Live Review – The Straight Arrows, Melbourne 2010

The Straight Arrows
The Tote, Melbourne
Saturday, December 4

The most pretentious music writing terms can be applied to the least pretentious bands. For instance, “sonic architecture” in the context of The Straight Arrows means a rundown inner-city sharehouse, where a drum kit is permanently set up in the living room. Tonight, they bring their brand of dirty greasy garage-y rock to The Tote in Melbourne, and set up front and centre to entertain a pleasingly large crowd and, coincidentally, flog a few copies of their (rather excellent) debut album It’s Happening. Mega-quiffed psychobilly types rub shoulders with beardy freaks and women with tattooed necks. It’s always nice to see the young people get along so well with each other at this kind of social event.

The merch stall stock features two different band logos – a bunch of plump mushrooms, with accompanying ladybirds, on the vinyl and CDs; or a flick-knife on the T-shirts. That’s kinda symptomatic: The Straight Arrows fall into a middling place, being neither slavish imitators/recreators nor bold originators. Not that that’s a problem. That middling place is plenty wide enough and if you want a band that gives equal props to The Stooges and The Who and a stack of other noisy antisocial types, well, here you are.

Mainman Owen Penglis is a reckless dynamo, both on- and off-stage, with a greasy finger in many many pies. For no reason that anyone can explain, the band played the set in rollerskates tonight, for fuck’s sake, which Penglis then had to wear for the rest of the night while manning the aforementioned merch desk. But despite the relatively high profile of both him and bassist Angie Bermuda (thanks to the Circle Pit connection), The Arrows present as a unit onstage; one massive four-headed dog of a thing, which tonight plays through the whole album I think, every catchy hummable tune of it. Note follows note in vaguely familiar riffs, a fairly short and punchy set that ends in general sweatiness and good natured laughter all round, before more beers are drunk by all present.

I don’t see them making anyone’s rich list soon - and I really don’t think they care.

by Trevor Block

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