My Disco

My Disco have amassed a dedicated cult following here in Melbourne, so it was surprising to see maybe ten odd people scattered around the Hi Fi last Friday night as opener Marco Fusinato appeared on a dimly-lit stage. It soon became clear that this night was all about My Disco, and the appropriately weird assortment of openers were of much less interest to most. I was unfamiliar with Fusinato, and spent the first half of his set wondering when the wall of warped, screeching guitar noise was going to morph into a song. I eventually realised that the noise was his set, and although I found it to be a little directionless and ostentatiously strange, thinking of it more as an art piece than a music performance helped me enjoy it a little more. Fellow Melbourne experimental act Kes Band pulled off a much more coherent performance, and I wasn’t surprised to see the room fill up fairly quickly before the end of their set. Even with their wildly varying sound and instrumentation, the number of musicians on stage kept things interesting and there was definitely a buzz of restless anticipation in the air, and I found myself distracted by the thought of what was to come.

The lights died and the smoke machines were turned up to maximum as Robin Fox emerged onstage, with a single beam of green laser light and a humming bass note piercing the darkness. His sound-driven laser show was visually amazing from the very start, and the oscilloscope style combination of heavily rhythmic electronic music and perfectly synched sweeping laser beams made for a really cool audiovisual spectacle. Unfortunately things began to get monotonous by the end of his half hour set, and members of the crowd even started voicing their restlessness, but thankfully the show finished before it got boring.

There was an instant transformation in the room as My Disco took to the stage. The stage lighting was turned up above a dim glow for the first time in the evening, the crowd roared and the energy level on and off the stage hit a massive new high as the band pounded into ‘Closer’ .The band chose to launch new album Little Joy by playing it in full, and the overwhelmingly positive response this got from the audience – despite a lack of much-loved older material – is a testament to just how adored they are. The sound was absolutely perfect throughout the set, and the bare, crisp lighting and occasional billows of smoke sat perfectly alongside the band’s minimal sound. Amazing drum work, sparse lashings of thunderous guitar and hypnotic bass combined to make one hell of an intense live sound, and watching guitarist Benjamin Andrews thrash around on stage by himself would have been a satisfying enough visual spectacle even without the charismatic contributions of the other band members. Things hit a new high when Robin Fox re-emerged to lend his lasers to ‘Sunray', with the particularly sparse musicianship on that song sitting perfectly alongside the oscillating walls of green light. After an excellently fleshed-out version of ‘Rivers', the band finished the night off with the jaw dropping ‘A Turreted Berg’, leaving a vocal crowd still very hungry for more.

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