Live Review: The Drones, Harmony

Harmony’s lead singer and guitarist Tom Lyngcoln is clearly someone who feels a lot, and has found the perfect way to express everything that writhes and rages inside him.

Lyngcoln’s soul-bearing, throat-shredding howls are offset by three women who sing beautifully stirring back-up vocals on his beastly power ballads. About halfway through the band’s thrilling set, Lyngcoln hands his howling Fender Jaguar to the nearest of these, urgently loosens his belt and pulls down his pair off baggy blue jeans, revealing… another pair of baggy bluejeans. He then pulls off his green checkered flannel, revealing… a red checkered flannel. All the while, the band around him rages on. It’s hard to tell what it means, but it’s pretty exciting to watch. With rock'n'roll now well into its 50s, it is rare for a band to feel so exciting and unpredictable, but Harmony has found a way.

With all gratitude to The Drones for the introduction to Harmony, it's hard not to be concerned that their opener will upstage them. But the moment The Drones launch into Private Execution, the menacing, pulsating opening track from their recent album, Feelin Kinda Free, the notion of this band being upstaged by anyone immediately seems ridiculous. Taman Shud is still frenetic and funny, but frontman Gareth Liddiard seems deadly serious as he spits bile all over its oblique beat. The three back-up singers from Harmony join in on the bruising and brilliant break-up ballad, To Think That I Once Loved You, and hang around to elevate the jet-lagged and paranoid Then They Came For Me. An especially sinister I See Seaweed moves like a slow-motion tsunami before crashing into its towering choruses.

It’s good to see that the band has enough faith in the newer, weirder stuff, and fans’ ability to digest it, to not feel the need to drag out Shark Fin Blues. In fact, the only pre-Havilah song tonight is Six Ways To Sunday, unless you include their cover of Kev Carmody’s River Of Tears, which is a truly transcendental closer. Despite the number of times they’ve reached its searing, dissonant crescendo over the last decade, nothing about tonight’s monumental version feels rote. Watching The Drones play River Of Tears is just about the most powerful live music experience a person can have.

There is simply no one else like Gareth Liddiard and his band. Despite, or perhaps because of, all his pointed criticisms of the state of our country, Liddiard makes this writer proud to be Australian, if only because our strange country has produced such an incisive and singular artist. Australians all let us rejoice, for we have Feelin Kinda Free.