Not enough screams and too many laughs in this bloodless Dracula

Yet this visual and performative virtuosity, like wanton virtuosity in music, breeds a sort of greed in the audience. Having been astounded, if we’re not astounded even more, we’re disappointed. It’s interesting that amid this technological extravaganza, an abiding memory will actually be Newman’s voice – always a sumptuous instrument – and the way it delineates character with much more clarity than the costume and wig changes.

The core of the design team (Clements, Marg Horwell and Nick Schlieper) remains intact, and the new members are phenomenally expert. Twelve technicians shadow Newman on stage, and Williams accelerates and mutates the ending – by which time it was starting to lose me.

Genesis Owusu
The Tank, Art Gallery of NSW
Volume Festival, July 5
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★

The idea was too good to be perfect. One of the country’s boldest and most interesting alternative/R&B/hip-hop stars, a man who invokes Kafka and cockroaches and thrives in dark places, descended into the bowels of a subterranean World War II fuel bunker for a headline turn at a music festival.

Only problem is, as Genesis Owusu discovered when he first visited the Tank at the Art Gallery of NSW, you can clap your hands and hear the echo minutes later. The cavernous space and its 125 pillars required the Aria winner to take a different approach to each of the songs he had otherwise finely honed after a six-country tour.

Owusu’s “night of experimentation and improvisation” included drum machines, fiddles and throat singers. He kept his back to us for the first five minutes while the guttural, almost menacing introduction reverberated.

The first song proper, Leaving the Light, is an anthem of defiance from the point of view of a pest escaping a vengeful god, and it crackled through the space as Owusu stood imperious in his armour. If he was not lord of this underworld, he was one of its furies.

Survivor, however, came across somewhat subdued compared to its studio version despite the staccato machine-gun beats; for the plaintive Old Man, Owusu’s voice soared but positioned himself so that few could see him.

The Ghanaian-Australian rapper and singer from Canberra occasionally let a kookaburra-like cry loose, and had clearly given a lot of thought about how best to exploit an area better suited to an art installation. Walking through the crowd helped, and pleasingly the slower jams came to the fore. Gold Chains and A Song About Fishing worked well while bangers Tied Up! and Balthazar struggled.

The amusingly bitter Don’t Need You faltered under the weight of the reverberating bass, but the show ended on a high if abrupt note with the rousing Stay Blessed.

Both the performer and the space are impressive, and it is exciting to think about what they’ll each do next. But on the first date, they did not seem a perfect match.

Hockey Dad
Hordern Pavilion, July 7
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★

Hockey Dad have a keen sense of history. It comes across in drummer and co-frontman Billy Fleming’s reflection that it wasn’t so long ago he was at the Hordern watching his own heroes. It also comes across in their respect for the bands –Iggy Pop, The Cure, Pavement, the Arctic Monkeys – that influence but never overwhelm their art. Those musical references offer Easter eggs for the musos in the crowd but more importantly locate and enrich the sound that bathes an audience deep in party mode.

It is a sound distinctly their own, distinctly Australian. Harking from down the road in Windang, the band’s lyrics translate that musical heritage into sentiments both direct and modern. Maybe it is the proximity in time and geography that separates us from them that makes the relationship between this band and its audience so thrillingly close.

No need to ask what this crowd have been listening to in the three weeks since the band’s new album dropped: in a set that opens with Base Camp from that record and features six more of its songs, the audience sings along with every word. And what those latest songs lack in familiarity they make up for with a maturity that is more than a match for the old favourites.

The well-worn numbers pepper the night, drawing the show together just as things start to wander. The effect is best demonstrated on the switch from muted That’s on You – complete with acoustic guitar and poetic ramblings on dying trees and rotting leaves – to Itch, whose bell-like opening notes serve as a rallying call for anyone who had strayed to the bar. This band not only knows, but also serves, its fans.

As excellent as their new work is, they know that songs like set-closer Join the Club are unrivalled crowd pleasers, and please the crowd they do. The overall effect is of a band on the rise, beginning to master its powers of both craft and performance. Windang’s finest may also be Australia’s.