review

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Death Most Definite – a deadly debut

death most definite by trent jamiesonDeath’s big business — cutthroat, too. This is brought home to Pomp (alas, the circumstance!) Steven de Selby, a minor rung in the corp’s Brisbane ladder, when everything goes to Hell. Helping spirits pass over to the great fig tree under the world is a family talent, though there are those who have spurned the calling. Not Steven, who finds the task of Pomping somewhat cushy: it pays well, and the only effort he has to make is visiting the recently departed once in a while to make sure that unruly denizens of the netherworld — Stirrers — don’t pop into the recently vacated meat and take it for a test drive. But now the old firm is suffering a shake-up and the new broom is sweeping mighty clean indeed. Steven’s on the run, his life in tatters and under considerable threat. Through south-east Queensland he flees, with a gorgeous ghost watching his back (and other bits of his anatomy as well). Steven’s gonna have to step up and set things to right, or die in the attempt, and all of Australia — if not the world — is at stake.

Death Most Definite, the first of a series, is the debut novel (with an awesome, Angel-like cover) of Brisbane’s Trent Jamieson (a man whose prose I’ve long admired and who I have had occasion to share a drink with). Here, he’s wearing his heart on his sleeve. It’s an endearing feature of his prose — the man’s a short story genius — that the emotions run high and true, more often than not. The prose is on the money — fast and self-deprecating, with touches of beauty where appropriate, and insights into the morality of modern life (and a further insight into Trent’s CD collection — but hey, if any story was befitting of London Calling for its soundtrack, this is it).

Brisbane stands up quite well to its central role as sub-tropical battleground, its smallness of city and bigness of town adding to Steven’s woes. Just goes to show, you don’t need to be in Manhattan to have an enjoyable apocalypse. The supernatural elements, particularly the rituals, are suitably visceral, and should satisfy the eye of those looking for awards shortlists.

For the most part, the pace of this crime/horror thriller skips along nicely, smoothing over the couple of logic potholes that are adequately filled by the time we reach the denouement which sets up the next leg of the arc. Steven is a cool dude, a philosophical slacker and easy mark who rises to the occasion and provides pathos, a few chuckles and plenty of slick gory moments along the way.

This is an accomplished debut. Devilish fun!

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Goldfrapp rock Melbourne

All kudos to Alison Goldfrapp, but let’s also hear a cheer for her band and sound team, who all came together with nary a missed beat to provide a thrilling climax to her Australian tour at Melbourne’s Palace Theatre on Tuesday night.

Goldfrapp, soldiering on despite the death of her mother (announced on her blog in July), headed a band as tight as her body suit: a keyboardist with a Chrissy Amphlett fringe who was either busy with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the synthesiser or boogeying away at the front with a keytar; a Sheena Easton lookalike drummer presiding over a hybrid electric-acoustic kit; a cruisy bassist who might’ve been Jason Statham’s little brother; and a ringmaster who bounced around with a certain impish glee with his wild hair and beard and pyjama style body suit as he added highlights with an electronic violin thingy, guitar or keytar – the double keytar attack on some songs was truly awesome. And then there was Goldfrapp herself, raising hairs with those high notes, and otherwise enthralling with a set to seduce, all breathy and note perfect as she strutted centre stage and reeled off an hour and a half of hits, including two encores.

The lighting was striking, centred on a silver doughnut at stage rear, with lots of strobes and smoke, but it was the sound that made the night: the keyboards were working overtime, laying the foundation with a huge sound complemented by the rhythm section’s driving beat.

There was little chitchat from Ms Goldfrapp, looking resplendent in her mix-and-match black bodysuit and makeup lifted from the Alive music clip – minimalist but for the dark eyeshadow that enhanced the silvery undead gleam from the stage lights.

Light and shade were provided by a range of songs (penned by the songwriting duo of Goldfrapp and Will Gregory) from the cruisy Utopia, from debut album Felt Mountain, to more wistful Black Cherry to the joyful dancefloor pop of recent singles Alive and Rocket. The band were sharp, stopping and starting in perfect sync, and the tunes arranged to provide moments of quiet for Goldfrapp’s high range to weave its magic.

It was an impressive display of slick musicianship that could only have been improved by having Tycho Brahe in support!

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Recent reading: Ellis and Marsden

BRET Easton Ellis is on his way to Melbourne so I thought I’d better swot up, starting with Lunar Park (2005; his only book since then, Imperial Ballrooms, came out last month and is a sequel to his debut, 1985’s Less Than Zero).

