged me and he turned out to be the main abuser of volume. He was soundchecking Metallica bass lines before they started and at times used ridiculously fuzzy distortion and really liked whacking things with his bass to make loud clunks. (The sound guy seemed decidedly unamused when he smashed the mic stand and the microphone was rolling all over the floor.) Now done correctly, I'd be on my feet cheering that sort of thing but it just seemed like noise that didn't really fit the rest of the music. I liked the bits where he just kind of played normally or even better where it was just the two guys on guitar throwing back and forth fuzzy jangly point counterpoint almost trance like sounds. The vocals didn't really register much over all the music, so I'm not sure of they were good or bad. It was easy to kind of let it wash over you and let your mind wander. I was thinking back about things I had seen way back, I had recently unearthed some old concert fliers and realized, wow, I had seen Sonic Youth for $4, or Nick Cave for $7 on Halloween, or seeing the Swans at some crappy warehouse, or, ahh good times.

Elizabeth Pistol Club, they were kind of cool. The guitar player was on the other side so I couldn't see or hear a lot of him. The bass player had a bass with high cutouts so he could play even higher notes and tended to play mostly quite high and lots of chords. He also sort of sang, almost low talking. They had a girl drummer, she hit hard and had lots of fairly complicated patterns, was pretty good but really kept screwing up the last song, off by a beat or so every so often and everybody had to pull it back together. They seemed to be having fun though. She played a lot of toms and with the low singing and the way the guitar sounded, it reminded me a whole lot of Dance With Me era T.S.O.L. or maybe a less industrial Savage Republic.

Unfortunately, public transit in Melbourne doesn't go much past 1 so we couldn't stay for the entire set for New Estate. Apparently they have been around for years and years too. They were quite fun, lo-fi jangly, quite distorted electric piano, and everybody switched off singing. I kept thinking of Sonic Youth covering Ca Plane Pour Moi. We only got to see about five songs before we had to run to catch one of the last trams. Next time, ear plugs and a bike so I won't have to be at the mercy of the tram schedules.