This Is Not A Photo Opportunity

Tiny Spiders + Undead Apes + Golden Bats + Green Nose @ The Waiting Room, 03.08.2012

The Tiny Spiders album has been one of my favourite albums so far this year and has been on regular play, for days on end at times, since it was first came out. I got it through the band’s bandcamp page as part of a 12″ vinyl & t shirt package, with the album download available for immediate download and the rest following. This year I have noticed myself doing this a lot more, especially for Brisbane bands; buy the vinyl and merch package, use the code to download the music. I’m not a fan of downloads but am a massive fan of vinyl, even though since moving to Australia I have taken a more pragmatic approach due to the cumbersome nature of vinyl and as I was never sure how long I was going to be here, and bought CDs. I don’t like CDs either but it was a happy medium to actually own the physical item. As a guide to my dislike of CDs, I only bought my first dedicated CD player when I moved into my apartment in Tenerife in 2007. But now I’m developing a small vinyl collection in the Australia and really need to think about getting a turntable, amp and some speakers to go with it. If anyone has any suggestions as to where to find something like that (is there anything like an Australian equivalent to the UK’s Richer Sounds) then feel free to point me in the right direction. Maybe one day my mini Australian record collection will get to be united with my much bigger (2,000ish albums) UK collection.

One of the things that’s most immediate and impressive about the Tiny Spiders album Innez Tulloch’s guitar parts, with bristle with verve and energy and sound fresh and exciting. There’s a definite touch of Sub Pop about the album, an obvious Nirvana reference in the poppy melodies and also a hint of the label’s never-weres/should-have-beens, Pond. Live, however, the band are a completely different beast, with Cam Smith’s superb drumming to the fore, a mix of the finesse of Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier and a near Bonham-esque sheer brute force. I just can’t believe that somehow this is the first time I’ve seen them.

The band have put together an eclectic bill for their album launch; I’m very much a fan of eclectic bills and there just aren’t enough of them around these days. There’s the freestyle electronica of Green Nose, the one-man-and-his-iPod-drum-backing of Golden Bats and the Ramones-esque punk of Undead Apes. I’ve always had mixed feelings about Undead Apes but tonight is the best I’ve seen them and they win me over with not too much effort.

You can’t really go wrong with four bands for $10 and it’s a really enjoyable night. Even the photography is a bit better tonight, with the near mythical spot light making an appearance throughout. The extra light helps considerably for Golden Bats and Undead Apes but less so for Green Nose (who plays in a dark corner) and for Tiny Spiders (Innez also playing in a dark spot on the stage and Cam set up too far from the light for it to make much difference – inverse square law and all that. Still, it was a much more enjoyable and less frustrating experience than last time and as with photographing at any venue, the more you photograph there, the more you get used to the conditions are how to make the best of them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2012 at 10:35 am. It is filed under Music Photography and tagged with Brisbane, Golden Bats, Green Nose, The Waiting Room, Tiny Spiders, Undead Apes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.