Happy, as you may know, began its life as a pop up music festival in 2010. A lot has changed since Happy’s residencies at Enmore’s The Sly Fox (namely this whole blogging malarkey that we’ve been doing recently), but the drive to be part of Sydney’s various party scenes has never been far from our sights.
Happy threw a pretty mean party with some of Sydney’s raddest songwriters turned band frontmen. Stay tuned for more Happy curated shows coming up this year!
Last Friday (the 13th of June), we jumped right back in to our party pants and with the help of FBi radio and Monday Records, we put on a massive show which brought the full band experiences of some of Sydney’s finest songwriters to a packed out FBi Social. Spookyland‘s Marcus Gordon, Atlas B Salvesen‘s Alastair Cairns and The Tambourine Girls‘ Simon Relf started their lives as solo projects (the latter’s involvement with Deep Sea Arcade excluded), but it seems that all three have finally muscled up and plugged in their guitars.
While anyone who had heard openers The Tambourine Girls’ The End Of Time EP came in expecting a big, vaguely 90’s, vaguely poppy, wholly rockin’ show, but more notably, this was the first we saw of a burly rock and roll noise sound from the deceptively skinny, scarfy Spookyland. While the most recent single The Silly Fucking Thing injected a greater sonic depth into the singer songwriter’s tune, it’s clear to us now that the upcoming Rock And Roll Weakling EP isn’t holding back on anything.
Rocking the black leather, a Metallica shirt and a half Alex Turner meets Jimmy Neutron hairdo, Marcus made it clear that the show was the start of something importantly definitive for Spookyland. Throughout the show, it was made clear that the band have taken influence from the trend of bands getting louder and slower, but unlike other bands on this wagon, these guys have left plenty of room for emotion in their noise. Each note the frontman hit seemed to bring out a new ounce of feels – his quivering mouth, his furrowed brow and his rancorous voice cutting through the mix.
Taking out the tough middle slot was a premiere of a lot of new stuff from Atlas B Salvesen’s upcoming release The Pale King, whose lengthy soundcheck was well utilised, the newly fleshed out sound swelling throughout level four of the Kings Cross Hotel. Like the unreleased tracks from Spookyland, there was a real and unexpected dynamism, a blissfully crunchy backing noise was exactly where it was needed, especially on their epic closing song.
We reckon we did pretty well pulling everything together, and from the general merriment and the number of dudes and dudettes gettin’ down at the front of the d-floor, you guys enjoyed it too! With some long winter nights ahead of us, Happy are gearing up for presenting some more parties with some of our favourite artists, and we’re bloody excited about it.
FIND OUT MORE ON
▲ SPOOKYLAND ▲ ATLAS B SALVESEN ▲ TAMBOURINE GIRLS
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/146837541″ params=”color=7ac7a1&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
