I promised mrak that I'd say a few words about this, and as always, the following was written well after the face-paint and bowler hats had been removed.
I'd quite intentionally never heard a Dresden Dolls track before going to this gig, trusting mrak's impeccable taste and plumping for a ticket blindly. (Originally it was supposed to be at the Gaelic Club, and I got in when they shifted it to the much larger Roundhouse.) Andy reckoned they were good, Jon just wrinkled his nose, and Dave mumbled something about it being emo but — when pressed — warned me off expecting a trashing of the Roundhouse ala Fear Factory back in '96.
It was all ages, so one had to drink plastic beer in plastic cups in the specially marked zones. Wow. The first thing I noticed when I found where the smokers lurk were some pearl earings, making me think she had something to live for. The rest of the crowd seemed standard apprentice-zombie and prototype-vampire inner city types, some obviously out after their bedtimes. (Some, as I later found out, were also out of their biochemical tolerances as well.) Curiously there were some older punters, older than me even, and I don't want to ponder that too much.
Some of the value-maximisers had already scored the tour tshirt, branded "Punk Cabaret is Freedom" on the back with the tour dates. Apparently there were two gigs in Melbourne versus the singular here. I don't for a minute doubt that Bleak City, being world class and all, pumps out more enthusiasts for this kind of schtick than we do, but still it hurts.
All this before the music began (I'd missed the support). I scoffed my Tooheys Extra Dry (urk), politely muscled some younguns out of the way on the upstairs balcony, in order to listen to... a man with an accordion, encouraging the underagers to spin about on the spot to simulate drunkenness with a somewhat obtuse Irish knock-off drinking dirge. Unfortunately it lasted quite a long time.
Anyway, the Dresden Dolls themselves, a bloke playing drums and a girl on the piano and singing. I'll get the unabashedly positive stuff out of the way first: I like the format, and the drummer is excellent. The tunes are mostly solid. The drummer's shirt lasted all of two songs, at which point the crowd went crazy, though I just couldn't get as excited as when that happened at The Thaw's gig a month ago. The girl's accent drifted, from Scots to upper-crust English before settling (somewhat) on a Boston sort-of-Irish lilt.
Now to quibble, as my training requires me to: cabaret? Well, maybe, I wouldn't know. Punk? Surely not, except in that 90s thrash faux American style. I found a lot of it to be just a good fusion of recent noise, progressive Brit-Pop melded with elements of neo-punk. It seemed to me that this juxtaposition of soft melodies and hard-edges is but an update on the Guns'n'Roses patina of my youth: to wit, Axel's combination of sandpaper vocals and a face that would earn him megabucks at the Cross.
In comparison to Pulp, one might take the Dresden Dolls' Coin Operated Boy (by god do they love their gratuitous profanity) against Live Bed Show or Underwear or something of that ilk, even his latest solo effort; in short, Jarvis Cocker has more to say and says it. Their piano rock-outs reminded me of Elvis Costello's (or perhaps more fairly Steve Nieve's efforts on) Strict Time. One of their songs sounded like a direct knock-off of the Pixies' I Bleed, specifically the fem vocals.
No, I wasn't trying to hate them. Late in the gig, after some ultra-repetitive thrash had sent me in search of a beer and led to the discovery that the upstairs bar had closed, they launched into a bloke-on-guitar, girl-on-vocals cover of Port of Amsterdam, last heard by me performed by David Bowie. Spooky, a hairs-raising-everywhere experience. (It's an old folk song, right? — "He'll drink to the health / Of the whores of Amsterdam / Who've given their bodies / To a thousand other men".)
Up to then I would've said they were post-irony; not over-serious but at least earnest and unhumorous, except in that way you can be with blindly adoring fans. (mrak's puppy dog eyes are classic on that front.) And yet... around this time the drummer peeled off a country riff, showing some awareness of the transgressive and inherently uncool. That would have been a good time to leave: for their house-lights-are-on-next encore they rolled out Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, which was surely older than most of the crowd. I was re-educated as to why people used to cringe about the 80s.
One last weirdness: the funny thing about a sound-triggered light show is that sound ends up travelling faster than light, which makes me wonder about the punters' mental processes.
For the desperate JJJ recorded the concert and took a lot of photos. I'm not in any of them.