The Troubadour - Wed Jan 16

Perhaps better known for his efforts alongside Messrs Ellis and White in the notoriously Dirty Three, the musically mutinous Mick Turner, spurred on by former Laughing Clown Jeff Wegener on drums, exposed tonight’s swelling Troubadour crowd to a stirring display of instrumental sodomy and the experimental lash. Brandishing a bow for much of his set, Turner trapped his guitar’s thin neck across his knee and threatened to draw blood as the audience looked on, wittingly complicit in the fate of five skinny metal strings. Painfully stretched metaphors, anyone?

Drums And Guns, the most recent uneasy release from Minnesota three-piece Low, was held up to the lights tonight by Alan Sparhawk, his wife Mimi Parker and bassist Matt Livingston. Opening with Sandinista, a track that’s emblematic of the ominous fragility permeating most of their work, the trio moved quickly from In Silence to Take Your Time and Dragonfly, before coaxing out the shy July from Things We Lost In The Fire. There was a noticeable lack of banter this evening, apart from, that is, a good-humoured yet unsuccessful attempt to get the muffled crowd to share a life-changing dilemma—“That’s a request; if you really liked us you’d listen to me”. Mick Turner joined in, bow in hand, for an extended version of Neil Young’s Down By The River, before the band closed with Violent Past, Murderer and the synthetic percussion of Breaker. Returning for a brief encore consisting of Starfire, taken from 1999’s Secret Name, and Songs For A Dead Pilot’s Condescend, Low’s performance this evening will surely soak into the Troubadour’s wall-to-wall carpeting and leave a stubborn mark. Another superb gig, then, at the Brisbane music scene’s velveteen vital organ.

BEN WILSON

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