Live Review: Dianas, Sex Panther, Hamjam

“Long-awaited” is one of those clichés that should be taken out the back and sternly shaken, but I’d be lying on the massive if I didn’t own up to wanting to own, hear and excitedly talk about a Dianas full length since they first emerged three or four years ago.

As one of Perth’s most prolific, hardest-working and unique bands, people turned out with a blooming kind of sense of appreciation as the Rosemount gradually and gratefully filled to welcome the LP into the world. 

Opening were HUSSY, who have been increasingly killing it for a prolonged period of time now, and they wore the Rosemount stage the way you slip into a pair of housebound Volleys to do some tiling. Trading off lines with guitarist Marcia with a Sleater-Kinney level of hypnotic dyamism, frontwoman Shin possesses a magnetic kind of command of space; I am trying to convey a sense of the front-woman equivalent of that The Dad-parenting technique where it’s the low, quiet voice that’s telling you you’re in big trouble rather than your garden-variety yelling. It’s almost like watching a loop of a large sheet of glass falling out of a second storey window that never shows it hitting the ground. 

Watching them for some reason I started thinking about the System Of A Down video where their faces start transforming into one another. As far as cinematography goes, it’s hot trash, but like in terms of the general HUSSY are one big, breathing steamroller, crushing in total unity. Bonzer. 

In between sets Catlips held down the ones and twos with the kind of stuff that’s responsible for people still downloading Shazam even though it’s gone weird and corporate. 

The Hamjam duo sailed deep into the tone zone and took a few turns around the quay, peaking with a cover of the irreducible Wicked Game by Chris Isaak. Love, as ever, shimmered. As we paddle down the river of life, it’s comforting to know that Hamish Rahn will continue to be on deck, nonchalantly offering a cigar at regular intervals. 

A semi-rare set from revered perma-legends Sex Panther slayed, before finally, the time rolled around for Dianas. Since the addition of John Lekias, they’ve become a slightly different band – more complex, fidgety, -- and the songs from the new record shone like extremely complex glass objects thrown at speed (today’s motif). The material from their new record is mobile, ambidextrous and direct, with the emphatic kiss-off Freakcreep. The ornate, melodic guitar work of Caitlin Moloney remains a weird kind of wonder to behold – like, people talk about Ruban Neilson playing guitar, but this is about a dozen floors above it on the tower of song – and Lekias and Nathalie Pavlovic click together like the parts of an expensive watch. Finally, the bulldozering older favourite Static closed the evening with a bulldozering rush. With this record under their belt, bigger things await – keep catching them while you can.

Originally published in X-Press Magazine.