Live Review: The Drones, Harmony, You Beauty

Sydney's You Beauty might just be our new favourite band. They've got a garage, jangle-pop kinda thing going, frontman Will Farrier galloping across the stage with abandon. Farrier and band seemed almost styled on a particular kind of late '80s/late '90s pop aesthetic, dressed in sunglasses, a sports jacket, You Beauty bum bag, and runners, vocals a la Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays. He had headphones in sometimes and rocked out with them, before moving to the barrier to sing into the crowd, even posing for a selfie or two with a particularly eager punter. "We're taking requests! For the songs we rehearsed!" He climbed on top of the stacked speakers, danced enthusiastically, primped and posed for photographers, and even threw his particularly disagreeable shoe off stage...  "Give us a case or we'll stop playing," he says as they kick into their last song, having realised they've almost finished their rider already.  

We don't get the hype around Harmony, a six-piece from Melbourne - it feels like the pop-punk narcissistic whining of The Smith Street Band (Tom Lyngcoln and Wil Wagner seem interchangeable) plus wow, stop, wait a second, three female backing vocalists. They're supposed to give the songs texture, acting as a 'heavenly' counterpoint to Lyngcoln's angsty, overly earnest cries, and we suppose they do - but it doesn't make the succession of power chords sonically interesting. Lyngcoln removes a blue flannel to reveal a red flannel, and kicks into the air, but otherwise to a bystander the set seems pretty still and stagnant.

The Drones put on a garage-rock show for the ages. They entered the stage to the pop keys of Enya's Orinoco Flow (Sail Away), before jamming on the track, giving it unexpected grit and power. From underneath a wash of distortion, the opening chords of new album Feelin Kinda Free's sinister opener Private Execution rang out. The people in the crowd were rabid about frontman Gareth Liddiard, throwing cans and stuff up at him ("Chuck something expensive up here, we get free beer backstage"), especially during first single Taman Shud, a room full of people crying out "you fucking cunt!" in unison.

It's mostly new album tracks from here, with the likes of The Minotaur, I See Seaweed and Six Ways To Sunday thrown into the mix to rep their earlier records. The ladies from Harmony (Amanda Roff, Quinn Veldhuis, Maria Kastaniotis) bolstered a series of more moody tracks, Boredom, Then They Came For Me, and the heart-wrenching To Think That I Once Loved You. We all have a bit of a moment, before Liddiard shows us his bleeding fingers, which he douses in Jameson, before a helpful stagehand gives him a pile of tissues. "Can someone throw us a new bottle of Jameson?" guitarist Dan Luscombe quipped. Then it's Shut Down SETI, sprawling out into an epic, Liddiard getting up into Luscombe's space, goading him, before I Don't Ever Want To Change proved a powerful close to the set. Our encore is I Am The Supercargo and River Of Tears, an emotionally charged pair of songs that deserved the huge cheer rising from the sated crowd.