Tropical Fuck Storm played Crystal Ballroom – 10/1
Australia’s finest returned to Greater Boston after a six-year hiatus for a packed show at the Ballroom, supported by Unrest’s Mark Robinson.
__________
Nihilism, existentialism, or the Bee Gees?
These were the three options that Tropical Fuck Storm’s Erica Dunn presented to the crowd as encore choices last Wednesday, which kind of sums up the whole band in nutshell. Rising from the longterm-hiatus ashes of Melbourne punk-blues outfit The Drones, TFS combine the bristling sonics and bad-vibes worldview of singer/guitarist Gareth Liddiard and bassist Fiona Kitschin’s former band with a darkly comic zaniness and the ability to bang out a raging mutant-disco rendition of “Stayin’ Alive.” They’re weird, they’re loud, they might be the best active rock band in the world.
TFS have been on my radar since the release of their modern-classic 2018 debut A Laughing Death In Meatspace, and they’ve remained a consistently fascinating and unpredictable crew across three subsequent LPs, including this year’s Fairyland Codex. We haven’t seen a whole lot of them in Boston during that time – sans one glorious night at Great Scott back in 2019 – and the packed house in Somerville last week indicated a pent-up demand. The people came for a storm, and the results were indeed elemental.
To watch Liddiard play guitar is to watch a man go to battle with an instrument, and his unconventional, percussive, fuzz-blasted style cuts around and locks in with Dunn’s complementary playing, anchored by the groovy rhythm section of Kitschin and drummer Lauren Hammel. It’s not an easy thing to make a conventional rock lineup sound totally singular these days, but TFS come as close as anyone. That chemistry was in white-hot form across the band’s Ballroom set, an onslaught that let up only when Liddiard had to take a gear-repair break brought on by simply playing too hard.
Outside the aforementioned Bee Gees cover, which eventually closed out the night, the quartet also worked in their haunted take on Stooges deep cut “Ann” between selections from the new record and some earlier discography highlights. We were absent a couple of my favorites (the furious “Antimatter Animals” or Nazi-witch-hunting saga “Maria 63”), but it’s a thrill to watch this band play pretty much anything, so who am I to complain.
Warming up the evening was Teen Beat Records founder Mark Robinson, attempting his recurring bit of performing 50 songs in 30 minutes. Sprinkling in favorites from his 80s/90s band Unrest and elsewhere across his discography, Robinson did come pretty close to the feat in a brisk, fun and funny set (though he was jokingly disqualified from setting a Guinness World Record by his own audience). There’s always next time.
Check out photos from both sets below.
