Live Review: Cartel, Arms Attraction, LLC, The Effects Of Boredom

New local haunt The Brightside has gone to great lengths to paint an image for itself as a quirky, welcoming establishment, and it's done a solid job of doing so. It's sad, then, that their pièce de résistance – a free-entry, open-air beer garden – seems both a blessing and a curse, proving far more popular a hangout than where the real action is this evening.
The night's first act, The Effects Of Boredom, certainly do a pretty good job of making outdoors look like a pretty alluring place to be. The band are a rough-hewn, raw-edged, occasionally poppy punk trio that give it their all – including their incapacitated guitarist Joe, who apparently broke his leg in a recent motorcycle mishap – but their jagged, off-key yell-singing (sing-yelling?) at the crowd wears thin well before their cover of Blink-182's Dammit, replete with No Scrubs bridge gag as heard on The Mark, Tom & Travis Show.
One-man acoustic act LLC, then, makes for a refreshing change in pace, something more in line with tonight's headline act. The Sydney-based singer-songwriter has an EP in tow (he mentions it plenty of times), on which we can apparently find tracks such as opener, Limousine, which betrays a City & Colour influence in LLC's acoustic arrangements, all clean and crisp high-register vocals with introspective, neo-romantic lyrics. There are some real standouts – the restrained Home Sweet Home and gorgeously rendered Elevator Music among them – as well as a somewhat out-of-nowhere cover of Taxiride's Everywhere You Go. All up, it's a polished, strong performance.
Fellow Sydneysiders Arms Attraction maintain the higher level of quality, though prodigiously talented new vocalist Mikaila Delgado does get somewhat lost in the mix. The recent line-up change has served the four-piece in good stead, with their driven, aggressive arrangements doing well to keep energy levels up among the sparse audience. Rambunctious single Alive, and the ensnaring This War highlight the strength and joy with which the band do their thing.
At last, Cartel's Will Pugh takes the stage, an adorable, soft-spoken man who explains this is his first time touring alone, though not in the city. It's kind of heartbreaking that he's playing to – at a quick count – less than 40 people, because the quality of his performance deserves much more. Throughout the soaring choruses of opener Say Anything Else, his cascading vocals display a masterful control over his impressive range, which he puts to further good use in heartfelt acoustic renditions of songs such as The Perfect Mistake and the sublime Deep South, which Pugh reveals was not originally written to be a Cartel song, and in fact was more alike in form to tonight's version than the better-known full-band arrangement.
In some ways, the small crowd worked to his advantage – the entire performance carried an intimate air, with audience members sitting cross-legged on the ground, looking up adoringly at the man serenading them with song and story, and warming them from start to finish, while the folks in the beer garden suffer in the rain.