Review by Ben Connolly
Photos by Annie Wilson
In the great lottery of the Sidewave venue scramble, Placebo must surely have pulled the short straw. Not that St Kilda’s Palais Theatre is generally anything to be disappointed with – its grungy dilapidation holds a special place in Melbourne’s rock vernacular. But when it comes to a furious set by one of the world’s best emotive post-punk purveyors, those torn leather seats are just woeful.
Seated gigs are sometimes just the pits, with often fickle gig-going punters varying between reckless abandon and a studied aloofness, meaning that on any given night you can find yourself jumping to your heart’s content surrounded by fellow revellers, or having to reign in your exuberance or suffer the fate of a thousand daggers shot your way.
Continue reading Live Review | Placebo @ Palais Theatre, Melbourne – February 27, 2014
Gary Numan is a truly unique artist and everybody knows it. And he is back in black and ready to darken Australia and New Zealand once again!
Children of Bodom, a name that redefined a genre and made it their own and a name that continues to galvanise all walks of life and all Heavy Metal sub-genres within that culture, it’s a name that crosses genres and moulds them into the one army. In 2014, Children of Bodom return to Australia for an exclusive East Coast tour on the back of their strongest release to date that surpasses any of the band’s classic and ground breaking releases such as ‘Something Wild’, ‘Hatebreeder’ and ‘Follow The Reaper’.
There was already a significant amount of water flowing under the bridge by the time Flemington’s famous iron gates were flung open for this year’s Melbourne chapter of the Big Day Out. With ownership wrangling continuing into a second year, a buy-out by one of Australian music’s most polarising characters, a line-up to end all line-ups only to be tarnished late in the day by the pull out of Blur, and now speculation that the national festival will once again be curtailed by Perth’s inability to get its shit together as a cultural collective. In some ways, 11am on the Friday before the long weekend was a welcomed event, if only to end the continual news feed of the daily life of Australia’s biggest orgy of rock.
Dark Tranquillity will finally be returning to tour Australia; it will be their first time back here since 2006. One of the pioneers of the Swedish Gothenburg Melodic Death Metal scene of the time, and, an iconic namesake in their own right, Dark Tranquillity has evolved into far more than a pigeon holed stereotype act akin to the region which has defined a genre of its own. Dark Tranquillity is the complete package; they have that emotional and captivating groove laden sound with enough melodic and crisp guitars which is nowadays filled with melancholic thought provoking hooks and music score; they have a charisma and aura uniquely defined and attached to everything they do; they are, in the true sense, standing alone yet leading the way for the evolution and continuation of acts that spawned from Sweden born of the Gothenburg Melodic Death Metal mould. Dark Tranquillity is entrenched in the hearts and souls of a gripping cross section demographic.