Hurtling down the highway towards Geelong without having been to bed prompts an untapped level of road rage and a sensory regression to a childhood obsession with pirates. I’m still embarrassed by the egregious amount of noise I accidentally made in the kitchen while I waited for the briki to foam up given there’s absolutely no chance my housemate didn’t hear it. When we come off the backroads and hit the outskirts of Corio I roll the windows down, and before I can stop it I turn to Addy and say HORSE. IT SMELLS LIKE HORSES. She just hits me with an ‘ok buddy’. This is about to be one to make the sole family member with whom I still speak proud, and by proud I mean stressed that I’m the only spawn of a certain branch, and it certainly appears that I’m really kicking goals. Horses, I’m a fucking wild horse, ride the white horse, it’s like I’m the horse in King Heroin and then the heroin in She’s Like Heroin to Me, except I feel like a bandaid in a pool and also like if I move my head too fast I’m gonna spew. But yeah…Jerkfest.

We try and cross a two lane road and nearly cause a three car pile up, and start listing people in the “scene” based on whether we think they can drive or not. Walloping around the Barwon Club like a jettisoned seaman has a way of making your decrepitude feel like magick. We clamour in for Station Model Violence who are, and I do not state this lightly, really fucking dicking about on the indoor stage. No one is talking to each other about the soundchecking, and the guitarist who isn’t Buz keeps trying to start up a solo noise set by pissing about with his amp while his guitar is too close. Addy finds a badge that says “Imagine Peace” and I whip out my lipstick, put a big red X through the middle and affix it to my scarf. I am anything but at peace with the dick-swinging Guitar Hero die-hard business happening right now. I’m a horse of the goddamn swamp and you lot sure are ridin’ me hard and putting me away wet. Dan Stewart is awash in the sea of alcohol, a drunken pirate clinging failingly to the life raft of a microphone stand. Station Model Violence cough up the standard post-punk fare seasoned with Magazine, Wipers, Echo and the Bunnymen. An alembication of the ashes of Total Control with the dyed-in-the-wool downpick of Sydney garage has transformed our dear vocalist into a swaggering mess polished in spilled alcohol, sticky Melbourne Bitter fingers tracing along the edges of the mothering divine, desolately digging in search of hope. It’s a bit of alright once it kicks off, and for the first set of the day you could do a lot worse, although it leaves me wondering how UV are gonna pull up as DX struggles to remain above his own feet.

Somewhere in the trudge along the post-nuclear beach we stumble upon the shell of CONSTANT MONGREL. I find a lot of the Jerkfest fare to be music for the incredibly employed, which could perhaps be a Pavlovian response to the decimated careerist enterprise I was engaged in when I was flogging in the most. Despite looking like high school lab techs, Constant Mongrel remain firmly tied to the post-dole tradition of remembering you can actually play a guitar fast and loud. Two members of Station Model Violence enter stage right and it’s like watching Dumb and Dumber on hyperspeed. It’s something incredible to manage to rhyme “intellectual” with “existential” and not sound like a teenage boy who’s watched too much YouTube, and really I’ve just been hanging on to hear The Law, fists flying as the last chorus hits. Tipping my own beer onto myself in a maelstrom of Lifeless Crises, I transpose through stratospheres to late-night radio broadcasts, fast and deft dodges of trams on bikes, the social ease of saying yeah mate just crash on my couch and then waking up and making coffee and sucking fresh air up through gummed nostrils. It’s rolling bad cigarettes and getting in a gross backyard spa with your clothes on, the Melbourne Sway in full force as those classic 600 Pound chords slam across waiting heads. Sarcasm may predispose apathy, but it’s what we do best. Hope is tricky but synthesizers are a lot more fun than dodging cops.

Addy is flipping off Al Monfort across the bar while Charlie chews my ear off about something and somewhere outside there’s elevator music coming from a dude behind an organ and it’s all a bit much until the guy cracking out beers does that thing where he pops both simultaneously and they squirt out a bit and all of a sudden my bow has been christened with froth and I’m ready for my maiden voyage.

