shimweasel

Tonight, I pity everyone who isn’t me. The Maladies played the Excelsior tonight, and as always were precious little short of a religious experience.

Edit: Hm. I should really post more often - this was a few weeks ago now.

I have a setlist with me, filched from underneath the bassist’s not-so-watchful eye, so I can go through the set song by song.

1. “The Woods”.

An absolute fucking barnstormer.

“Oh Mary, dance along the wire/Because tonight, we’ll set these woods on fire” - this is one of my favourite Maladies tracks, and it was a perfect way to kick off the night. Daniel showed he could be angry as well as angsty - he’s got a massively powerful voice, and, while offstage he’s mellow and even humble, on stage he’s a consummate frontman.

1. “Glory” … I can’t remember how this song goes. I remember enjoying it massively, but that doesn’t help you much.

2. “Who’s?”

A bitter, country-tinged paean to obsessive, doomed, unreciprocated love.

1. “So Fine”

Another favourite, this song starts out almost brash, and slowly descends into madness - “my friends don’t like me/when I piss and I moan/so I feel so fine, I feel so fine”.

1. “Louise”

This was a Don Walker cover, and an excellent choice, too - I didn’t like the Bob Dylan cut I heard them play recently, but this perfectly suits their heartfelt, confessional style.

1. “Addiction”

A jaunty little sex jam about a Tasmanian girl. If there’s any justice in the world, Dan ought to have been admitted to hospital with a crushed pelvis and an ineradicable grin after writing this song.

1. “Jump Down”
2. “Falling”
3. “Take me down”

Given that all three of these songs are about downward velocity, I can’t actually remember which is which. Sorry, fellas.

Since writing this, I’ve seen the Maladies twice more, at the Sandringham and at an odd little concert at Home nightclub. The room was disappointingly sparse at both gigs - the headliner for the Sando gig, despite an impressive pedigree (X, the Saints) was nothing particularly special, yet the room was nearly empty for the Maladies and jam-packed for him. Regardless, I dragged a few new people along to the show, and they all enjoyed it - Jules was particularly tickled by the Metallica riff the guitarist chucked in between songs.

The Home gig was a little weirder. I saw the Dirty Three play beforehand with Daniel, and was mightily impressed, and he managed to persuade me to come to their set at 2:30. After a bit of argy-bargy with the bouncer at Home, who seemed to think I wasn’t on the guest list (cheeky bastard), I managed to get in and found the boys upstairs. Unfortunately, that seemed to be about as full as the room actually got - there were as many people on stage as there were in the band. (There was some momentary amusement from watching a couple of Beautiful People attempt to dance Home-style to the Maladies’ mournful melodies, though. Doesn’t quite work.)

Anyway, I’d better stop here before this turns into an angry rant about how people would rather pay money to listen to shit than take a chance on a band they haven’t heard before. I’ve done that topic to death, methinks.