Hideous Sun Demon @ Grace Darling Basement
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Hideous Sun Demon @ Grace Darling Basement

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Downstairs at the Grace Darling Hotel, Dead Heir are bathing the audience in a lush psychedelic wash; a little bit Jefferson Airplane in the fall after the summer of love, a splash of Hollow Everdaze on a dark Melbourne night.  There’s some good riffs buried beneath the synesthetic surface, and everything is good in the world (at least the distorted sub-stratum of the world that can be found in the Grace Darling basement). As the world continues its decline into paranoia and hatred, at least there are bands like Dead Heir to give us something to smile about.

The set over, the crowd filters out to imbibe the blend of industrial pollutant and tobacco smoke that passes for fresh air. 20 minutes later and Danny Kransky is rapping and venting onstage, his backing band weaving their way through funk, rock, soul and garage psych. Kransky’s tirade against misappropriation of public funds (“don’t fuck with taxpayers’ money”) is more angry than eloquent, and the crowd laps it up in rhetorical spades. Smoke weed and listen to Sabbath, comes a later exhortation, part statement of defiance, part pop-philosophical proposition. There’s more than a bit intriguing about Kransky: the scathing social commentary of hip hop, complemented by the slick groove of early ’70s rock. 

Hideous Sun Demon are playing their third Melbourne gig of the day, but apart from a couple of broken strings there’s no sign of fatigue. It’s a set of elasticised freak out events that fry your brain into a perfect cognitive state. There’s some scuzzy Pacific Northwest garage, some lumbering stoner rock riffs, punctuated with psychedelic punk sensibility. It’s infectious, and the crowd is grinding with the adolescent excitement of Liverpool in 1964, the countercultural defiance of Detroit in 1967, the punk insolence of Los Angeles in 1979 and the bent psychedelic rock attitude intrinsic to San Francisco. These guys are from Perth, and you sense James Baker, the patron saint of Australian punk rock, has had a subliminal hand somewhere in Hideous Sun Demon’s gestation. 

The band says it’s got time for two more songs, and the crowd bays for three, four or maybe even the whole set all over again, like a group of lost souls desperate to hear the sermon on perpetual repeat. But all good things come to an end, and we surrender to reality. It doesn’t matter how shit the world is: there’s always good rock’n’roll, and tonight was seriously fucking good.

LOVED: Hideous Sun Demon. See them any time you have the chance.
HATED: The footy the night before, but that wasn’t anyone’s fault tonight.
DRANK: Cans of Hammer and Tongs for the princely sum of $5.

BY PATRICK EMERY