The Drones – the group dubbed ‘Australia’s most important band’ – took to the stage at the Corner on Saturday night to a capacity crowd, in one of their final performances before they head to the States to showcase their considerable talents. Velvet Underground-esque support act Snowman set the agenda with a set of haunting, richly layered noise using sax, violin, wide-eyed chanting and at times almost operatic vocals to build a wall of defiant, experimental sound.
 
The Drones peddle a brand of simple, yet sophisticated dark rock, pioneered by the likes of The Birthday Party and The Dirty Three and energetic front man Gareth Liddiard channels the ghosts of every disgruntled, black-clad loner who ever sat down with his guitar and a chewed pencil.

On CD, some Drones songs can sound under-produced and murky – but live, Liddiard completely inhabits them, spitting out the pithy syllables like stray bits of tobacco from his rollie. He’s met by a similarly angry and unfeasibly tall audience who sing back every word to big numbers like the captivating, anthemic, ‘Shark Fin Blues’, with the additional spectator cry of “Go you Drones!” hollered for good measure.

At times a number of burly blokes at the front attempt to revive the near-extinct practice of crowd-surfing, which is alarming considering the size of some of them. Eventually a smaller guy is lifted good-naturedly above the throng. Nobody else tries to mount the audience, but there is a definite rowdiness to some audience members, who I suspect miss a lot of the subtlety and depth in songs like ‘Locust’.

The tales woven into each song evoke something that can only be described as Australian Gothic – and this refers more to the mystical storytelling tradition of a wild colonial past, of the sort brought to technicolour life by Sidney Nolan (and, more recently, Nick Cave’s film, The Proposition), than any 80s eyelinered subculture. Indeed, Cave is probably the link between the sub-cultural and historical ‘gothic’ territories mined by The Drones.

This heritage is thrown into sharp relief by an acoustic encore performance of ‘Sixteen Straws’, a ballad in the literary sense – 30 verses of rum, sodomy and the lash (as The Pogues might say) at the hands of the dreaded British in Port Macquarie, in a century long ago and far from the consciousness of much of the crowd.

With Liddiard at the helm, The Drones are nothing short of masterful in a live context and their rich storytelling deserves to be heard on the world stage.