Freaks to the front

Amyl and the Sniffers and Lambrini Girls testify in Detroit Rock City

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—The Amyl and the Sniffers storm front is moving steadily across the country. In a calisthenic feat of booking, the Australian band is hopping off of their club and theater tour for a few dates, joining the Hives in support of Foo Fighters, but mainly they’re focusing on smaller joints, behind their new single “U Should Not be Doing That.” They skipped Chicago this time around, so without complaint I drove three hundred and fifty miles to catch them in a sold-out show at the venerable Majestic Theatre in Detroit.

The band was as intense and fun as the last time I saw them in Chicago, two years ago. Amy Taylor shook a Debbie Harry-ish feathered cut and rocked a red, ragged-cut dress and brown leather boots, while guitarist Dec Martens (a name I will never tire of typing) evoked Jimmy Page with his striped dress shirt, shoulder-length 70s shag, and outsized axe. Drummer Bryce Wilson was decked out in sweat-standard shorts and a muscle tee, while bassist Gus Romer went all-in in the face of the heat and stripped down to a bathing suit. (The impression was that the rhythm section hadn’t changed clothes since the last band rehearsal.) The band pulls it all together with grins, chops, and a bunker-mentality spirit. They’re as much fun to watch as to listen and jam to.

At the Majestic, Amyl and the Sniffers gave the impression of a barreling train, a thunderous riff from Marten the aggressively pointed cowcatcher, deflecting anything in its way, Wilson and Romer the roaring engine manfully hugging the tracks, and Taylor the grinning, rogue conductor in hot pants atop the cab, shaking her blonde mane like Angus Young. They hit the stage to DEVO’s “Whip It,” then tore through twenty songs, heavy on their most recent album, 2021’s Comfort to Me. Taylor pounced, leapt, struck muscle poses, shrieked, strutted the stage end-to-end, and threw a handful of party invitations into the air: “Starfire 500”; “Freaks to the Front," the band’s appeal/challenge to their core audience; the boisterously sexy “Got You” and “Shake Ya.”

During “Security,” a rambunctious mini-narrative about the inebriated singer denied entrance to a pub, Taylor made heart signs with her hands to match those from the knocked-out crowd, the song a rowdy celebration of the desire—no, the right—to hit a bar or a loud music venue, eyeing nothing but a good time. (“I’m not looking for trouble, I’m looking for love,” Taylor implores the bouncer. “I’m not looking for harm, I’m looking for love. Will you let me in your hard heart?” She had the besotted crowd on her side.) The excitable, riff-driven “Hertz” is even more fun live than on record, if that’s possible. It’s a rollicking tune about a road trip fantasized in the COVID-19 lockdown, during which the singer may be falling in love and strangers along the way become mates, and where “time is not linear / Especially when we’re here in this car.” Onstage, the song really smokes, and the feeling of careening toward a limitless horizon while standing in a packed crowd inside of a building’s both restraining and freeing. For a few moments, it felt as if the dance floor was tilting.

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Taylor and her band play three-chord pub/punk rock with humor and nerve; their simple approach to making guitar-based rock and roll will not endear them to the masses in this era, and yet their sound is evolving, and they seem poised to get bigger. In the autobiographical “Snakes”—“an ode to my childhood,” as Taylor told Apple Music—Taylor sings about growing up in a very small town near the coast of Australia, “kind of bogan, kind of hippy. I grew up on three acres, and I grew up in a shed with my sister, mom and dad until I was about nine or 10, and we all shared a bedroom and would use the bath water to wash our clothes and then that same water to water the plants.”

Dad used to bring us toys home from the tip and we’d go swimming in the storms and there was snakes everywhere. There was snakes, literally, in the bedroom and the chick pens, and there’d be snakes killing the cats and snakes at school—and this song’s about that.

In one passage, Taylor, audibly grinning, belts out the line, “I worked at IGA, and it was great!” To hear her praise a shitty, small-town supermarket job she had as a kid only days after she performed before thousands at Citi Field in Queens and Fenway Park in Boston gives an indication of where she’s been and where she’s going.

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One thing I doubt Taylor will lose along the way is her powerful and charismatic feminism. A trio of songs near the end of the show—“Knifey,” “Control,” and “Facts”—distilled Amyl and the Sniffers’ righteous blend of personal politics and rock and roll release. The remarkable “Knifey,” from Comfort to Me, tells the enraging story of a lone woman who simply wants to walk in the park and by the river, to see the stars, but can’t for fear of being assaulted; she can bring along a knife, but is furious that such a recourse to violence—which she abhors, and anyway, she’s just “not that tough”—is required for her to exist safely. (I was in tears near the end; I don’t think I was alone.)

