Review: Lana Harris
[Image courtesy Brisbane Festival]
Have you heard the one about the Spiegeltent? A girl and a guy walk into this travelling bar – a pointy topped sphere shaped by mirrors, wood and glass. Golden poles, blood red velvet curtains swooping overhead, low lighting and dancing shadows. Smoky. Drinks service on the curve, booths hugging the circumference. A big-top boudoir with an audience.
The girl and the guy start out cautious in this ringmaster’s playground. They clamber carefully onto the high wire – wobble and steady, wobble and steady. She wears a pair of lasciviously red heels as she teeters. The shoes return sporadically throughout the acts, as do the scene setting ukulele and tinkling pianola. Music through out invokes alternately past, present and future – offered in no particular order. Subject to whims and acrobatics, time periods depart and return often.
Continue reading Cantina @ The Spiegeltent (Brisbane Festival) 5th September 2010 – Live Review
There was a great turnout at the Globe theatre on Saturday night, with Brisbane music fans coming together to support fundraising efforts to save the heritage of the Regent Theatre in the city.
The general rule is that you can recycle a trend around about every thirty years. The late ‘90s saw the return of super flared jeans and platform shoes adapted from their 1970’s incarnations, and the final years of the 2000-2010’s saw 1980’s revivals turning everything fluro again, including ruched skirts and the accessories holding big hair in check. As the wardrobes of many of the theatregoers tonight attested, the 80’s success Fame: The Musical is ripe for a comeback. Bucking usual trends, Fame (the movie) actually came out first, then a TV series, and then the musical, and it’s worth noting that the story is not the same as the movie.
Having missed all but the closing bars of opening act, Victoria’s Ryan Meeking & The Few thanks to the perpetual and chronic lack of parking in Sydney’s Newtown and Enmore areas; I got into the warm and cosy confines of the iconic Enmore Theatre just before San Francisco chart botherers Train took to the stage.
With both headliner, and second support bands touring off the back of their latest releases, they’ve come; ready blow the house away with an arrangement of toxically destructive yet undeniably distinct songs. Maylene don’t’ look like your typical metal band, because they’re not. Neither are Dillinger. Both acts are well known for their pioneering ability to create and mould new genres of sounds, encompassing an array of metal, jazz, blues, rockabilly, punk and screamo. The collection of sounds we’re about to hear are unique only to the bands who’ve created them. Maylene are drilling to the core of traditional rock and metal and intently injecting an air of southern flair, quite familiar to their place of foundation; Burmingham, Alabama. While Dillinger, a much earlier conception, incorporate their own blend of metal (progressive, thrash, hardcore, punk) and jazz fusions to have become, the pioneers of what critics and fans alike now know as “math metal”. With such a partricular combination of artists, the show will surely be, as mind boggling and utterly intriguing as the bands themselves.
