The band have a massive show coming up on Tuesday December 31 at The Penny Black in Brunswick, and Nic cannot wait to welcome in the new year in style. He promises that punters who come down to the show will have a memorable time, especially given the time of year.
“Yeah, I’m feeling pretty excited about it!” he enthuses. “We’re playing a longer set, about an hour and a half, and doing the countdown and all that kind of stuff. I think it’s going to be really fun because we generally don’t have enough time to get through what we’d like to get through. The songs are pretty groove orientated and jammy in a lot of ways, in rehearsal sometimes a song will go for ten minutes…and I’m guessing people will be pretty down to party, being New Year’s Eve.”
When pushed further as to what the band brings with their live show, and why people should choose their show for their New Year’s Eve’s entertainment, Nic struggles just a little to find the right words.
“It’s a pretty, umm, what’s a good word for it?” he hesitates. “Hopefully it’s…just trying to think of an appropriate word. ‘Energetic’ doesn’t really kinda say it. We kind of pay with audience in mind. It sounds kind of lame, but I mean where the audience is important to what we do in terms of performance and dancing and all that kind of stuff. It’s pretty wild, I guess…I’m trying to think of a more interesting word!
“But there’s always a lot of energy onstage, and the performance is always different to the recording,” he describes, “and just having so much percussion onstage, and just having such propulsive rhythms throughout the entire set, hopefully it’s a trance-like experience for people.”
Ultimately, summing up, the band’s live show maybe described as a cathartic experience, with the crowd and band coming together as one. “You can just tune into your own dancing and whatnot, as opposed to watching a band that just plays verse-chorus, verse-chorus kind of song. I’m not bagging out any band that does that kind of song. The performance and the audience are pretty much the same thing, if you know what I mean.”
The show also serves another purpose for the band, as next year holds some very exciting developments for them. “The other way we’re viewing it is that it’s one of a few warm up shows before we go to the US and to Mexico in March,” he reveals, “so we want to get a lot of shows under our belt before that.”
This will be the first time that the band has played outside of Australasia, and presents a very exciting opportunity for them, but also sees them having to deal with a lot of the red tape involved in organising such a trip.
“Yeah, it will be,” he confirms. “We’ve played outside Australia, we’ve just played New Zealand before, but that’s it. Yeah, super excited, but also dealing with visa and grant stuff at the moment, which is kinda fun!” he states sarcastically.
“We got invited to do some festivals in Mexico,” he says. “There’s two shows, the first one’s in Mexico City, and the second is in Monterrey, which is up north, closer to the border…and then we thought, since we’re going to go all the way there, we may as well go the US.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
