Club Acoustica - Reviews

If you are one of those lucky or foolish enough to stay up at weekend's end, finding Club Acoustica at a new monthly home is a damn fine thing! And when the new venue is The Basement, one of the few places you can still get some degree of intimacy in a crowd of 200, that helps as well. Might even forgive them the $3 pool tables.

But this Acoustica label can even be a little misleading, with even the showcase nature of this debut night falling into quite a range from the unplugged through, umm, semi-plugged (?) to virtual full band noise, though you can hear the words.

So, after expending maybe a little too much money at the bar and the aforementioned pool tables, we found a stool to watch the passing parade of variety and talent.

We start at the harmonied pop end, with Blue World quite nice with the extra colour of every other band's guest, Kylie Burtland, adding some flute and vocals.

Getting the 'why the hell isn't he huge?' asterisk is Dominique Fraissard. For he (and he is indeed a he - despite the name spelling), comes somewhere between the rock of Mick Hart and not quite as histrionic as iOTA can be, Monsieur Fraissard has voice, songs and a touch of the weird (love the statement on the human condition as delivered from a soapbox between choruses) to be really compelling. Like to see closer up, and for longer.

Kylie Burtland then gets her own spot with her very good band. The flute trills, her voice an equal instrument, and that song that got played on Triple J a bit gets acknowledging applause. Kylie also points on the fact that this is the venue you are most likely to run into an ex-lover at. She apparently has three in the room, and asks them to guess which one, a song, with a slight snarl to it, is actually about. Mess with their heads, girl!

Universe's Steve Balbi also has Kylie along at points in his set that follows, and even in reduced mode, his glam affection keeps coming through. Again I get to hum Bowie's Space Oddity over the intro to that song of his that sounds just like, umm, Bowie's Space Oddity.

Welter are their usual quality self, even seated. Elliott Weston does the rich voiced stuff, including a suitably well-felt Happy Birthday (no, not that one, his one) and its tale of relationship crumble. And Bondi's "skin against skin" refrain is fast becoming one of my favourites. Just excellent pop songs with some heart and head.

It's getting real late, and it's a school night, and Steve Appel's King Curly and the melancholy stories of little domestic dramas - how good is Family Man?, we ask again - let you down and out the door as the just right punctuation to end the night. This is going to be the first of probably quite a few special Sunday evenings.