Sunday 17/04/05 Snowman @ Amplifier Bar, Perth

Perth, as any Australian magazine/newspaper/website/passing stranger will tell you, is blowing up with good music right now. The local boys made good of last year were Eskimo Joe, who scored a massive radio hit with the Coldplayish 'By The Sea'. The John Butler Trio, who made it to these shores last December, also come from these parts, and have been riding the wave of a feelgood rootsy vibe all the way to the bank. No surf trip is complete without a copy of 'Sunrise Over Sea' leaking out of the stereo as you skin up on the beach and re-plait your mini-dreads.

But, fortunately, there is an antidote growing to this niceness, this "proper" music, these major-label-funded unit shifters. And its name is Snowman.

Snowman’s debut "EP" (actually ten tracks, including interludes) 'Zombies On The Airwaves of Paris' was released last year, after a flurry of live activity. Playing last year’s Big Day Out on the newcomers stage, they were watched by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, who dubbed them "Freaks". Wayne
Coyne thinks these guys are weird....a man who regularly dresses his band as rabbits and daubs himself in fake blood. Praise could come no higher.

And they are freaks, they aren’t the least bit interested in sounding like the next Jet or Eskimo Joe or next anything. If you asked Snowman to a game of beach cricket, they’d turn up wearing jodhpurs and cheerfully swinging a squash racket. Their sound on the CD takes in Jazz, surf-punk, creepy radio
broadcasts, Vincent Price voice overs and a reasonable debt to piano led Radiohead noir. Onstage they kick it like vintage Dead Kennedys led by Aditya (Andy) Citarwaman, a screaming dynamo of diminutive stature and incredible voice.

Live, the band stick to the harder stuff in their roster, like the opener of the E.P. 'Lost In The Woods': duelling surf punk guitars, handclaps, three part Beach Boy harmonies and a huge swooping falsetto scream from Andy (Justin Darkness eat your heart out, and write a decent ****ing song whilst you’re at it). Further backing screams are provided by Olga Hermanniusson, the horror scream queen dream of a bass player. New tracks from the forthcoming album are aired, they are harder, trashier, messier: 'Shake Yer Brain To The Left' is the best song The Cramps never wrote, while 'Viva La Fever' adds a Surfer Rosa era Pixies feel. These are exalted comparisions for a newish band, but by god they are justified: pure, concentrated, brain eating energy. Whilst the singer dances, shakes, dammit viiiiiibrates and shimmies across the stage, guitarist Joseph Mcphee strangles the life out of his guitar and at one point joyfully provides us with a demented trumpet solo. Massively out of key and played with a Cheshire Cat grin, he throws his horn to the floor with a flourish and swings back into the fray with a yet more demented guitar solo. In return Andy abandons his guitar for a feedback drenched violin session, where he appears to be trying to saw the damn thing clean in half.
Having sweat a swimming pool of salt between them, the band are dragged back for an encore (pretty rare for a Perth crowd, from what I’ve seen) and the band don’t dissapoint, even though they must have spent enough energy to power the whole city by now. Steaming and dripping, Andy leads the troops
through one last swing. Snowman deserve your love, devotion and attention. They are ****ing weird, ****ing freaky, ****ing amazing. Send ’em some loving. Get ’em over here, dammit. We need ’em.