Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs - The Vanguard (13th March)

18 March 2009 by Max Easton

Share |

Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs - The Vanguard (13th March)

Related Artists

Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs

Currently crossing the country on an Australian tour, Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs stopped by their home town of Sydney to play the Vanguard at the heart of Sydney’s Inner-West. Soulshine was there to capture the mayhem that an extravagant, maniacal gypsy punk band can bring to the traditionally Blues, Roots and Jazz venue.

You know that something has gone either terribly wrong or terribly right when the tables of the Vanguard - Newtown’s home of quality folk, blues and roots – are bearing the weight of a dozen drunken patrons of what has been, on more than one occasion, been deemed a classy establishment. Included in this quarrel of human beings is a slender, corset and thigh-high stocking clad groupie. On stage is Juke Baritone, a man in a waistcoat and top hat, possessing an incredibly face-encompassing moustache. He shouts, growls and gyrates while the aforementioned tables teeter underneath the mass they’ve potentially never been exposed to in their lifetime. To his left is a man on acoustic bass wearing a Fez. In front of him is a cape-wearing saxophonist. To Juke’s right is a smartly dressed, moustachioed trombonist who dabbles in the banjo. He is beautiful. Somewhere behind all that mess lies a tattooed, singlet-wearing guitarist and a phenomenally busy drummer. This was the mess that became Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs. This was a Friday night at the Vanguard.

The Vanguard is a venue that’s easy to miss. Sitting at the arse end of King Street, it appears as little more than another shopfront. Of course, the giant lettering screaming ‘THE VANGUARD’ is a minor giveaway, but that takes away from the picture I’m trying to paint here. The walk to the Vanguard crosses at least thirteen Thai restaurants, with ABN appropriate titles like “Generic Thai Place 2.’ It also crosses a half dozen pubs. This is problematic of course, since, hypothetically, the unannounced acoustic Juke Baritone set played before the first support could be missed by way of distraction…but that’s hypothetical of course, I’m just trying to paint the picture. The Vanguard itself is an attractive little venue…stepping inside, you get the feeling it could just as easily been a second hand book shop if it hadn’t been for the refurbishments. To the left of the entrance is a stairway to the top half of the split-level venue, while a few metres from the desk lies the bar (this will prove to be a focal point of Juke’s for their set.) Of course, there are the tables that we spoke about earlier sitting in front of a very cramped looking stage, that will somehow be filled with six men wearing hats and sporting wide varieties of facial hair monstrosities. However, time for venue descriptions is limited, as Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs come strolling through the split-level architecture from top to bottom, with banjo playing, washing boards percussioning and Juke Baritone growling. In a flash, they’re plugged in and a set of (as they describe it themselves) ‘gypsy trapeze punk pirate blues mayhem’ is inexplicably begun.

The music is as good as impossible to describe, in fact their own description is just about as good as it can get. It’s chaotic, it’s maniacal and it’s absolutely, comprehensively in your face. The comparisons to Tom Waits are too strong to ignore, from Baritone’s own growls to the subject matter of his songs, dabbling in dark, unwanted characters from all walks of life except the good ones. From the peculiar gender-fuck that is ‘Rusty Bed’ to the rolling, growling, ‘Lover,’ the set is a mish-mash of instrumentation pressed against raw theatrics reminiscient of Screamin' Jay Hawkins. It’s full of scripted moments like the halt partway through a song to have a drink and a chat, to unscripted offstage crowd romps with just Juke Baritone’s screams and the thundering trombone of the moustachioed Grant Arthur. Through Juke’s loud, obnoxious requests to be purchased gin repeated ad nausea, to trays of drinks appearing courtesy of the mysterious corset possessed lady in black, the set takes a pretty strong theme of booze-ridden mayhem. The energy and character behind their tunes drags the people seated upstairs to the bottom level…where people are clogging the aisles between the tables, where the space in front of the stage fills to capacity until eventually, the tops of the tables are at capacity as well. I suppose Friday the 13th does that to people…but maybe that’s just Juke.

Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs are absolutely chaotic. They play a genre clashing brand of drinking songs to the point that it’s an absolute disadvantage to be sober or seated. If they can be criticized at all, it’s that their songs rarely stand up on their own. The set is a rolling mash of tracks where each individual piece is barely distinguishable from the next. Whether this can hold up on an album or not is another story, but as far as a live performance goes, you’d be hard pressed to find a band with as much charisma as this within this very loosely defined genre. Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs are mysterious, avant-garde and maniacal. Check them out at your risk and at your own pleasure…it’s an experience that’s worth seeing, if not solely for the total unpredictability that seems to come with every show.

(Photo: Tom Evangelidis)