Basics, The - The Basics (Album)

The Basics polarise music lovers. Some call them brilliant and overlooked while others see them as being a bit too 60's cute. Either way, they are a live band, so they have released a live album, The Basics. What they gain in immediacy and energy, however, they lose in emotion and continuity.

It’s an understated opening to a live album. The voice of Kris Schroeder interrupts the laughter and subdued background chatter with, “This is called The Number One Cause of Death Amongst Youth...” pause. Applause. “Today.” But what a song! The single from the 2009 album Keep Your Friends Close, this delves into deeper and darker places than what many listeners would have presumed from the smiling, suited pop-rockers.

The familiar voice of Wally De Backer (Hey, isn’t he that Gotye guy?) lifts the mood an octave with Better, from 2007‘s Stand Out/Fit In. Jokingly referred to by band mates during the show as “the most under-appreciated member of the group,” De Backer’s voice is clearly one of the best in Australian music today. That said, he sounds at times to be sacrificing pitch perfection or vocal quality for energy and feeling; there are crackles, accidental falsetto squeaks and not-quite-there moments throughout. But, hell, it’s a live album, after all. It’s half the point.

Everyone knows The Basics give you a lot of fun for your live music buck but not everyone knows how amazing their songs can be. Unfortunately in the end, after a set-long struggle between brilliant songs and blokey banter, you tend to remember the light-hearted conversation at the expense of amazing songs. The battle begins four songs in when the band goes silly and rocks out for three songs in a row: Have Love, Will Travel, What Have You Done and Rattle My Chain.

It’s great fun, but the fun gets tiring. Like most Aussie males, Wally, Tim and Kris don’t tend to give too much away, lest it’s taken and thrown around. (You sing about unrequited love, tenderness and heartbreak; you don’t talk about it.) But we’re eight songs in when the tender and subdued Feels Like Love is introduced with typical understatement: “It’s just a nice one to break it up a little bit.” At the song’s end, Kris asks ironically “So is everybody who has been enjoying themselves still enjoying themselves?” The audience erupts into laughter and the moment is gone. The song took the audience on a journey, the banter yanked them back to where they started.

Lookin’ Over My Shoulder is a highlight. Featuring a blazing drum solo, innovative vocal arrangements and three key changes this is The Basics at their best. The energy builds like a wave about to break, pushing the band for the first time in the show to the edge of new territory: letting go within a song, being carried by it and allowing the song to take you to wherever it may, trusting the audience will travel with you. Trusting you will all arrive safely on some new and foreign shore. You can’t rehearse that.

But then they go and sabotage it. “You can talk amongst yourselves,” they say immediately after the song’s climactic end. “Decide whether you want to hear any more. We don’t want to waste your time if you’ve got other things to do tonight. It is Saturday tomorrow after all.” De Backer has just been singing at the top of his lungs about how he feels he feels frightened and isolated a lot of the time, and then there’s a joke at the end of it?

They finish their set with New Kids on The Block’s You Got It (The Right Stuff), the hilarity of which erases any memory of how The Number 1 Cause of Death in Youth Today broke your heart, how Feels Like Love left you calmed and awed or how Just Hold On made you feel okay with your imperfection, made you see you weren’t alone. Vacillating between pub jokes and songs of heartfelt disclosure, The Basics lose out to just being a fun band. If only they could strike a balance between their sense of fun and their art, The Basics would be truly brilliant.

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