Alpine at Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory
Carol Bowditch checked out Alpine at OAF in Sydney:
I arrived towards the end of Club Feet’s set, to a tune that I subconsciously had memorised the chorus of. I hummed along to Edge of Extremes as I got a big smiley stamped on my wrist at the door and waded to the front of the packed venue. Sydney’s Club Feet, or “the male Alpine” used various gadgets to create 80’s synth pop, a favourite song of mine was Teenage Suicide that had enthusiastic back-and-forth vocals (“Teenage suicide/don’t do it!”) and samples that reminded me of Jim Cunningham (aka Patrick Swayze) and his motivational self-help videos in Donnie Darko.
Girl Alpine, or just regular Alpine actually, took to stage next, dressed in cute outfits and with heavily glittered eyes. They opened with Lovers 1, the first track off the new album, A is for Alpine, and continued with a few of the gentler tracks from the record, teasing the room with their angelic duel harmonies. The up-tempo tunes like Hands and In the Wild, with that cowbell intro, had the room bouncing along. One of my favourite tracks, Gasoline, with its harmonic guitar strum opening and dancy backbeat was a standout moment in the set.
The two lovely ladies danced in sync to Seeing Red, which was a little forced and came off a bit Sparkle Motion for me (sorry about this being the second Donnie Darko reference). A friend commented that their live performances were “very Melbourne” in reference to these theatrics, but the voices of these women were as impressively wholesome as they come across on the record, so a bit of musical theatre dancing didn’t detract at all. They covered most of the tunes from the album, before returning for the encore that an excited crowd demanded. Singer Phoebe finished the show by saying in a thick British accent, “lets prance into Summer with a Summer song”, and launched into the sugary sweet track, Icypoles.
Their varied, fun set made for a fine evening’s entertainment and suggested that Alpine, with their engaging frontwomen, would be an excellent addition to the summer festival circuit.
Words and pictures by Carol Bowditch. You can see more photos on facebook.