#5 Go Bang! We snap out of our scheduled Jerkfest cry as WRONG WAY UP take the stage. If there’s one thing I believe about Billy it’s that he has definitely been to a Meredith and likes how it’s run. He too wishes he was a member of the landed agricultural class but alas he lives somewhere in Preston, so instead he throws these two in to pep everyone up. Going in blind is a good way to learn how to see, and I feel like a kitten whose eyes have finally opened. I put my finger up to the breeze and feel Ibibio Sound Machine rushing past on the disco air. The white people of the crowd love some funk music, activating bodily movement into something more than just a nod. Hip swinging is occurring as far as the eye can see as everyone remembers how fun it is to be around each other in the slight stink rolling off the Barwon River.

By the time the starter pistol fires for the Ultra Violet RACE, the big baby on the drum kit seems to have wrested back the control of his precentral gyrus and I am so spent I have ceased to be aware of the machinations of a physical existence, feeling myself instead to be a form of odd vapor. There’s a grand deal of alcoholist male reverie centering itself right up against my back which needs to be reminded as the band begin to stand up on their own two feet and there’s this one bloke in a striped shirt who just will not let up with the shoulder pressure. I wait for the triumphant end to Tread on Me and then lurch violently backwards, sending him flying into the tunnel that awaits his exit and snarl through rapid-dog teeth did you get what you fucking WANTED. I am not proud of this behaviour, but at this point I’m hardly even sentient, merely a sack full of beer and endogenous opioids, so it wasn’t even me who really did that actually. Stripe-head aside it’s quite nice down towards the front with pressure on each side of me. I feel like a docile cow being vacuumed. Or inseminated. A fella next to me turns and says “is this music they’re playing” and I send back a quick “yeah I reckon so” and he lets out an OK which is astounding in but it’s length and volume before commencing to hop from side to side to the synth prelude to Inner North. I’m enjoying the naise Fall-isms, though by the way Al Monfort keeps glancing at me I think I’m freaking out the band by standing dead-eyed at the foldback with my thumb outstretched like a hitchhiker. It’s only because I’ve been having bad dreams guys, this is what the song you’re currently playing is about, get around it. No Trend-setting upon the stage is a welcome break from the rumour mill of misremembered garage nostalgia. I’m a lack-of-sleep paralysis demon, a Benadryl space ghost coast-to-coasting on the merry-go-round of Life Park. Anti-punk has this way of bringing a grin to the mouths of even the biggest XTreme music wanker, because really, as much as I can piss and moan until I come up dry, I do actually have everything I want. I wish I could write a diatribe against the punx as good as Act Like Them.

Standing up under the fan I spy the golden locks of Lachlan Smith and put my hand down to tousle them a bit. I reckon I tell Addy the drummer of MARBLED EYE is Really Good about eight times across the rapid set. It’s ultra-California in here, marked by that slow, simple guitar lick build into a raging onslaught of persistent kraut-enjoyer thumping, yet jumping across the border to hit that real Crack-Cloud-y Canadianism. Lach is dancing like he’s skiing and the sky is swirling against the desperate fan. Maybe not something to write home about but not everything has to be revolution. Sometimes a good downward stab and mute is all you need to get you through the day.

Last time I saw OPTIC NERVE at Jerkfest I remember being unable to look at, let alone speak, to the wide-eyed Victor next to me. Post-hardcore is dead in the water, an art-school validation for people who think they’re far too esoteric to enjoy getting dirty, or rather, more recently, have found their wealth does not grant them the instantaneous validation they are so accustomed to. The understanding that Optic Nerve retain, unlike many post-hardcore groups, is that the genre is not anti-hardcore but rather hardcore-plus. And did you want to add hot sauce to your sandwich my liege? And would you like to add blues to your Blue Vomit? The retention of this spirit articulates itself in Gi’s decision to eschew her role at several points, electing instead to manipulate the microphone’s feedback in place of any form of verbal expression. And again, not in that unabated nonsense gear-worship fine-art-ification of noise way, but simply in the way that often emotions are not bound by the falible transactions of language. Optic Nerve appreciate thought as extralingual, something that is only tangentially bound to linguistics by virtue of the fact we cannot simply open the trap door of our psyches and allow the other to peek in. This is precisely the curveball needed at this point in the many hours of bloke-with-shed gear, and empowers me to make eye-contact with the dude from a previous band who was talking a heinous load of fresh-Adidas-clad bullshit as he stands on the Barwon stairs, and show him the backside of my central finger. Hard-fuckin-core.

We leave after precisely one and a half GUITAR WOLF songs. I throw a dead mouse over the bridge on the walk home, and sleep as peacefully under my cloud of demons as I am hoping he does down in the mud of the river.