An Horse

She’s been described as a “hidden treasure” of Melbourne – haunting, intense and sincere - and is lucky enough to be able to claim Tim Burton as a fan. But walking into the Northcote Social Club’s bandroom a few minutes into the opening set, the beautiful Saskia Sansom just looked like a sad, scared young girl playing sad, scared music. With only a handful of people sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the stage, staring up at her from the dark, you felt like you’d walked in on some kind of eerie cult performance that could possibly end in a suicide pact.

Her starkly simple piano tunes (each basically consisting of only a few chords played repeatedly) coupled with her fragile voice and intensely timid stage presence made for a somewhat pitiful introduction to the night. It’s one thing to be completely daunted if you’re playing your first ever gig, but this was not Sansoms first rodeo, and it was incredibly hard to believe that the girl represented on the Internet (on Myspace, Facebook, Mess&Noise, FasterLouder etc…) was the same girl sitting up on that stage. Without all the reverb and guest instrumentals present on the recordings, her songs just didn’t have the same effect, and seeing as though she clearly doesn’t thrive on live performance, it’s a wonder why Sansom even does it. Of course, this is not a criticism of her as an artist, but rather of her as a performer, and perhaps in a different setting, with a bit more confidence, she could be great.

Thankfully, The Gold Coats came out and immediately lifted the mood in the room with their energetic, country-esque tunes. The band, a self-described “bunch of hippies”, was far more charismatic and confident, and the fact that they were genuinely enjoying themselves made it that much more enjoyable for the crowd. Between songs and when she wasn’t tuning her guitar for the umpteenth time, the lead singer chatted away about eating Yum-Cha with An Horse, a tambourine-playing accident that led to a giant blood blister on their drummers leg, and how this was the first time they’d played to a standing audience (although, had venue security not forced everyone to stand up after Sansom’s set, I’m not sure this would have been the case).

Along with their only publicly available track “Stories”, the band played songs like “When We Go Home”, “Waiting Around”, and a cover of a song from The Handsome Family, which after some arguing was settled on as The Gold Coats mutual favourite band. The songs and the sound were nothing mind-blowing, but The Gold Coats just seemed to be having such fun together that it didn’t even matter. Although many people weren’t paying a whole lot of attention, they gave a solid applause when the band finished up.

After a tedious half-hour wait that even saw one punter whip his book out for a bit of light reading, An Horse finally appeared, and without a word launched into “Trains and Tracks”. Some sound issues that left the song distorted and unbalanced continued into “Know This We’ve Noticed”, but after some pleas from the band it was quickly fixed and the rest of the show continued glitch-free. Well, almost…the two onstage cameramen flanking the band throughout were incredibly distracting, but that’s what happens when you only have two bodies to occupy a whole stage.

In what was a somewhat unconventional set-list, Cooper and Cox pleased the crowd early on with the insanely catchy “Camp Out”, which was followed closely by a stream of tracks from “Beds Rearranged”, including “Postcards”, “Scared As Fuck” and “Little Lungs”. Cooper then declared that they were moving onto newer stuff, and the band eased their way through their new release “Walls” with tracks like “Dressed Sharply”, “Brain On A Table”, “Swallow The Sea”, and the title track “Walls”. Whilst each song was executed with energetic conviction, as a whole, the set didn’t have all that much emotion behind it. Besides the obligatory “How you guys doing? It’s good to be back in Melbourne…” the band barely uttered a word to the crowd or each other (although funnily enough, they did pick out the book-reader to find out what it was that he had been reading). Sure, chit-chat from the band is not essential to the quality of a gig, but it does allow the audience to form some sort of connection to what’s happening, and gives them an ‘experience’ that they can take home with them. So although Cooper and Cox sounded super on stage, you got the feeling that they weren’t overly thrilled to be there. That being said, a large portion of the audience up front either didn’t notice or didn’t care, as they jumped up and down, singing along to every word.

An Horse are an interesting duo with some undeniably catchy tunes that leave you with little doubt as to why they’ve enjoyed so much success already (although the live David Letterman performance still baffles me a little), and although their live execution of the songs is something that I would pay money to see again, I sincerely hope that next time they bring a bit more enthusiasm to the stage. Better support acts wouldn’t hurt either.

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