Melbourne’s space cadets in residence, Midnight Juggernauts, have been steadily gaining a following in the UK with their peculiar brand of space-rock and electro, each trip to these shores gaining more dedicated Juggernaut disciples with very good reason.
Being Australian no longer means comparisons with Men at Work or Neighbours characters playing the pop star. There has been a steady line of great music from Australia over recent years, most releases on the Modular label, Luke Steele in either his Empire of The Sun or Sleepy Jackson guise, Pnau, Van She, Architecture in Helsinki, Cut Copy and er…Jet representing Aussie pie and mash cock rock, badly.
Midnight Juggernauts are fully aware of their country’s recent musical history and cherry pick all the best bits of it while throwing in dashes of Super Furry Animals, Filthy Dukes and preposterous, Muse-influenced synth histrionics.
Live, it’s like watching three John Bonhams rambling over keyboards and guitars, wondering what happens when they press this button or strum on that, they perform with ragged Antipodean brilliance like a Flight of the Conchords sketch (but not from New Zealand).
Songs such as ‘Vital Signs’ and ‘The Savage Pack’, from their recently released second album ‘The Crystal Axis’, float dreamily mixing psychedelia with high camp while the swaggering ‘Winds of fortune’ has a chorus so big it could fill the Australian outback.
Older tracks, ‘Into the Galaxy’ and ‘Tombstone’, show how easily they can switch from rock to dance with a canny knack of producing pounding electro tracks, way more convincing than the majority of acts who allege to be aligned to either, the set even included a stagger through a Gerry Rafferty’s dodgy 70’s stinker ‘Baker Street’ complete with dubious sax solos, as bad as it was good.
With these guys, the only thing to do is ditch the preconceptions and unleash your inner geek, the benefits are endless.
Words by Chris Todd
