Destination? Launch Party feat. Koma & Bones @ The Cross, Sydney (08/02/08)
The Destination? launch party crash landed in Sydney at The Cross last Friday night, to the gathered crowd of what seemed like the only passionate fans of breakbeat that are left in Sydney at the moment. And for a well-publicised fanboy of this very genre, is was quite a comforting thought; even if we all are a bunch of chinstrokers! Upon walking into the venue the friendly door bitches were all smiles, thrusting lollipops into the hands of punters but unluckily for me, I managed to grab the only coffee-flavoured lollipop among the bunch. Now I like my candy like I like my breaks: juicy. So whilst simultaneously throwing down my coffee-inspired deathstick, I threw down some flashy dance moves to the warmup DJ for the evening: Clive Morely, who I was told on good authority that he’s a British expat responsible for some immensely popular Fabric parties. A good warmup DJ, but I have a feeling that promoting is where this cat’s talents lie. Who knows whether we’ve seen the last of this geezer!
Arriving as fashionably late as I possibly could have, I did manage to miss the opening set from Joules Fine, which by all accounts went down smashingly well, but I was still there in time for Koma & Bones to step on stage. As I rocked around to the latest reincarnation of Underworld’s Born Slippy, I noticed the well placed Pacman characters that were adorning the walls, and wondered how easily it would be to smuggle out one of the pairs of branded Destination? tennis shoes that were hung around the dancefloor. But there was little time for mischief as Koma & Bones had arrived with a full arsenal of heavy-ass breakbeats that they were ready to assault the dancefloor with. Running through a veritable who’s who of the current style of chunky-maximal-fat and brooding synth-breaks, pushed by the likes of artists such as Adam Freeland, Evil 9, Alex Metric and of course Koma & Bones themselves, while still dropping the occasional Ed Banger style chainsaw electro bomb. I’m sure I even heard a Thomas Bangalter remix in there somewhere.
As refreshingly heavy and fat as this music was, over two hours of this one continuous style does tend to grate on the ears as well as the feet, and me amongst many others found ourselves wondering downstairs into the pouring rain for some fresh air, a little non-shouted conversation, a smoke and/or a burrito depending on our preferences. But while some of our less-spirited friends with not as much stamina departed to head home, most of us remained to enjoy this trip through the breakier-side of the energetic-80s-glam-metal-disco-inspired French wave of music, with the hope that they would finish with an homage to the duo that started the whole shebang. Alas, instead of dropping something like Waters of Nazareth or even D.A.N.C.E., they decided instead to finish with the still-being-played-by-mainstream-so-it-hasn’t-quite-reached-classic-status-yet track from the cheeky french duo Justice We Are Your Friends, albeit a Koma & Bones style remix. In this reviewer’s opinion it was a horrible injustice, because instead of thumping over-compressed bass lines and incredibly singable choruses, we were left with an forgettable jumble of distorted mess that saw the first half of the hook (“We are your friends”) being repeated over and over and over and over again until I didn’t even want to be friends with them, even if they were offering candy. The whole set was kind of like a first date when everything is going swell, but then right at the end of the night you’re about to have sex and you’re hit with a bout of violent diarrhea and can’t find any toilet paper, so you use the nearest towel and jump out the bathroom window. Enough said.
Up next was a mashup crew of sorts, and I use the word ‘crew’ liberally because if you have read any of my other reviews you would be familiar with the fact that a standard mashup crew can literally consist of one DJ and four idiots prancing around behind the decks in ridiculously-coloured hoodies. But instead we got the combination of BKP and the Tone Def DJs (one half of whom seemed to be Dirty D of Bass Pressure/Whomp! fame) who succeeded in keeping people glued to the dance floor, by carefully selecting and dropping some of the fattest and dirtiest breaks tracks released over the last few years. Unfortunately for them, this was sullied by the fact that one of the ‘crew’ was a little too handy with the CDJ; cramming into each song as many DJ acapellas as they possibly could, like clowns in a volkswagon they just kept on coming. After I counted about 20 or so in the first few minutes, not even the underlying tracks could keep me satisfied and I devised a method of sneaking out a pair of Destination shoes. But lucky for them (and me too I guess), I’m keen to come to the next installment of Destination?, so I allowed them to keep them. For now…
