Milk! Records “Good For You” Tour
Howler, Saturday 5 March 2016
Writer: Fiona Hile
Live photo by Reuben Acciano, full gallery here.
Blur’s “Coffee and TV” is filling out the gradually diminishing pockets of space in
the capacious Howler theatre as Courtney Barnett, Jen Cloher and assorted label
mates ready the stage for the Melbourne instalment of the Milk! Records national
tour. Oliver Mestitz (who Courtney will later refer to as ‘one of the best songwriters
in the world’) and cellist Sarah Farquharson of The Finks begin with a spoken-word manifesto
that risks coming off as feel-good advertising but manages enough Pandora moments
(‘I don’t believe anyone can really love another person as much as they love
themselves’) to provide what serves, instead, as a thematic template for the night to
come.
The East Brunswick All Girls Choir are the surprise of the evening with a full and
winning sound due partly to a double-drums high-wire act performed by Jen Sholakis
and Dave Mudie. Their songs are what Beyoncé might call ‘skanky’, with Marcus
Hobbs’ vocals ranging everywhere from Tim Rogers to Jeff Buckley to PiL-era John
Lydon. His intro to “West Brunswick” – ‘I’m pretty sure I wrote this before Courtney
wrote her song about Preston’ – adds a much-needed nip of poison (‘Yes, that’s right,
I’m a dick’) to a night that is otherwise in danger of turning into an unmitigated
love-fest.
If gratitude is good for you, whoever devised the ongoing musical cross-pollination
and seamlessly interwoven transitions between sets has gifted us a couple of
statistical life-years. Ouch My Face, featuring visual artist Celeste Potter on vocals,
bludgeon the audience with driving machine-gun sounds and lyrics like ‘Gonna
follow you to work / with my eyes I tear your shirt’ (“Creep Heart”). They twist a
skilfully-forged knife in the guts of Metal and make me think of the revenge novel
Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi or Melbourne poet Gig Ryan’s “If I Had a Gun”.
Jen Cloher’s intense and iconoclastic presence reminds us of her unique status in the
Australian rock landscape. Songs like “Mount Beauty”, “Shoestring” and “Needle in
the Hay” emit a slow-release antagonism offset by the occasional Ween-sweetened
chorus and crack-in-the-Pavement riff. Fraser Gorman is as louche as ever,
flourishing the mic cable with the flair of a 1970s leagues club host. ‘You all look
fucken hot,’ he tells us and we believe him. We’re easy pickings for songs like “Book
of Love”, “Broken Hands” and “Skyscraper Skyline Blues” (‘a metaphor for some
other shit but let’s not get into that’).
If you had never heard of Courtney Barnett you’d know something was up by the
subtle subtraction of sound and lighting. It’s moody and subdued and has the effect of
drawing audience and performer into an audiovisual embrace. Having entered a
firmament populated by artists referred to mostly by their first names, Courtney
proceeds to show us what all the fuss is about, compressing a performance of
stadium-intensity into a 20-minute set crowded with hits. An all-hands-on-deck
rendition of Suffragette City owns us. If there was ever any doubt about the level of
commitment and attention to detail that goes into keeping Milk! Enterprises afloat, a
quick post-gig look at the award-winning video for Blur’s “Coffee and TV” –
featuring “Milky” the animated milk carton – brings it all back home.
