Apr 10, 2010 (14 years ago) Spectrum Darlinghurst, New South Wales, Australia
Experimental, Garage Rock, Punk, Australian, Australian Alternative Rock, and Perth Indie.
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Kim Salmon & the Surrealists, Spectrum, 10 April, 2010
The launch of the first new Surrealists album in a thirteen years sees Kim Salmon strut the Spectrum stage.
Australia doesn’t really revere well. We have countless creative types who are critically and fanatically adored abroad, yet remain almost unknown on our shores. Kim Salmon’s impressive resume includes stretches in the highly influential Scientists, Beasts of Bourbon, Antenna, The Darling Down, The Business, and his recently reformed three-piece outlet The Surrealists. First formed with Tony Pola and Brian Hooper, the band were formed under the auspices and ethos of punk with the inspiration the improvisation aspect of jazz.
When Salmon took to the stage brandishing a Dictaphone and played a swirling mass of feedback and un-restrained, whirring noise by way of introduction, to the set & new album’s opener ‘Turn Turn’, it’s clear, that after numerous years and line up changes those traditions still exist today.
The Surrealists, now comprising bassist Stu Thomas and drummer Phil Collings, are all about creating music focussed on power and purity, with the guitar proving to be the main protagonist. Their sound is hardly what you could safely call tuneful or traditionally structured, with most songs created from noises summoned from playing pushed right to the edge. The band is challenging, with the rhythm section mostly just gainfully keeping up as Salmon’s guitar is wrung to it’s very last gasp of useful vibrations. During the purely instrumental ‘RQ1’ and the twenty-minute plus, two part opus ‘Grand Unifying Theory’ the trio barely share a word, but exist together on a whole series of unspoken, subtle cues that send the music veering into seemingly made-up tangents. After hushed and humble farewells we are seen off with the grandiose ‘I’m Keeping You Alive’ which sneers brilliantly along building to its megalomaniacal climax where Salmon declares himself a god. Which most in attendance would be tending to agree, particularly when he chooses to be a particularly compassionate one and returns to delve into the back catalogue with an ominous airing of ‘Cockroach’, a woozy telling of ‘Rose Coloured Winsdcreeen’ and the cascading convulsions of ‘Melt’ end the encore and the evening. While Salmon will seemingly always be a victim of interest in his past, overshadowing his music of the present. But his music will still potentially provide the same inspiration and influence simply because it is discomfortingly provoking, inspired and still pushing envelopes.
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