Ball Park Music, Photograph supplied
Ball Park Music performed at the Metro Theatre, on Gadigal land, on Saturday 31 May.
In the internet age, where every band needs a hook to cut through the digital noise, there’s something refreshing about a gimmick-less band. Ball Park Music don’t make concept records; they don’t have a unique backstory that’s touted in the press materials; they don’t dress up onstage. For a contemporary act, there’s something distinctly old school about them: they get up in front of an audience, and they play indie rock songs.
Little wonder that they have been selected as the support for Oasis’ much anticipated Australian tour – they are cut from the same Brit-pop cloth, their music guided by an uncomplicated interest in pleasure. Their most recent album, Like Love, might be the most experimental thing they’ve ever released, which is to say, not very experiment at all. With its acoustic layering and gentle harmonies, it’s the softer Radiohead material by way of Elliott Smith, and always with those unadorned, textural melodies in the centre.
Like Love was the focus of the band’s Metro show, the second of a two-night Sydney stint. Whereas the first evening was a two-hour long journey through their back catalogue, crowd-pleaser after crowd-pleaser unfurled at a breakneck pace, the second gig was a quieter, more subdued affair.
The band played Like Love from start to finish, the tone more subdued, choruses being applied on top of each other – not running headfirst, joyously, into a wall as they had done the night before, but more submerging themselves in the ocean, step by step, song by song.
Not to say that Like Love doesn’t have its anthems: even in the short amount of time since its release, ‘Please Don’t Move To Melbourne’ has become a rallying cry, a mournful rebel yell directed at change itself. Not just, don’t move to Melbourne, but, don’t leave me.
In the live setting, even the gentler, more understated cuts from Like Love were given new life – ‘Fast Forward’, the album closer, rattled the walls, and Sam Cromack’s heartfelt voice had a power and strength entirely of its own. The evening ended with a slew of Ball Park Music’s hits, but reminders of the band’s staying power were not needed.
People do change, people do move to Melbourne, but Ball Park Music aren’t going anywhere.
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