Reviewed onSaturday April 30
It’s been a massive year for dark ’n’ dreamy indie-pop darlings Methyl Ethel. September saw the release of their debut album Oh Inhuman Spectacle; the Western Australians also joined the triple j rotation; and, most recently, they announced that they’d signed to independent record label 4AD, home to the likes of Beirut, Daughter and The National. This was obviously rather huge news, so why wouldn’t the trio want to celebrate with a national tour?
Opening the show was Melbourne four-piece Jaala. Led by the candid and charismatic Cosima Jaala and armed with jangly, proggy art-pop from their first record Hard Hold, they launched straight into ‘Salt Shaker’, an unadulterated exploration of what it means to want to leave the town you grew up in, particularly if your hometown is a seaside village filled with “happy-holy-heinous houses” and “fuckheads” with “large hard hands holding half-empty cans while driving”. Their wonderfully clamorous and fast-paced performance was only (hilariously) interrupted once, when they had to confer over which song to play next; such are the minor pitfalls of not having a setlist.
Methyl Ethel kicked off with ‘Shadowboxing’. And from the almost androgynous vocals of frontman Jake Webb to the dusky rhythms of bassist Thom Stewart and the commanding beats of drummer Chris Wright, the three-piece was immediately broodingly and reverberatingly hypnotic. Things were taken down a notch with the self-effacing ‘Rogues’. But by the end of that, Webb was well and truly loose, asking the crowd, “Does anyone know the meaning of ‘crepuscular’? I’ve forgotten.” (It means resembling or relating to twilight, if you were wondering. So obviously germane.)
In the live setting, ‘Also Gesellschaft’ transformed from a demurely rattling number to an all-enveloping dreamscape. Other high points of the gig included the slowly unfurling ‘Sweet Waste’, and the groove-inducing, saxophone-guided gem ‘Twilight Driving’. There was no encore, not that it was needed. Methyl Ethel had already more than amply charmed and captivated the sold-out crowd by then.
