Live At Bar Open 2006
Director: Matt Richards
Running Time: 112 minutes
Distributor: Tenzenmen

Seeing as this DVD is essentially a filmed document of one show at Melbourne's Bar Open, on the 16th of February 2006, there are two aspects for this review to cover: the DVD and the show.

Let's start with the DVD. The cinematography is superb. From only three cameras, director Matt Richards has given us a great impression of the atmosphere, the stage and the energy of each performance. Perhaps it would have been nice to have some more crowd footage, but Bar Open seems like such a dark place that perhaps whole scenes of blackness have just been cleverly excluded from the final cut. The sound is marvelous, too. But the 'experimental' structure of the DVD unfortunately tries hard and fails. The footage is divided into four arbitrary segments, each containing excerpts from all four sets. This is every bit as irritating as it sounds and it would have been much easier for us to just have a segment for each band (particularly, as explained below, with ni-hao!). Also, the rapid-fire interludes of crowd interviews seem to want to expose the Bar Open audience to be a vapid, dim-witted lot of drunken hooligans; if this is the case, then I must say they have succeeded brilliantly.

Now, the show itself. Well, this would have been amazing. Sydney's The Thaw are an experimental power-trio, whose long, slow-building, mostly instrumental pieces are wondrous to watch. Somehow, these guys have managed to make the plucking of a guitar's headstock, long a feature of Sonic Youth-style noise-pop, sound intricately melodic.

Baseball, who headlined the show, played every bit as manic and chaotic a set as they did a few months later at Rocket Bar; Cameron Potts' mashed violin and crazed yelling perfectly-orchestrated against Ben Butcher's staccato guitar, Monika Fikerle's driving bass and Evelyn Morris' quasi-melodic wailing. And that's not to mention that Morris is one of the most driven, perfectly-measured but crazy drummers I have ever seen.

Finally, ni-hao! It's a Japanese band which has chosen a Mandarin greeting as a moniker. Nevertheless, I don't think I've ever seen a band like this in my life. Two basses, three female vocals, piles of gibberish, 30-second songs of melodic gold, infantile harmonic yapping; it's like The Ramones only far more arbitrary and filled with unimaginable joy. Each song plummets into the next, almost indistinguishably (except when cut off by the segmented structure) and each melody soaks my head with wonder. Would have been quite a night, I say.

Ben Revi