LIVE REVIEW: Twine w/ Keeskea, Bleeding Star. 22/02/2024, Moon, Wellington.

LIVE REVIEW: Twine w/ Keeskea, Bleeding Star. 22/2/24, Meow, Wellington.

 

sometimes i just like to have a nice night, ok?

for our first wellington gig feature (i live here now, there’s gonna be a lot more of these), i wanted to take myself to a show i actually wanted to see, so i jumped for joy when this bill presented itself. 3 bands. 3 good bands. some i had seen before, some i had seen only recently. The common thread seemed to be that they all shared the stage the previous weekend at Camp A Low Hum, or, at least, they were scheduled to (Bleeding Star a no show at the first weekend due to circumstances).

i started my night by getting completely lost on the way to newtown, which was great, but after a 45 minute walk i finally got to where i needed to be. i wanted to arrive early on purpose so they’d enough time to grab a beer and chat with the various emerging faces in this particular scene, but my delayed entrance cut the time i wanted in half. It felt like everyone from our emerging “alt-pop” scene was there, and my diagnosing  of this scene as “incestuous” was echoed by those in attendance. fortunately i was able to actually interrogate the violinist of both the second and last bands on the bill to get an idea of the mood of the night before it started. they seemed like nice people and we engaged in a spirted discussion on our respective cities. this tour is the first time they’ve played abroad, they confided, and they’re a little road-weary already. prodded for details, they told me they thought wellington is nice, but auckland was nothing but grey tower blocks. ouch! 

first band on the bill is Bleeding Star. i’d go as far as to describe them as some kind of “local royalty”, which raises the question of why they’ve been forced to go on first to a less then full crowd, which trickles in slowly over the course of the set. i’m awful at estimating crowd sizes, but it looked to be around 20ish people at the start of the night, swelling to 50 something during the course of the night. not a full dance floor, but for a small venue like moon, with a tiny stage and poor visibility, it’s actually optimal and prevents getting crushed trying to stand up front.

teenage heartthrobs

Bleeding Star are sort of an indie-pop punk-dunedin sound-power pop-first generation emo soup of good rock. first port of call for describing them would be the Jean Paul Sartre Experience, a oft unfairly forgotten flying nun band who’s third album named the band, but Bleeding Star’s song writing reminds me more of Bob Mould’s most vulnerable Husker Du songs, or Lou Barlow’s bursts of passion on the early Sebadoh albums. given more time and a bigger studio budget, i’m convinced the songwriting talent here could become some kind of homegrown answer to people like Brian Wilson or Jeff lynne. they’ve recently suffered the tragedy of losing guitar man Otis to a rare form of cancer and tonight was their first show after his passing so i was naturally expecting things to be a little looser then they should have been, but that was not the case. instead, we were treated to volley after volley of both brand new material and a few old favourites, delivered out from under the sultry fringe of frontman Jude. not to be outshone, his bandmates respond in kind. Operating in a kind of musical lockstep, like a laser-beam of emotional expression, they slayed me and i need them to slay me again. if you were in that room, you came away smiling. My only regret was that i couldn’t stand any closer.

the set of Bleeding Star, in an order that they didn’t play

next on the bill is adelaide's Keeskea. i’ll preface any criticism by saying this band was just really pleasant. they played well and i liked their music, and the heart breaking part is that i met the band and they were really nice. which always makes my job as a critic hard. But regardless, can we please stop putting slowly dreamy bands on the middle of bills? I don’t know what the promoters were thinking but it absolutely killed the momentum. This kind of music isn’t designed for packed crowds in dive bars. I’d love this band if i was sitting at home listening on my stereo, but not sandwiched between two high energy rock bands. You don’t book Brian Eno to play after the Ramones, even though both artists are great. that being said. i did like the music i was hearing, and i felt bad watching people peel from the dancefloor. they put me to sleep, but in a really good way, i’ll hoping to see them again, but maybe on a different bill. if you run a cafe, or need music to chill out with after a night on the tiles, i can’t recommend Keeskea enough. 

finally, a band called Twine take the stage. they’re a noise-pop act, also from adelaide. they take the term noise-pop very seriously, it seems. Because all of their songs seem to be structured to have 30 seconds of indie pop a-la the best of Pavement, before heading into a 30 second noise jam, like a switch has been flicked and they all remember they have to get loud. i liked it, but, i feel like they both need less and more rehearsal time to be a truly convincing outfit, if that makes any sense? they’re too tight in some aspects of their execution and too loose in others, but i enjoyed their set nonetheless. i feel like they were suffering from the small stage the most out of anyone that night, because they just couldn’t bring across the stage energy to match the music, which may account for my lukewarm feelings that night. when i saw them at Camp A Low Hum they were chewing the scenery with the best of them and i liked them more, but here, they were reduced to just glaring at us, frozen in place on stage, occasionally moving to generate some feedback or waving their guitar in a vaguely threatening manner. however, they didn’t let it get them down, and by the end of the set i found myself warming to them. I’d give them an A- overall. Good, but you’ve got room to grow.       

working with what they’ve got

in the end i’d say it was a good show. no band was bad, but the other bands definitely suffered by having to follow Bleeding Star. maybe i’m just biassed, but the aussie invasion was definitely shut out by the locals that night. I spent 10 dollars on a pint, and after the uber home i have 49 cents left to live on until studylink can pull it’s thumb out of it’s ass and pay me the student loan it’s supposed to. My ears hurt and my feet hurt and i didn’t get to shower until 1:00pm the next day. i had a good time and if you were there you probably did to.

and i don’t think i’ll ever get over the sight of a girl dancing in a back brace.