Lunar Park is a very clever book, all about a writer called Bret Easton Ellis whose career path seems to mirror the drug-snorting, much-screwing celeb career path of the real life character (there’s a fascinating interview with Ellis in the Guardian about his new, drier, quieter life, and his public persona). It also offers some of the spookiest scenes I’ve read in ages, as fictional Ellis realises the mansion he shares with his wife, their son and her daughter is, shall we say, under a cloud. And it’s not just the fact that the wild child is grasping on to what passes as a normal life when you’re famous and your missus is an actress. Mixed in with acerbic observations about a certain well-to-do class of society is a plot of vanishing teenagers and some even stranger goings on at chez Ellis; there’s a son’s difficult relationship with his deceased father and the whole issue of fitting into this strange, new family; there’s drugs and booze and a certain girl at the university where he teaches who he’d really like to screw; there’s the dog, a truly delightful character.

The climax left me a little underwhelmed, but the writing was so smart and, despite some long (very long) sentences here and there (that for the most part worked), accessible, the characters so engaging (if the narrator is a tad, well, useless (he’s an addict so, d’uh)), that I really didn’t mind the letdown. The denouement was fetching, so maybe that helped.

FAMILY is also central to Tomorrow, When the War Began, but the focus is different and the comparison ends there. While Ellis and co are snogging and snorting in McMansions, Ellie and her small band of high school pals are sweating it out in the Australian scrub in the aftermath of an invasion by an unnamed and unidentified foreign power. All we know is that the soldiers probably hail from Asia or the Pacific — you do the math. John Marsden doesn’t say, at least not in the first three books. Given Australia’s traditional xenophobia, it’s probably wise to keep it obscure, but I can’t help feeling that wanting to know where the invaders were from would be on the minds of the invaded. It’s a small thing, and it’ll be interesting to see how the makers of a movie based on his series (opening in August), first released in 1993, tackle the subject of just who launches this comprehensive strike with an eye to colonisation.

Ellie’s from the bush, a rural town where most of her friends are farmers’ kids, so they know there way around machinery, animals and the scrub. They’re resourceful and plucky, and altogether human. Watching the characters rise to the occasion, mature under the pressure, grow and change, is part of the joy.

One of the most compelling features of the story is the way Marsden balances the action with the insight — this war is not patriotic, it’s survival, and questions of hate, morality, love and the future under foreign rule are handled with such care it’s a pleasure to read. There are some explosions — Ellie’s mates work out that they have a compulsion to fight for their land and their way of life against those who would take it by force. But the kids don’t turn into commandos overnight. They don’t use karate and explosives and guns with an innate Hollywood sensibility. Rather, they use their nous, they learn from their mistakes, and they pay a physical and moral price for making some hard decisions. Thoroughly enjoyable.

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The Loved Ones – skin-deep Aussie torture porn

First, the good news: Australian horror movie The Loved Ones looks very good. Nice effects, effective acting — I really enjoyed Lauren McLeavey’s psycho killer Lola — and some wicked camera work (there’s a gorgeous shot, coming out of a cellar, with mirror ball highlights moving across the ceiling). Special effects were on the money.

It’s a high school horror drama, set in regional Victoria, in which, as you will gather from the trailer, a side-lined girlfriend gets even with the help of her good ol’ dad (best line: this one’s for the Kingswood!), while the victim’s girlfriend is left to pine and his best buddy gets it on with the self-destructive goth girl (sigh).

Note that the core plot ie boy being tortured, and the secondary plot ie sex with goth girl, have little to do with each other.

And therein lies the rub. The connection between the characters and even the scenes in this flick just don’t add up. Just what kind of movie are we watching here — high school drama, family grief drama, edgy comedy, sicko horror? I’m sure I was laughing at the wrong times for all the wrong reasons, here.

There is so little development of character — here is the guilt-ridden hero, feel sorry for him; here is the patient girlfriend, cheer for her; here is light relief in good-hearted side-kick and here is the total outsider who, in some strange act of self-humiliation, deigns to date the class loser for the night of the formal (I think the reason that she’s goth, or maybe emo, I can’t tell after a certain age these days without hearing the music, is because she HAS SUFFERED LOSS: hence the fashionable black, the drugs, the booze, the screwing). (Nice girl Holly gives blow jobs, but they’re for the good of others.)

Lola the psycho could’ve been fascinating, but sadly she’s psycho from the moment the light goes green and has nowhere else to go. I really wanted to know her, her and her dad, and how it had come to this, but nup, it was all power drills and emotional power plays. Oh, and there’s a quasi-zombie moment.

