Rain Dogs & California Girls Deliver Top-Quality Punk At The Vanguard

Before a slim but enthusiastic audience, California Girls – the project of Sydney based musician Angus McGrath – opened the night of Thursday, January 29 with a loud, experimental approach to punk.

Huddled with three other musicians in the centre of the Vanguard Theatre’s deep red lights, McGrath alternated between arrhythmic spoken word storytelling and awry auto-tuned vocals. His drummer – standing with no more than a tom, snare, and crash-cymbal – punctuated the slow, clicking drum machine with deep acoustic smacks of rhythm. Meanwhile, the bassist and guitarist provided rising tension beneath McGrath’s lyrics – thrusts of distortion and dreamy riffs building into the slowly moving room.

In the centre of the congregation, contrasting the red, McGrath’s laptop was open, playing seemingly random videos on its bright white screen. At times, the dialogue and music from these bizarre videos would emerge through the loud electronic mix, providing an extra absurd depth to the performance.

At the conclusion, after McGrath had thanked the audience and wrapped up his final song, he let the video continue playing. Off-putting sighs and squeals played from the laptop – making it seem as if the band, while packing up their instruments were an additional piece of performance art preceding Rain Dogs’ entrance to the evening.

More people gradually trickled in from King Street to fill the small room. Yet, for a band with as large a following as Rain Dogs, I was surprised by how few people were present when the three-piece finally arrived on stage.

Despite the undeniable quality of the following forty-five minutes, I could not help wondering if the band’s performance might have been more energetic if there had been more people to perform to. Yet, combined with the band’s cool mystique, their subdued stage presence was rather fitting.

A Korg synthesiser pulsed beside a consistent drum machine at the fore of the stage. On brief occasions a member might emerge to interact with these instruments, but otherwise the band spent most of their performance as dark figures submerged in glowing red smoke at the back of the space.

Bassist Luke Scott kept close tabs with the drum sequences – providing spacey, liquid rhythms for the audience to swing their shoulders into. Guitarist Ju Shung painted broad, colourful riffs with a guitar hooked into so many pedals it might have been a synthesiser if not for the distorted howls of his whammy bar. Apparently destabilised by the music he was playing, Shung would stagger from his pedals into the smoke – clinging the neck of his guitar and flinging his fingers frantically over the strings as if that was the only thing keeping him tethered to the room.

In the centre of all this, with lyrics doused in deep timbre, Tom Murchie folded into his microphone. Projected through a delay pedal, his voice was devoid of detail. Instead, lost in the distorted electronica around him, his words became additional drivers of rhythm for us to move to.

Without an encore, the end of the performance came rather suddenly.

House lights were raised and the glamorous stage returned to normal.

Riding high on the rhythm of the night, the murmuring audience trickled back into the real world.