 
The Vines
Metro, Sydney
Review by Mark Mordue
When did everyone start letting their hair go? This seems, to me, to be
the first side to The Vines call to feedom, hairdos straight from the pillow to the street
then the stage, bent, messed, distorted, mops of decadence and disarray. Oh yes ladies and
gentlemen, The Vines have come to say it loud and proud: free your hair!
Maybe all this hair liberation is a function of their new-found fame, that of singer Craig
Nicholls in particular: he's the rock star as painted in a Japanese cartoon, his 'do'
constantly pulsing in some invisible breeze of paintbrush blonde veering out to stage
right. FREE YOUR HAIR, YEAH!!!
Of course all this hairy grandness cannot obscure the central questions hanging over The
Vines: are they too much star, not enough light? Too much cool not enough heat?
They sure as hell don't have many notable songs. Or much of anything to say at all. I
don't think I felt a single thing from them all night. It's actually remarkable how blank
they were, how void of inner depths, honesty, insight they could be for such a phenomenon.
And yet Craig Nicholls performed like a god. Big gestures, ecstatic motions, rolling over
the drum kit in a radical spinal twist, aiming his feedbacking guitar at the audience and
letting it hum over their heads like a wand. Yeah, he was larger than life alright. And in
this largeness lay an emptiness, a call to 'love me' without any reason to be loved. When,
let's face it, he was loving himself more than any of us ever could.
Hey, maybe I was just irked by the fact he was wearing a t-shirt for 'The Vines'. It
seemed to symbolize a certain ongoing self-obsession that diminished everything about the
band here tonight. As if they couldn't escape from themselves and what has happened to
them this past year. Perhaps that's why their performance so often seemed to go right over
us; to not meet us face to face. It always felt like they were acting, not being. We were
in their movie - that was all. As world-conquering hometown heroes return to us, there was
something vital missing from a night that never got over it's own sense of anticipation.
The one thing that did get us again and again was Craig Nicholls singing. No one has
really said what wonders exist in that voice; it's a goddamned ocean. From angel sweet to
ragged and raw and back into a soul falsetto, Nicholls has a gift that not even The Vines
own record Highly Evolved gives a clear sign of: that he is one of the truly great rock
'n' roll vocalists, up there with Liam Gallagher, Bono and Michael Hutchence. He can
really, really sing.
Everything good the band does is attached to the tide of that voice. It keeps the songs
conversational, clipped, even throwaway at times, like the curl of a lip or a would-be
poem or obtuse joke-wisdom thrown out fast and half heard. Accordingly songs spin out in
what feels like a minute flat. So The Vines don't strain a limited riff ever, which makes
me think they're a bit like Oasis when they knew how to stop. You also hear the other
references too, the lashings of Nirvana, the Beatles via Supergrass's stereophonic
youthfulness, a distinct glottal, angular dose of Blur.
Drummer Hammish Rosser looks remarkably like George Lazenby in The Man From Kong, sporting
a mean coke-dealer's Fu Manchu moustache. He also plays very simply. While most rock
drummers have gone jazzy and eight-armed or delude themselves they're John Bonham, Rosser
comes from the Mo Tucker school of thump-thump-crash, pushing the band along without
excess and sometimes hitting a missing beat that anchors them in the garage as well as the
amphitheatre. He's so simple it's easy to not appreciate that he's also outstanding. Ryan
Griffiths adds some beautiful acoustic guitar work beneath Nicholls electric flares and
finger burning leads, hiding out stage left in the smoke machine (the delicate arrogant
one who comes and goes). And bassist Patrick Matthews plays solidly, of course, like all
fine bass players, sings great harmonies with Nicholls and looks a little unwell. It's a
rock 'n' roll band, picture perfect.
Put them all together and you have songs that are full of cascades, echoes, a worship of
reverb, with Nicholls vocals raining and stretching throughout. Sometimes the build-up
getting into the songs is like walking slowly into a big room, where you hear something
and approach it, till all of a sudden you're in the middle of it all. The melodies
certainly come at you, working off a proximity that suddenly envelops you. It makes the
sound very dynamic where the songs might otherwise seem very slight. Psychedelia or just
fixing it in the mix? I'm not sure.
A cover of Outkast's Miss Jackson is one of the night's highlights, startlingly beautiful
and yet another calling card for Nicholls as a very fine singer indeed. He takes ownership
of it so easily you wonder what he might do when he finds songs of his own to get really
immersed in rather than glide over.
Towards the end of the set Nicholls stops mid-song to wipe the sweat off with a towel,
leaving it hanging over his head and face as he keeps on singing. It looks and sounds
fantastic, like he's some prisoner or bandit exalting us from an anonymous place. But he
quickly whips the towel away again, maybe because he thinks it's stupid to leave it there
too long - but it's not - it's fucking awesome and eerie and magical. Craig Nicholls
disappears and something happens we can't explain.
You wonder again what might then happen when he learns to disappear into all of his work,
and stand out not just as a major new rock star, but as a songwriter with something to say
that matters enough to dissolve completely into it. Oh great things might come of that
time. But for the moment Craig Nicholls mostly looks and sounds so much better than he
really is. Free your hair soon, Craig, free it soon, yeah. |
© Mark Mordue
Dirty
Three: Mark gets in the mood in Glebe, Sydney with the Dirty Three CD, "Whatever You Love, You Are." & Alive in the City of Sound: A Night with
Dirty Three.
Mark Mordue's Music Archive: Morrissey, Nick
Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tex Perkins and His Dark
Horses, Radiohead: Ghost in the Machine, Ben Harper: "The Gift".
Tom Roe's Music Archives: Made
in New York, "No More Prisons", Sonic Youth
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