Now… before I begin, it's important I reveal that my boyfriend is the bassist in Soviet X-ray Record Club. So I have been attending their shows for a few years and obviously have a pretty biased opinion. However, this one particular show in Brisbane was the first of their 'This Girl' tour and played host to some fresh new talent that really piqued my interest.
Max Chillen + The Kerbside Collective
Max Chillen + The Kerbside Collective are a fresh young band out of Brisbane and they completely blew me away at The Brightside last Friday night. They played a tight set and looked pretty at-home on stage. Their songs were catchy with a surf-dream 70s nostalgia feel. I fell totally in love with the vocalists voice; it was silky-smooth yet strong. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on these guys to see how they turn out. If they hone their songwriting a little and keep at it I think they'd be worth watching.
Big Bad Echo
A more established band by far were Big Bad Echo taking the stage after Max Chillen + co. They're a local Brisbane band with a shoegaze-pop sound who are making their way up the ladder with (hopefully) a bright future ahead of them. Although I loved their sound, not to mention they're some of the nicest guys in the biz (so I've heard), I wasn't as taken by them as some of the other bands that played on the night. There was nothing particularly memorable about their performance. Which is a good thing, in a way. Their sound was really good and they also had a strong lead vocalist. In saying this, it was such a strong lineup on the night and they definitely didn't disappoint, they just didn't stand out.
Big Bad Echo play Against The Grain Festival Fortitude Valley 19 August.
Hedge Fund
Hedge Fund are a Sydney post-rock band who have themselves quite the following. Their frontman had enough energy for the rest of the band on stage, thankfully, who all lacked it in this department. He had some wacky dance moves and focused less on how he sounded and more on how he looked. Which, in this case, wasn't such a bad thing. He was engaging and got the audience interested and moving.
I was caught up at the merch desk all night so I wasn't able to enjoy each band as much as I would have liked to and they may have sounded completely different down on the floor. I was still really impressed by the quality of the lineup, however, and will definitely be keeping an eye on each of these strong bands.
Soviet X-Ray Record Club
This was one of their first gigs back in a while after some time off to work on new material and the start of their 'This Girl' Tour. In their opening track, 'End of Everything' (a new and unreleased track), their absence from the stage definitely showed and they knew it. It was a bad start and they weren't happy but they earned back the attention of the crowd very quickly when they kicked off the set the right way with their second track, 'Good Things (I Only Think Of)'. A few other newer tracks in the middle played really well but were unfamiliar to the audience and some people seemed to have lost interest pretty quickly but there were many people intrigued and impressed. SXRC soon pulled them back in with crowd favourite 'Never Enough' and finished the set on a super strong note with 'Shake'. Although they had a shaky start to the set, they went from strength to strength which each song.
Soviet X-Ray Record Club play Grace Darling Hotel, Melbourne, 12 August and Studio 188, Ipswich, 9 September.
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