2009 is looking up for The Y.G.
2008 had slowly and listlessly divulged its weak hand. In seasons past we were kept busy plucking bounties from corporate and municipal benefactors. Like fruit-pickers flown in from the South Seas to orchards unnumbered. At summer music festivals and at spring racing carnivals and at the temporally-variable (but evergreen) council youth events we harvested our tariff. The PA-hire men played pilot fish to our basking sharks. And then last year we sat glumly in our huts (back in the South Seas) forlornly strumming at our ukeleles wishing we hadn’t squandered last year’s remittances. But 2009 is looking up again.
If the bald mercantile metaphor of the previous paragraph concerns you with it’s lack of DIY vigour, or infact any pretensions to ideals, then too bad. It helps to remember that, as Thomas Pynchon said in someone else’s liner notes, “rock n roll remains one of the last honorable callings and a working rock band is a miracle of everyday life”. I take this to partly mean that he wished he was born a few years later so he could’ve joined a band. And, dear reader, I don’t know what you did last Thursday night but Youth Group played a concert in the grounds of a castle in Fremantle. With a sea breeze at our backs. It was alright, as Toby said to the crowd. A miracle of everyday life even.
Our hosts were Death Cab For Cutie. Before soundcheck they spotted us and vainly attempted to ingratiate themselves by making small talk. We rebuffed them of course. Chris Walla was the first to greet us. He’s spent so much time in the dark of the studio (making great records) that he could pass for his own, implausibly thin, wax-works’ dummy. He is a freak of nature: such an eternally young, enthusiastic personality. They’re all great guys, including recently buffed-up singer Ben and his inverted-triangle physique. I find his stage banter these days amusingly aggressive. For example, he shouted, This’s song’a hope!, as his way of diffusing the tension surrounding their playing the song ‘Grapevines’ from the new record because the song is about wildfires. The comment seemed less about sparing the crowd’s feelings than warning them not to get upset. There were a couple signature Beefcake Ben, How-ya-doin’?, exclamations at guitar-change points in the set – these too were verbal flexing for the crowd. But Chris tempered this machismo by signing off at the end of the set with: Bye now double-u-ay. It’s all balanced.
Their songs are absurdly catchy. ‘No Sunlight’ stuck in my head for 24 hours. I reckon two newer songs, I Will Possess Your Heart and Remainder, have really toughened up their set. Given them “teeth” as Chris would have it. The slightly bloodless audience could take note. Another great thing about DCFC is their crew, whose number befits a chart-topping US band, and who are uniformly generous and chirpy which is like a masterstroke. Backstage there was always conversation, never sulleness or road-weariness.
We sat and watched the set on a grassy knoll in T-shirts on a summer night. Perfect. Now, on to Melbourne.