The movie could’ve been fascinating: a history of disappearances, guilt-addled and grief-stricken dysfunctional families, and some really cool defensive driving lessons were all on the cards here, but alas, style held all the aces.

Anyway, it’s a solid little slice and dice if you’re up for seeing some people suffer, even if it is short on logic and lacking in give-a-damn, and the actors do a great job with what they’ve got. And it really does look very good.

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Inception – living the dream

Writer/director Christopher Nolan’s latest film is still looping through my mind after tonight’s viewing — it’s a tad exhausting.

In Inception, Nolan, who did a superb job re-energising the Batman franchise, casts Leonardo DiCaprio — far from the prow of the Titanic, thank goodness — as renegade spy Cobb who can enter a sleeping person’s dream and root out hidden or suppressed knowledge therein. Wanted by the law and with his wife, um, problematic, he sees an intensely dangerous mission as his one last chance of getting to live his life with his children. He leads a team of dream-shapers into a rich businessman’s dreams, not to extract, but to implant a ruinous suggestion that will earn Cobb his freedom to be a father.

There are dreams within dreams in this clever heist movie, where the treasure is an idea and the vault a man’s subconscious mind. Cobb’s relationship with his wife adds a gorgeous undertow to the movie’s arc as the action sequences, the kind we used to see in James Bond, pile up. My one negative about the flick was that there was perhaps too much bad shooting, too many shoot-outs and chases and fisticuffs that didn’t do much more than look pretty (some, very pretty indeed).

As the credits roll, we’re left with a question akin to that notably posed by The Matrix and a large section of the Philip K Dick canon: what is reality, and is it any more reliable, or preferable, than the dream?

A blog at NME suggests a few movies that cover similar terrain to Inception, and you’ll find a couple more amongst the at-times snarky reader comments (Dark City and Eternal Sunshine… were two that came to my mind quick smart, and I rate them both highly).

Another good thing about Inception was that it has completely erased (well, almost) the bad taste left by Predators, which we saw last week when Inception was all but sold out at the theatre and, well, since we were there… bad mistake. Should’ve got a takeaway and gone home to finish off Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. I had hoped Predators might breathe some life into the franchise, but it went from improbable to dull very quickly indeed.

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Ronnie James Dio dead, Jeff Martin live

So I’m just about to say how much I enjoyed Jeff Martin’s gig at Ruby’s last night, and I see that Ronnie James Dio has died from stomach cancer. The little guy had a massive voice — anyone who saw him tour with the Heaven and Hell Sabbath tour had nothing but praise for him (alas, I was elsewhere, and now the opportunity is forever lost).

Maybe it’s fitting, then, that Jeff Martin’s Requiem-Hurt combo was a highlight of last night’s two-hour acoustic set, accompanied by Armada bass player Jay Cortez. This was their third night in a row, and Martin’s voice had taken on a huskiness that added to the impact of the slower tunes, but he didn’t favour it, giving each song everything he had.

This was my first outing at Ruby’s, an easy 30-minute drive from home and plenty of off-street parking, at least at eight on a Sunday night. It’s an atmospheric and intimate club, lots of black and red, and a wicked timber staircase down to the basement loos. Naturally, as it is these days, it seems, the crowd had its share of tossers who got more vocal during the night: I’ve never seen bouncers come to the front of the stage at a Jeff Martin gig before, and it was a relief when the manic-depressive domestic in front of us finally decided to take it outside.

But they managed to contain themselves for the opening songs, Morocco and the aforementioned Requiem. The set canvassed Martin’s career, including Tea Party favourites The Bazaar and Sister Awake rubbing shoulders with solo songs The Kingdom and Stay Inside of Me (a duet with support act, Brisbane singer pear), and Armada tunes The Rosary (written for his dead grandmother) and Line in the Sand, and a stomping encore double of Going Down and Black Snake Blues. Add a second duet (regret I didn’t catch the singer’s name), on the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush hit Don’t Give Up (a RockWiz hit with Tina Arena), and a cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable, emotionally charged concert. But then, his usually are, which is why, despite the aggravation of arseholes who chatter and elbow and take their flash photographs, I keep going back for more of the same (but never quite the same).

Martin is said to be withdrawing for a few months to work on a new album. Can’t wait for that!

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The Cult rocks Melbourne with Love

Oh, my.

