FOR WEIRDNESS SAKE

INJURED NINJA / French Rockets / smRts /
Apricot Rail / Drop Macumba

The Bakery
Friday, December 23, 2011

A lot of the sounds heard over the weekend at the Bakery, came with the force of an assault. There were whipsaw screeches, scorching blasts and solar-plexus-socking rumbles. It was all part of A Very Heartless Xmas Party, an end-of-year extravaganza organised by experimental record label Heartless Robot Productions. While the evening courted a hyper-specific subculture, the crowd of several hundred strong reflected an impact beyond the realm of the cloistered connoisseur.

In this atmosphere, local foursome Drop Macumba stood out for several reasons. They used conventional instruments (guitar, bass, keyboards and drums) and their set brushed up against psych-rock, showcasing some big, bare-bones riffs. This would be fine – great, even – if their tunes were carried through with anything resembling charm or commitment. However, their set tonight was hobbled by disconnections – between verse and chorus, lyrics and music, intent and execution. The inherent sense of fun present on their recordings just simply failed to rear its head tonight.
Next up, Apricot Rail was smart enough to know that listeners could only handle so much of their dense, sinister sound in one sitting, and kept their set at a lean, mean 40-minute length. Utilising light textures to help brighten the milieu, their set was like a French dinner: a tight package of intensely rich compositions, best taken one forkful at a time, accompanied by a gracious interlude to help cleanse the palette and, of course, a decadent finale.
Proving one of the many highlights of the evening, smRts presented themselves as an outfit thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music can be. With influences ranging from ethnic field recordings to surf-rock to the elemental funk of James Brown to Pink Floyd, their tunes were intellectual but funky – serious music that was also fun and interesting.
Specialising in long, jam-heavy rock grooves, WAMi-award winning experimental rockers French Rocket turned a low-frequency churn into something disorientingly palpable. Shapes and textures kept mutating within the din. The overall effect was visceral as well as artful, and the crowd responded with some scattered moshing.
At a time when a lot of pop is sounding wearily formulaic and the new year will bring the usual mix of stern-faced industry priorities and marketable pop, avant-garde experimental rockers Injured Ninja have come up with something far more unpredictable and playful. Their dancey stew of sounds and styles – hurling together everything from psychedelia to house music to Krautrock and Link Wray-style guitar fuzz – sounds ridiculous, until you hear them. Then it just sounds awesome.
Tonight they were not weird for weirdness’ sake, but the likes of Superluminessance and Redeemer were terrific tunes, delivered with a sense of fun and adventure (they never sound less than open and questing, as if their music is always searching for that psychdelic lift-off). They might well be the most refreshing local band you’ll hear in 2012.

_JENNIFER PETERSON-WARD