Photo: Justin Edwards

After exercising self-control for all of one song, vocalists Jake Stone and Stav Yiannoukas explode with the reckless energy for which Bluejuice have become renowned. Their apparent artistic ethos states that the performance must come first at all costs – Stone’s bones broken onstage this year can attest to this. Their physical theatre finds the pair traversing the stage and disturbing the band’s three musicians, who’ve only become more adept at ignoring psychotic singers and nailing down their keyboard-driven rock-hip hop hybrids. A replacement drummer appears tonight: one hopes that his tenure is temporarily, as he seems to take the band far more seriously than the four others combined. New songs abound; Vitriol and The Reductionist are as exciting as ever, and Stone gleefully offers to fellate the two men who comprise tonight’s headlining act. Bluejuice – ever the performers, never the gentlemen.

Take a band whose artistic output is harmlessly enjoyable enough on record, place in a confined space with a lighting technician who sees fit to repeatedly flash spotlights into our retinas at any moment that resembles a chorus, and you’ve got We Are Scientists. Keith Murray and Chris Cain are accompanied by a drummer and hilariously overacting keyboardist/second guitarist on this three-night Australian tour. Inaction, Chick Lit and Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt are played in quick succession, and set the bar at a height that’s impossible for the rest of the set to limply flop over. Their appeal is scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time the seventieth minute ticks over. 

The only departure from this painfully well-trodden path of playful pop copy-and-paste is After Hours, which brightens my cynicism for all of four minutes. My sentiments fly in the face of the hundreds of bodies abusing The Zoo like a wooden trampoline; my accomplice and I eventually find more entertainment in watching androgynous indie kids repeatedly taking photos of themselves. Hypothesis confirmed: half the appeal of this band’s well-marketed geek niche is being seen to be a fan. 

ANDREW MCMILLEN

Comments (1)

1. Written by how dare you, on 21-01-2010 13:26 , IP: 121.218.219.183

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