The Cult played a full house at Melbourne’s grand concert hall, The Palais on the St Kilda foreshore, tonight, and it was everything I hoped it would be from the seminal ’80s rockers. Their music has filled many a mile of lonesome highway and provided a backdrop to plenty of get-togethers, so to see Ian Astbury strutting his stuff alongside guitarist Billy Duffy was just magic after all these years.

Astbury, still wielding one of the most distinctive voices in rock, wore black: black pants, shirt, jacket, gloves, sunnies. From my seat in the back row — and how well is the Palais designed, with its sloping floor and staggered seats, so the view was still phenomenal — he looked a little fuller in the face than in the band’s heyday, kind of a melding of, say, Jeff Martin and Bill Oddie, and of course a touch of Jim Morrison, whose swaggering shoes he’d filled out the front of the Riders on the Storm (the Doors tribute band, featuring members of the Doors) (I think I can get away with that gentle jibe, given the Cult’s roster has rotated around Astbury and Duffy).

At least he wasn’t hidden under a hoodie ($100 at the merch stand — men’s thin cotton tees $50, women’s $55) as he was in Brisbane.

Duffy looked remarkably unchanged, still playing his trusty Gretsch White Falcon (“the whole Love album is played on a Gretsch, it was the only guitar I owned’), given a rest only in the second set for a couple of ‘heavier’ numbers from the group’s later and largely ignored albums.

While Astbury didn’t scramble over the rather depleted Marshall stacks nor writhe upon the floor as in clips from the days of yore, he did groove, he did yarn, he did flick that long black hair, he did chuck the mic when it played up and he did give the tambourine a bloody great hiding: the heart of soul was still beating.

The band played two sets: the first consisted of the entire Love album, their breakthrough album from 1985 featuring singles Rain, Revolution and the Goth club favourite, She Sells Sanctuary (big cheers from the crowd for this one!). It took about an hour, the concert lit with basic lighting and a big screen of complementary video.

The second set, slightly shorter, was a ‘best of’ that wowed the crowd, hitting a slight lull during songs from Beyond Good and Evil and Born Into This (the latter album deserved more attention, IMHO), before ending on a wicked high with Fire Woman and Love Removal Machine. As Astbury said, they don’t play ‘pretentious’ encores, and after that set, it would’ve been superfluous anyway. (And encores are a bit wanky, aren’t they? They’re expected now, formula, no longer an accolade for the deserving.) The sunglasses had come off for the second set, so he could kind of get away with poking fun at pretension.

Earlier, Astbury, still showing a bit of an 80s touch with critters’ bushy tails hanging from his belt — the kind of thing you’d expect to see flapping from a bogan’s car antenna or perhaps wrapped around an elder Lady’s neck, its little black eyes staring at you from beside her bejeweled brooch and powdered cleavage — remarked how rock concerts weren’t as intense as they used to be. No ripping up of seats. In the US, he said, the audience tended to stay seated. Not so in Melbourne, though he did poke fun at a few who somehow defied the driving rhythm section. And at the time I thought he was coming across as a bit of an old whiner, harking back to the good old days. But then, as the phones came out and the texting and the tweeting took off, and the bint next to us insisted on flashing off her camera every three bars or so for the entire duration of the song, I realised he was actually quite right. It’s not enough to be there, headbanging with the thrill of hearing Astbury scream out Wildflower (though this take tonight was a little muddy, to be honest); you’ve got to take pictures of your pals during the song. You’ve got to let everyone know RIGHT NOW that you’re there. That’s if you’re not noodling off to the bar and missing it entirely. Dangerous ground for a man now blogging his rapturous headbanging experience? Maybe.

Bottom line is this: The Cult came, they rocked, it was awesome. (Andy, I wish you could’ve been there, brother.)

I’d be tempted to hit tonight’s gig at The Palace, if I wasn’t gonna be elsewhere.

PS Sydney’s Black Ryder supported, and also looked pretty good, and sounded just fine, though I regrettably missed most of their set, having been in line for the slightly over-priced but very fetching Cult merch. I hope they have more tricks up their sleeve than the fuzzy guitar.

Foodie aside: before the gig, we hit amigos and got fired up on cajun chicken burritos and extra jalapenos, washed down with Crushed Fairy cocktails (key ingredient: absinthe) and Sol beer. Rockin! I love the way you can walk down these cafe streets in this town and just pick one, and find it sweet.

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The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow, the director who gave us splendid vampire movie Near Dark (one of my favourites) and equally enjoyable SF flick Strange Days, really hits the mark with The Hurt Locker.

I finally caught the Oscar-winning movie last night, and wow.

