The state I’ve come to enjoy being in most is so tired I forget I’m human because my nervous system really needs to be taken for a big run before it lets me relax and stops doing some unique and intricate Odissi routine to free itself from the confines of my skin through violent esophageal spasm. Possessing better judgment, as many of my friends do, I wouldn’t be on the train, but regulation is not a skill I ever got to learn. A note on etiquette states that if you’re gonna spew before the first band even starts the least you can do is flush it once you’re done so I don’t have to look at the contents of your stomach. Perhaps this is a fallible assertion coming from the queen of spewing so much in the morning an immaculate conception scene forms behind the blood-webbing of my eyelids.

COMBAT ROCK play for all of ten minutes, which means they must be at least half decent, and sure enough Max and I catch the final gasps of their Bostonianisms, Project-ing X out upon the bizarre melee of crowd members. By design or necessity one cannot say, but it’s enjoyable to see a somewhat mixed bill, even if the bowl being stirred remains the size of a thimble.

I ask the bar manager if they have a phone charger and he says that it’s in use and then looks me up and down and says “yeah fuck it you’re not a cis white male, I’ll charge your phone”. If you wish to inhale my thoughts on WHOSE REALITY you may locate them elsewhere in this very issue though suffice it to say I tell Max at the start of the set ‘yo they fucking rip’ and by the end he is converted.

I’m kinda weirdly on mummy duty right now cos someone here is so fuck-eyed and has been abandoned by their friends but it’s pretty obvious tonight is not the night so I’m tailing them around the bandroom like an aggravated babysitter until I catch em sitting down and get sent off to find Yeap once we reach the decision it’s hometime. Although, if there’s any band in Melbourne that would be good to have a nice world-bending spew to, I reckon CUTTERS is up there. All of the bands on this bill trace individual arms out both sonically and geographically from that initial spark. Motorpunk for depressed people, the Chosen Few if they had big feelings about Pine Gap. Riding the rock and roll arm as far as they can push it, bounded only by a rejection of the pussy-and-beer individualisms of so much of that stuff. Depression the band, depression the thing you pretend you don’t have. High-functioning and all that jazz, tight as hell but only because if something goes wrong you don’t know whether you’ll be able to breathe properly again or not. It’s good, but it’s always bloody good. That’s what happens when ya practice.

I feel so revoltingly visible this evening, as though behind every eye that clocks me hides that freaky cunt from Rear Window and they’re waiting for the moment the light peeps through my atomic spacing and they can capture on film the private life that occurs behind the veil. PUNTER have that snot-filled vibe of a kid who was real mean in the sandpit. I feel like the amount I’ve listened to this album since the show trying to fabricate memories has turned me a bit dumb, and as much as they might hate it it does really sound like the shit we used to listen to while floggin old cars around Shepparton to get pissed in the river and get big red stains on our intimate areas winging ourselves off the shells of old barge docking stations. Sonic geographies of Echuca. It may be an intricate form of musical sarcasm how much this lot really do sound like AC/DC, and I do quite dig it when Nathan goes “aaaaaaaaa FUCK”. Speaks to my soul, and goes to show you don’t have to say eighty-seven things per song if you can just make a noise like Tom (of Jerry infamy) getting his tail stepped on. I’m guessing. I haven’t seen the cartoon. Listening to the lyrics feels like having your head sandwiched between a social studies textbook and a transcript from a child-support hearing in Stawell, but I was crap at school and never allowed to attend the hearings so I just watch Jake and Bella play instead. They’re both very good at what they do, which inspires me to get very good at what I do, and in the state I’m in getting gripped by anything, let alone inspiration, is a miracle akin to when Mary rocked up to old J-Dog’s house and found that the rock had moved. Feels a bit like we’re all going down to Santa Fe where Renoir paints the walls, but I’m from bogan stock so it’s alright. I won’t be leaving the wall my back is against because the floor is doing that Moire illusion thing it does when you’re really tired. There’s a bitta chat in between songs and I’m struck feeling that I don’t know, at least from where I stand, if you can compare the conditions of geopolitical, social and economic domination that permeate many use patterns with always being on the damn phone, but maybe that’s just me and my inability to have any hope for change. Nathan goes “we’re just having a bit of trouble with this contact mic” and I’m like contact mic? Are PUNTER about to chuck a noise set? The reality of saxophone doesn’t really hit me honestly until I catch the sax player booting it around near the toilets with no shirt on, and even then I’m drowning under someone saying they remember me and I can’t remember them and I feel like a bad person. Maybe that’s what’s up out here. I feel like a bad person, but we all do, so we’re either all correct or all wrong and either way it doesn’t really matter any more than a ringing ear in the end.