Venue: The Zoo
Date: 01/07/2005
After a brief sojourn at Rics Cafe, me and my two Cremin compatriots, Taz and Gez, hit the Zoo for a night that promises to be, well, interesting at least. This week its Sydney band, Faker, to grace this excellent venue. A few years back, a few Faker tunes had been floating around Triple J, “Kids on Overload” and “Teenage Werewolf”. I was pretty impressed with the tunes, but it seemed that nothing more ever came of the band and they disappeared into the myriad of other random bands that litter the recesses of my mind.
However, Faker are back and with a debut album ‘Addicted Romantic’ which features both the tunes I mentioned before. I bought the album expecting to be blown away with some new wave-esque rock, but initially was a bit disappointed. But like every quality record, it takes a while to grow on you.
As we enter, crazy prog-punk rockers ‘Flamingo Crash’ are destroying the crowd. Wearing some rather strange outfits, they are attacking their instruments with some kind of destructive urgency, as if its last rock show on earth prior to the apocalypse. A pretty tight four peice consisting of guitar, bass, keyboard and drums. As they pack up, we notice that the drummer is only wearing pink bike pants, and in the red glow of the Zoo’s lights, it looks like he is naked, much to the amusement of the crowd.
The next support is local band Speedstar. I don’t really want to say much about this band, but I have a few of their songs floating around at home, and I expected much more of them as a live act. Quite simply, it was painful.
After a long wait, Faker hit the stage at about 11:45pm, which is pretty late for a Zoo gig. It is immediately obvious that they had been drinking rather heavily. I inwardly groaned, thinking that it was going to be this drunken mish mash of badly performed music. How wrong I was.
With the intensity of true rock stars, Faker rip through all their songs off their debut album. The lead singer is gyrating, running round, climbing the stage supports, diving off boxes and addressing the crowd like some sort of demented priest. The lead guitarist spins estatically, like some kind of howling dervish, his Jazzmaster is an instrument of mass destruction. The other members of the band are a bit more subdued, content to let the singer and guitarist entertain the crowd. Songs like ‘Quarter to Three’, ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Fucking the Exhibits’ provide the main highlights. ‘Love For Sale’ which I thought was the strongest song off the album, sound curiously out of place amongst the pure energy of Faker’s set. After leaving the crowd worn out, Faker leave to stage, only to return to complete their show with the energetic ‘Enough’, a song fans had been chanting for all night.
Rock and Roll. Great (and not to mention cheap) night out!
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