The title is certainly apt, with the film following the events that befall a team of bomb-disposal experts in Baghdad with the arrival of a new leader, Will James (Jeremy Renner).

James is an adrendalin junkie, much to the concern of his new team-mates: after all, when you’re defusing bombs, you’d like a steady hand on the wire-cutters.

This is no Good Morning Vietnam or Blackhawk Down or, thank God, The Green Berets. There is no singular enemy for the team to overcome, no overarching narrative of right vs wrong, no great moralising: it’s a very personal story about men reacting under the most dire of pressure, and the relationship that forms between them.

Bigelow has shot this brilliantly in a semi-documentary style that gives it emphasis without playing too many emotional violin strings (and in fact, music is used scarcely and brilliantly).

The acting is superb (with notable roles for Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce, the tension palpable at times, the story unpredictable in its events if not its conclusion. And, like most good war movies, it leaves you asking, why.

I expect The Hurt Locker (official site and YouTube preview) will rank in the best movies of my year.

Here’s a sample of the superb music in the film, Khyber Pass by Ministry, played over the closing credits.

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Simply charming, Andrew O’Neill

I was comfortably numb from a very fine meal, accompanied by very fine wine, with friends at Stuzzichino in Lygon St when I rocked up to the Melbourne City Hall to see Andrew O’Neill strut his stuff as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Which probably isn’t a bad way to see a comedy gig, even one by a man whose descriptor is ‘occult comedian’: it sounds devilish, but he’s simply charming.

O’Neill is 30, he tells us, but still resisting the notion of maturing; it’s the least of his confidences shared during his set. There’s the obvious goth cheerleader look, for instance, his long black hair tied pack in bushy pigtails, the metal t-shirt and skirt completing the picture. Yes, he says, he likes wearing women’s clothing. And then there’s the metalhead aspect, inspiring a pleasant breakdown of some of the genres for the unitiated, which is tied into his active interest in the occult, in particular infamous Crowley and famous Newton.

He also relates how didn’t really care about pop music at all, until his outrage was ignited by the Jonas Brothers. This interview gives an idea.

(I think inciting the viewers to kill and rape the band is perhaps over the top, but you can understand the sentiments.)

Anyway, there is something very cool about sitting in council chambers surrounded by a mixed audience heavy on the metalheads listening to an erudite, passionate young man (in a skirt) expounding his belief that magic is fucked, but it works.

There are engaging — he’s an engaging guy, helped along by that English accent and occasional outbursts of ditty — anecdotes about being hassled by numbskulls for his fashion choice and a month spent in Adelaide to leaven his journey of interest away from Christianity into atheism and then into the occult; the latter journey being aided by black and death metal, that interest having arisen due to the influence of Metallica.

Satan, he says, gets the best music, and the best gags.

After more than an hour of his entertaining dissembling, I’m tempted to agree.

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Shudder, er, Shutter Island

Shutter Island is director Martin Scorsese’s new baby, and I finally caught it, late in the season, after being enticed by its Gothic whodunit trailer.

The island is an asylum for the violent criminally insane, back in 1954, with the impact of World War II and the Cold War adding undercurrents to what begins as an investigation into an escape and quickly develops into a far deeper, and more complex, mystery.

Leonardo DiCaprio is the investigating Federal Marshall who brings a whole baggage train of issues to the case as he faces off against the head psychologist played by Ben Kingsley.

The acting is uniformly superb, and I’m pleased to be able to vanquish thoughts of the execrable Titanic (just drown, won’t you?) while watching him work.

And Scorsese works up some delightful atmosphere with his bedlam visions.

But the movie falls sadly short of the mark that it could’ve and should’ve reached, and a damn sight sooner than its almost 140-minute running time.


There were a few warning signs that things were going pear-shaped from the get-go: unnecessary info dumps and a strange meeting between two cops, an overwrought score that thankfully settled down as the story progressed, and then the unnecessary expositions mounting up as the increasingly obvious (and slightly dubious) conceit was unveiled. I kept hoping for a further twist in the tail to unravel the conceit, but it wasn’t to be. There was, however, a very enjoyable and rather pointed, I mean poignant, closing scene.

And poor Max Von Sydow was wasted — he’s right up there with Christopher Lee on the list of actors who deserve chunkier roles, in my book — and an entire subplot told in flashback seemed all but irrelevant to the story in hand.

Good, but not great.

Among the trailers was the new ‘reimagining’ of a Nightmare on Elm Street: it looks tasty.