The Drones live. Image: Tracey Kemp.

The Drones
Venue: Corner Hotel, Melbourne

The criteria for full immersion at a performance by the Drones includes either acute drunkenness or the agonisingly slow fading of emotional scars; ideally both. Sadly, I didn’t have enough time to get raging drunk, nor was my heartbreak entrenched enough be fully prepared.

Thankfully Gareth & co. seemed to have a different agenda on this icy Thursday night. Rather than the shaking, shuddering evisceration that we know they’re capable of, the Drones felt compelled to lean on the audience’s chests. The setlist started off slow and heavy and sucked the air out of our lungs and kept pressing.

Drawing mostly from last year’s monumental Havilah, they lurched into the hateful ‘Oh My’; they tripped through a dazed ‘Luck In Odd Numbers’; they pulled out the acoustics and chimed through the more countrified corners of their oeuvre.

The lack of movement through the crowd was unsettling until I realised (or hoped) that everyone was letting the emotional weight of the songs coat them. A long set certainly made me thirsty (the Drones are incomparable in that respect) but every time I returned to my corner of the Corner, I stopped and just let my clothes quiver across my skin from the blanketing waves of sound and Gareth’s occasional yips and yelps.

Even with a grinding setlist, there’s still a good case to be made for our generation seeing history in the making. I actually feel blessed to be around while the Drones are actively playing and making music and I already pity a generation who will have their hearts broken by this band and never see them live.

If I wasn’t shattered at the beginning of the night, their final song beat me down. It was a brutal, terrifying cover of Kev Carmody’s ‘River Of Tears’. Even watching that version from the Cannot Buy My Soul concert is overwhelming. Tonight wasn’t perfect but it was another reminder that the Drones are Australia’s finest band and they are happening right now.

Tracey Kemp has many more photos at Dog’s Hind Leg.