Things started to get a little weird when the creature came on stage. He was about 6”2, covered completely in long brown hair. There was a red light where his eyes should be. He came on stage towards the end of Dead Meadow’s mind bending set, lumbering around in front of the crowd, shaking his hairy fists.
In any other place, with any other band, the creature would have seemed out of place. But under the star spangled ceiling of the Forum Theatre and with the band exploding around him, the creature’s presence, like the music, seemed just right.
Dead Meadow are in town for The Melbourne Festival, joining the likes of John Cale, Boredoms and The Drones for a month of musical madness, and on Thursday night the Washington three-piece proved to be the definition of psychedelic.
Things got off to a very loud but heart-warming start, with a set from Stigmata, who are (to borrow a phrase from John Darnielle) “the best ever death metal band out of…Sri Lanka.” Heroes in their home country, the hirsute five-piece are the first Sri Lankan act to tour Australia, and their set was just about the furthest thing you could imagine from a country known for cricket, tea and civil unrest.
With leather pants and hair down to their elbows, they looked like characters from Guitar Hero and sounded like it too. It was all windmills and face melting solos, blistering speed metal from the sub-continent. The tone of track titles like Spiral Coma and A Dead Rose Wails For Light belie the infectious enthusiasm of the band, lead by the permanently smiling Suresh De Silva. They seemed to be having a ball onstage, and though the set dragged a little towards the end, you’d have to be a pretty cold soul not to want to root for these guys.
Stigmata were loud, but Dead Meadow were deafening. They come onstage to a swirling wall of feedback and pulsing strobes, picked up their instruments, and from the first crunching chord from Jason Simon’s guitar, it was all very intense.
It’s somewhat hard to write about particular songs in this set. Obviously there were highlights, like the woozy blues of Good Moanin or the psych dirge At Her Open Door, but Dead Meadow have always been less about the tracks, and more about the feeling they create.
Songs seemed to cascade together, one riff melting into another. It was entrancing. While Simon is obviously the nucleus of the band, he is given great support from bassist Steve Killie and drummer Stephen McCarty, who keep things tight and focused, while Simon blasts out the sound. Needless to say, he is an excellent guitarist, switching with a flick of a pedal from blues, to psych to floating Pink Floyd-esque soundscapes.
As a frontman Simon had just about the least stage presence I’ve ever seen. He barely spoke to the audience, and to be honest, it was a good thing, as all anybody was thinking about was the music.
Everything just came together. The Forum has always been a great venue, and its cavernous space and pulsating light show put you in a very cool headspace. As the creature shuffled onstage, smoke swirled, lights pulsed and Simon’s guitar yelped and kicked the gig to a close.
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