Brisbane Laneway 2011 @ Alexandria Street, 04.02.2011 – Part 3

These days I find it almost impossible to keep up with all the new music released in the year and so tend to catch up on things I’ve missed when the music industry does its ‘Best Of’ lists at the end of each year.  The last Beach House album was one of those albums and I picked it up from Fopp for a fiver when I was in London before Xmas last year, part of a series of spending sprees you can’t help but do every time you go in Fopp.  When albums from the current year are going for five pounds and there are loads of back-catalogue and classic CDs going for £3 it’s hard not to just fill your basket.  I wish there was somewhere in Australia that was a cheap; not even Dirt Cheap CDs was as cheap as Fopp.  I guess the most surprising thing about seeing Beach House play live is finding out that it’s a woman singing; based on Teen Dream I had just assumed it was a guy singing.  They remind me of the much-overlooked Magnet, particularly the vocals, so maybe that’s why I ended up with that assumption.  They aren’t very exciting to photograph and yet I really like the set of photos I take of them, choosing to go way out to the side and using a shallow depth of field to get some nice shots of the two of them in frame and also using zoom to get close-up photos of Victoria Legrand but also using the foreground of Alex Scally’s guitar.

Catch a bit of The Antlers, then Gareth Liddiard.  I’ve missed the first three songs so take a few quick but not very good photos from the crowd.  Despite just how much I bought in Fopp when I was in the UK, I didn’t get the Warpaint album and watching them this afternoon it’s a decision I regret.  Up to this point they’re the band of the day.

By comparison, Two Door Cinema Club are one of those moments you experience more regularly the older you get, when you have to try to work out whether this band are as shit as they seem or whether you’re just too old to understand.  I really can’t fathom why they’ve drawn such a huge crowd (I’d say it’s the biggest of the whole day) but even with this as evidence I’m sticking to my first impression that this band are truly awful.  And it’s another case of the crowd being more interesting than the band.  I gain further photographic evidence that you can’t be on someone’s shoulders without a phone in your hand, although I can’t work out whether this is to take photos or just to text your mates; “OMG!!!! Watching TDCC. On Bfs shoulders. OMG!!!!!

Go to see Blonde Redhead but manage to go to the wrong stage, squeezing my way through the crowd and to the front just as John Steel Singers are about to play.  Decide as I’ve been to all the effort getting here that I’ll stay for a couple of songs but then rush off to the correct stage to see Blonde Redhead play in the dark and try to get creative with yellow backlighting and silhouettes.

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