“Control” turns that fear and anger upside down: it’s an anthem of self-declaration, of boasts in the face of derision, of being a big bad boss, telling people off, proving people wrong (even if “It probably means I'll die alone”). The refrain lays it out in simple terms—I like control, I’m obsessed—and when the band breaks down near the end, and Taylor chants those terms in a litany that rises with tension and release, the result’s thrilling, transformative even. “Facts,” a new song, continues the conversation. “N-O future”—she spells it out clearly—before a complicated lament: “We tried so hard, we thought we would outrun it / But now there is no turning back.”

The show at the Majestic was all-ages. To be in a room packed with young women above and below age twenty-one singing along passionately to these songs of anger, courage, and redemption is to see, feel, and hear the promises of rock and roll made manifest. Sounds corny? I doubt you’d say that if you’d been there. After “Facts,” the band got back to the business of having and being fun, as Taylor flipped her skirt, leapt about, dancing the problems away for a few minutes on top of the rollicking “Starfire 500.” Before the band returned for an encore, a sizable group around me shouted, “Ten more songs!” The band obliged with two, the strutting “U Should Not Be Doing That,” another righteous and danceable ode to self-determination, and “GFY,” a curse that Taylor and her band meant for anyone but the lively and receptive crowd in Detroit.

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Lambrini Girls from the U.K opened the show, and detonated six songs of furious, two chord aggression. Phoebe Lunny (vocals/guitar) and Lilly Macieira (vocals/bass) —they were supplemented by a drummer—are clearly, loudly intentioned: they will bring what pisses them off right to your face.

Literally. To my delight, Lunny spent nearly half of the show on the floor in the middle of the crowd. She asked one guy to hold her mic for her as she held forth, sang, and shredded; she clambered atop another guy’s shoulders, her mic now held by a different, startled fan. A few moments later, taking a breather between songs, she wondered aloud how many people knew each other in this joint, and proceeded to introduce random strangers to each other and to the crowd. It was great stuff, and though clearly calculated, the shenanigans, pushed over with Lunny’s amiable accent and showmanship, gave the duo a loose, ramshackle vibe, which, combined with the genuine anger and recklessness of their songs, vividly and uniquely amped up the energy.

I was thinking about Lamrini Girls the next morning as I drove up the wide, bizarrely deserted Grand River Avenue out of Midtown. I was on my way to pay homage to the building that once housed the Grande Ballroom, where, among others, locals the MC5, the Stooges, the Rationals, the Scot Richard Case, the Frost, Frijid Pink, rowdy cohorts, and countless national and international rock and roll bands made historic noise. The structure’s been empty for years, but since I last visited a decade or so ago a terrific mural celebrating the MC5 and optimistic local spirit has emerged along the corner of the building at Grand River and Beverly Court. (In 2018, the ballroom was added to the National Register of Historic Places; I recommend you stream Louder Than Love: The Grande Ballroom Story, Tony D’Annunzio’s terrific 2012 documentary, if you haven’t yet.)

And yet the bold and bright colors of that mural are fighting a noble battle against the area’s gray, continued deterioration. My “ruin porn” days behind me, I won’t document and fetishize the decline here; I’ll only remark that, traveling northwest up Grand River, I felt as if I’d entered a post-apocalyptic zone, the eeriness heightened by an uneasy mix of abandoned, century-old factories and warehouses, block after block of empty lots of overgrown grass, and side streets dense with shuttered homes. The sky was bright blue the morning I was there, casting down garish light. A few businesses were in operation—the Michigan Barber School next door to the former ballroom, where out front a hairdresser smoked a cigarette; an auto repair shop across the avenue; the Detroit City Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church down the block; McDonald’s and Wendy’s did brisk business a few blocks north—but mostly the area sat quietly, seemingly forgotten.

I recalled Lambrini Girls’ fierce, full-throated chants of “Free Palestine” and “Fuck the constitution,” of Lunny’s encouragement to all of us in the crowd to “Punch a cop in the dick,” the sobering statistics of abuse of cis and trans women and non-binary people that Macieira soberly read aloud from the stage…. I thought of Amy Taylor barking, “My choice is my own / My body, my own / Opinion is my own / I own it, I own it”…. All of this noise rang in my ears as I stood on Grand River, gazing up at a building in which half a century ago young musicians raised complaints and laments in different words and with different chords, yet in the same tones of frustration and rage. Time seems to have stopped on Grand River Avenue, but the rock and roll spirit keeps on.

All photos ©Joe Bonomo