Live Review: A Place To Bury Strangers, Flyying Colours

Approaching Cherry Bar down AC/DC Lane, the scene is populated by packs of long-haired guys chatting agreeably amid a fug of pot smoke. A sight that suggests tonight’s gig will involve guitars, volume and repetition.

Flyying Colours kick off the night with their hectic blend of guitar-driven, wig-out noise pop. Lead singer and guitarist Brodie Brümmer keeps his guitar front and centre, his solos winding and twisting. Notes are bent, held and merge with each other in endless passages, as one of the city’s tightest rhythm sections thuds emphatically behind. Big Mess is a blistering slice of fuzz pop that proves what fantastic songwriters the band can be when the lead guitar can be reined in. New track OK runs in a similar vein: slabs of fuzz guitar dispassionately dispatched by guitarist and sometime tambourine player Gemma O’Connor, anchor Brümmer’s meanderings, but are brought back to underpin a glorious hook. When new tracks are the highlight of a set from a band that have been playing for as long as Flyying Colours have, something is going right.

Flyying Colours. Photos by Yana Amur.

 A Place To Bury Strangers announce their imminence with bursts of dry ice on the pitch black stage. Feedback hum builds and the trio take their places behind their instruments as a strobe light flickers. Bursting into their 2018 single Punch Back, the band set the tone for what is to come. It’s what’s been coming since their formation in 2003 and it’s what makes them so exceptional. Sound and volume. Every aspect of their show forces the attention back onto the noises their instruments make and the sheer force behind it. A sinewy reverb is carefully modulated so that the bass and guitar sound distinct but like adjacent muscles. Light is at a minimum, so the band are usually seen in silhouette, if at all. Songs are skeletal in their construction: a pounding beat, a three- or four-note bass line and cathedrals of clamouring guitar, almost obliterating the notes that generate the sounds. Vocals are barely audible. The occasional use of a strobe light captures the members with their instrument, but the act of playing it is fleetingly seen. It all works brilliantly.

Songs fly by, with only a couple taken from their most recent album, Pinned. Distinctive vocal duties are handed to the trio’s newest member, drummer Lia Simone Braswell. As the set progresses, instruments are thrown around the stage, bashed against the ceiling and hurled to the floor. A floor tom spends most of the set abandoned centre stage.

As the set climaxes, with early single Oceans, a strobe light is gripped and turned onto the audience, then pressed up against the guitar, before it and Dion Lunadon’s bass guitar are left hanging from the ceiling. Wailing feedback and shuddering drones fade away as the cheers from the audience grow louder. “Man!” shouts one sweat-glistening punter emerging onto AC/DC Lane minutes later. “These guys tore the fucking roof off this place. I’m working on the Red Hot Chilli Peppers show and these guys left them in the fucking dust!” It would be hard to find anyone tonight who would disagree.