The walls of the Majestic Theatre reverberated to an assertive beat Wednesday night with the arrival of Australian electronic band Cut Copy. Having just released their fourth album Free Your Mind Tuesday, the group was welcomed by an assortment of nostalgic fans who were keen on returning to the bygone era of the psychedelic, electro-funky 1980s.
While the main act was well-received, the two opening artists of the night delivered truly comical performances. Kirin J Callinan and Larry Gus each stunned the audience into a mutual state of bafflement with their psychotic stage behavior. Callinan set the scene as he took the stage dressed in an ensemble of black Adidas track pants that nicely complimented his deflated psychobilly-wedge hairstyle. Forget the mullet; this cut brought the party to the front and echoed Callinan’s markedly bizarre demeanor. The artist remained mostly stationary, but he would prance across the stage at random intervals while riffing on his guitar and uttering screeches in his grungy vocals. Merely one and a half songs in, Callinan augmented the level of wackiness in his performance by spontaneously taking off his tight-fitting gothic tee to expose a chest as barren as the Sahara Desert.
Callinan’s repeatedly spastic behavior proved to be a theme of the night as DJ Larry Gus began to over-animatedly blast out tracks. While setting up, the artist mumbled incoherently in his native Grecian tongue in such a tone that left the crowd questioning his sanity. The entirety of Gus’s performance was marked by spastic full body tremors upon each subsequent spin of the disc that were more like seizures than dance. The artist would then proceed to sporadically press the mic to his face to such an extent that his facial features became so contorted that he appeared to be in severe pain. In spite of this freakish behavior, the audience met the two opening acts with a lighthearted level of hilarity.
With a convivial mood established, the arrival of the main act set the crowd off in a frenzy of dancing that continued for the duration of the show. What began as a one-man-band of the dynamic Aussie Dan Whitford, Cut Copy eventually developed into a group of four members with Tim Hoey on guitar, Ben Browning on bass and Mitchell Scott on drums. Since its formation in 2001, this blossoming product of the Australian Modular Records has toured internationally with the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Daft Punk, a syndicate that at times drew crowds of nearly 50,000 indietronica adherents. Cut Copy’s considerable reputation largely results from the popularity of their album In Ghost Colours that debuted back in March 2008; the record hit number one on the Australian ARIA Albums Chart and earned multiple nominations at both the ARIA and Grammy Awards. And the crowd’s exuberant reception of Cut Copy at the Majestic Wednesday night certainly attests to the band’s wide acclaim. The group took the Majestic on a kaleidoscopic tour of trippy tracks, entrancing the audience with fast-paced chords, wonky bass and floating vocals, putting their album title into practice by allowing the audience to “free their minds” to some wicked tunes.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPRJVKtrCCk
