Posted by KB on March 9, 2010
Having not been among the tens of thousands to have recently attended one of AC/DC’s arena shows, I’m in no position to comment on what it’s like seeing something on that scale. I’ve simply never been to an arena gig, and this is a Pavement review, so anything I could say about seeing AC/DC, if I had indeed seen them, would be irrelevant. Well, almost anything. Because the one thing that I heard so many people say after seeing that band was that every song in the set “was like a closer”. Despite the differences between Pavement and AC/DC - and the differences are huge - I shared the opinion, along with many others, that the same thing could be said about their set.
Perhaps it’s the effect of having waited ten years to see these guys together, in the flesh. I was too young to be there the first time round, or the last time depending on how you look at things, and I figured that was it; I’d never get the chance. But to walk into a sold out Enmore Theatre to the strains of ‘Rattled By the Rush’ was something like a dream come true. It only took the following song to completely break my powers of resistance; upon hearing the opening notes of ‘Grounded’, another Wowee Zowee classic, I deemed myself incapable of reviewing this gig objectively and eschewed my usual practice of tapping down the set list and any random thoughts into a text message to be read later on.
It was just after a rousing version of ‘Silence Kit’ that guitarist Scott Kannberg AKA Spiral Stairs asked for a show of hands from those who were there last time they played. There was quite a response, more than I’d expected from just looking at the crowd. “How much has changed?” was his reply; not so much a question as a wry statement because the answer, with little doubt, would be “nothing”. Stephen Malkmus AKA S.M. Jenkins had lost none of his unique talent; that ability to straddle the line between outright sloppiness and virtuosic brilliance perfectly. Bob Nastanovich’s stage antics are probably even funnier now than they were ten years ago, while the rhythm section of Steve West and Mark Ibold gave real meaning to the band’s ‘slacker’ tag, with the former in a pair of trackpants that no band of my generation would consider suitable ‘stagewear’, and the latter just looking completely at ease again after playing with Sonic Youth for several years.
Unsurprisingly, most of the set was comprised of material from the band’s unbeaten three album run between the early and mid-nineties, ticking off most of the numbers you’d expect from Slanted and Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Wowee Zowee. ‘Trigger Cut’, ‘Elevate me Later’, ‘Range Life’, ‘We Dance’, sing-a-long favourite ‘Cut Your Hair’, and ‘Stereo’, one of the few inclusions from 1997’s Brighten The Corners, were all there.
But on a night when every song could have been a closer, perhaps the omissions say more about the strength of a set than what was actually played. ‘Spit on a Stranger’, which they had closed with the previous night, ‘Here’, and ‘Heaven is a Truck’ were all notable absences. Although the eventual closer for the night was really one for the purists, ‘Conduit For Sale!’ - the most blatant, raucous, and infectious Fall rip-off ever recorded - left no room for any kind of bittersweet senses at the end. If only they’d had time for a second encore.
Check out the above picture, and more, on the Kluster Gallery.
pavement, enmore theatre, sydney