Issue 411 Issue Overview

Issue 411 Issue Overview | dB Magazine

Features		CDs
The Birthday Party "It's a beast... it turns into this beast of a thing," actor Gerrard McArthur reiterates of Harold Pinter's 'The Birthday Party', one of the English writers best known pieces of work. We'd caught up in the comforting confines of the spacious, grey, and dank and musty confines of the Queens Theatre; where I'd walked in on the cast having a mid-rehearsal lunch break. As I find out later, they were busily working though the music beds, which in itself was a new vista for a Pinter production. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me beforehand; a Pinter play - one of the cornerstones of the 'Absurdist' movement - is not the sort of thing where you just slot in a nice score beneath the action. As with Pinter and his terse writing, and his legendarily direct and immediately detailed stage directions, every piece of the action - and music - needs be thought out and matched to the on stage portrayal and intent of the story. There's little room for mis-interpretation. The man for the job, as it happens, was at hand here in Adelaide, in the form of Quentin Grant, known to all and sundry as 'Quincy'...		The Vasco Era Oh We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside Universal Instead of picking up a nice quiet indie band (who I mistakenly thought The Vasco Era were) and having them sing to me in dulcet tones, when I first put on their new disc 'Oh We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside', I was smashed by some tough Australian rock. These days, genres and sub-genres run so deep that you usually need to go down about five levels to give an idea of what a band sounds like. The Vasco Era for once has made my job a bit easier. Think loud rock, guitars that haven't been compressed to within an inch of their lives and straight up rock vocals accompanied by a tight rhythm section. Thankfully I didn't find myself slapping myself in the face and rubbing the disc face down on the road because it was ridiculously derivative like a hell of a lot of 'new' Australian rock out there is these days (Jet and Wolfmother perhaps?). Every time I listen to the disc, I hear a hint of some other Australian band hiding away. But that's what's known as an influence. Without influences, where do you even start?
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