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Family - Thu Jul 2
A band with something to prove, Infusion begin their Australian tour in our fair city, playing tracks from their first studio album in five years. A not-huge crowd gathers at Family, where expectations are nonetheless high for a night of top-notch live dance music. And the light show is pretty too!
First, The Dirty Secrets stalk on stage, looking like stringbean garage rockers. They could conceivably be a group of scruffy psych-punks, until they start playing that is. Instead, the band are a suitable support act for Infusion, specialising in a danceable strand of synth-rock, Triple J-friendly muscular pop songs with an electronic post-punk flourish. They even have a song called Transmission! However, instead of Ian Curtis’ apocalyptic death-disco vision, their tune is straight-up, noisy, shouty and melodic, like a blend of The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand. The hook-heavy Five Feet Of Snow is another highlight, and heads are bobbing approvingly, but it takes the headliners to fill the dancefloor.
And Infusion does this with aplomb, the tunes from their sleek new album fattened up live with crashing live drums, robotic vocoders and cranked-up guitar making the already-anthemic arcade challenge 2 Player Game into a storming floor-filler. Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus is cleverly reinvented, but the arrangement still respects the original’s electro-blues punch. Fans holler with joy when the stop-start grooves of old favourite Better World start pulsating, and even when they jam their way through a freeform burst of tech-house, the improvisations remain crystalline and disciplined enough to keep the audience on their feet. It should only be a matter of time before the air-punching, crowd-pleasing songs from the brand spanking All Night Sun Light become part of national festival consciousness – and this reviewer suspects the next time Infusion play a show in Brisbane, they’ll be performing before a considerably larger audience.
MATT THROWER
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