The Beautiful Girls - Tivoli Theatre (June 5)

9 June 2010 by Richard Wilson

Just four nights into a tour that'll occupy the next seven weeks, The Beautiful Girls hit Brisbane's Tivoli Theatre for the second of two shows to showcase tunes new and old -- from 2002's Morning Sun EP through to their latest album Spooks, joined by special guests Washington and Vida Sunshyne.

Vida Sunshyne features on The Beautiful Girls' latest album Spooks as a guest vocalist, and is opening select shows on the tour. Performing with Chasm, Sunshyne gets the steadily building crowd in the mood and might give a vague hint to any TBG fans somehow in the dark about the past few years that this won't be a night of acoustic surf balladry.

Washington follows up, throwing her idiosynratic pop rock into the mix. A recent darling of Triple J, Washington built a sizeable crowd and enthusiastically delivered a solid set, with the crowd in the palm of her hand; hits like Clementine and Rich Kids standing out to the crowd.

The Beautiful Girls hit the stage shortly after 10, fittingly opening with '10:10', the latest single after Spooks. Vida Sunshyne unfortunately wasn't present to deliver her opening lines from 10:10 (or Gratitude later in the set), instead using the samples from the album; a new element to The Beautiful Girls' live show as they seek to recreate the electronic  sounds of 'Spooks'. Indeed, the horns section that have been a part of The Beautiful Girls' live show for the past few years are not present for the Spooks tour as was originally intended, the band instead performing as a tight four-piece with Hugh Barrett adding touches on keys and also controlling the digital side of the affair.

The night was heavy on tracks from Spooks as could naturally be expected from an album launch tour. Nine of the eleven full tracks from the album featured in the set with old favourites spread through the show. It was these older tracks that received the biggest response from the crowd, as can be expected from a show only two weeks after the album hit the shelves.

Blackbird among these older tracks, it's quite amazing just how forboding this track has become recently, the early hit from the band transformed into a dark, apocalyptic dub jam.

New acoustic number After All This Time fits well amongst classics like Learn Yourself, Music and La Mar, and indicates precisely the sort of staying power The Beautiful Girls have on the Australian music scene despite so much musical variance, and eschewing major labels all along this journey.

It's in the epic Home / Family duo from Spooks that The Beautiful Girls fully realise their latest direction on stage. The sprawling eight minute track is probably their biggest departure from past work to date. Clearly born out of the drawn out jams and instrumentals of bands like Fat Freddy's Drop, this is one that could really benefit from the horns in a live setting, but the samples do their job to flesh the track out and what is offered is surprisingly faithful to the album version. Even with the samples it's a real showcase of the depth this band can get out of their music, PaulieB donning the acoustic guitar for half and returning to bass for the remainder.

Closing the main set with Gratitude, Rockers and finally crowd favourite I Thought About You from 2007's Ziggurats closed the main set, allowing the band to indulge in some juicy power-chord rock that has the crowd at their most excited, sustaining the energy through to their return to stage for an acoustic encore that is a throwback to their early years with perennial favourite Periscopes closing out the night, frontman Mat McHugh visibly enjoying the wild response this track gets after all these years.

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