sleepmakeswaves – Gig Review & Photo Gallery 4th October @ Max Watts, Melbourne/Naarm, VIC
sleepmakeswaves
Max Watts, Melbourne/Naarm, VIC
October 4th, 2024
Support: Rolo Tomassi, Lite
The mighty Bird’s Robe Records have done it again, serving up yet another tasty, highly varied, multi-national lineup for our viewing and listening pleasure. Tonight is a ten-year anniversary celebration of a momentous album in the headline band’s career, but more on that in just a sec. We have two superb support acts to experience first.
Opening the evening’s festivities is England’s Rolo Tomassi. I’ve been aware of this band for quite some time, they seem to have been out here to tour quite a few times over the years, but my path has never crossed with theirs to enable me to see them live. Until now. And apparently I’ve been missing out. Until now….
Being dubbed ‘math rock’ or ‘mathcore’, their music and live performance are pure chaos. The music is both dense and wild, lurching crazily from mood to contrasting mood seemingly in the blink of an eye, pure insanity one minute, textured and atmospheric the next. And with schizophrenic delivery from not one but two skilled vocal technicians, the overall effect is pure musical hysteria.
At the same time, the band members are in complete control of their art, they know exactly what they’re doing. It pushes the boundaries of chaos without slipping over the edge into something incoherent.
Rolo Tomassi’s live show is both mesmerising and devastating.
And speaking of devastating, a word on the band’s frontman, Eva Korman – she sings and performs like her life depends on it, giving it everything for fifty minutes, shifting up and back from impish pop singer to insane banshee queen on a dime. And with secondary lead vocalist James Spence filling in the gaps (as well as playing the keys), this band is a vocal as well as musical powerhouse.
What an opening. And now for something completely different.
Lite hail from Tokyo and have been around for over two decades. It’s fantastic when a bill like this expands your musical horizons, brings you something you’ve never heard of before, and realistically never would have had they not been put before you. What else is fantastic is when a band like this draws influence from the Western sounds and styles we here in the West know and love so much, but simultaneously combine it with their own musical and cultural touchpoints, creating something familiar and yet different enough to really turn your head.
This is what Lite does.
If you’re hung up on genres/classifications, you would lump this band in with the whole ‘math rock’ thing (and herein we see why it’s important to not get too hung up on dumping bands into convenient boxes – this puts them into an adjacent genre to Rolo Tomassi, which is ridiculous.) The mate I have come with deems them ‘funky Asian trash-rock’, which is as good an attempt as any.
It is that very funk that they inject into their sound that sets them widely apart from anything else on the bill tonight, as well as most other bands in the whole, broader post-rock/math rock/mathcore pigeonhole.
Their songs are all things to all people – funky most but not all of the time, heavy on occasion, jazzy sometimes, broadly experimental, mostly instrumental but featuring some quirky vocals here and there. And watching them playing those songs live is shitloads of fun.
Tonight, Lite are a disarming bolt out of left field, but a highly enjoyable one.
Anniversary celebrations of a beloved album, during which the band plays said beloved album in full, are always a joyously predictable, and predictably joyous, affair, and such is the case tonight. You know exactly what’s coming, but you anticipate it with bated breath nonetheless.
Love of Cartography came out ten years ago (and in some ways, this boggles my mind.) I adored it when it came out, and watching it unfold, end-to-end, in track order in a live setting now, a decade later, is nothing short of blissful.
Especially when the album is delivered with sleepmakeswaves’s famous, trademark, wall-to-wall ball-tearing energy, from the soaring opening strains of ‘Perfect Detonator’ through to the moody ambience of ‘Your Time Will Come Again’. The album is a journey, and when showcased live in full to an adoring audience in this way, even more so.
The fact that this band pulls off such an engaging and riveting live show without a single word being sung may amaze the average, garden-variety music fan, but not me. And not their legion of fans across Australia and around the world.
This is the second time sleepmakeswaves have toured the nation this year, having been across the country earlier this year to promote their superb latest record, It’s Here, But I Have No Names For It. They could tour five times in the space of a year and I’d want to attend every time, such is the power of their live show and the esteem in which I hold them.
The bill tonight is wildly varied, and yet makes perfect, cohesive sense at the same time, and represents yet another fabulous night of live music in our live music-loving city.
Gig Review by Rod Whitfield
Photo Gallery by Clinton Hatfield. Insta: @ampd.agency.
Please credit Wall of Sound and Clinton Hatfield if you repost photos.
Rolo Tomassi
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Lite
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sleepmakeswaves
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