Live Review: The Datsuns At The Annandale Hotel

BBM’s Jim Palmer headed down to The Annandale Hotel, Sydney on Sunday to check out The Datsuns…and here’s what went down.

If huge riffs corresponded directly to record sales, The Datsuns would be one of the biggest bands in the World.

In the ten years since their hard-rocking debut grabbed critics by the throat, the Kiwi fourpiece have gotten plenty of mileage from a simple, entertaining formula of jamming a few chords together and thrashing them out, channelling the spirit of Rock legends like Led Zeppelin, The Stooges and ACDC.

A decade on, their draw as the saviour of Rock has waned, but they still play hard and are back on the road following the release of their ostentatiously-titled fifth record Death Rattle Boogie, which critics have hailed as a return to form.

Which is what brought them to The Annandale Hotel in Sydney’s Inner West on Sunday 16th December.

It is not a big venue; essentially the back room of a pub. All over the globe, crap bands were flogging their crap covers to larger crowds that night, so it was a real treat to be in the right part of Sydney at the right time.

The Datsuns’ audience was a varied bunch, liberally sprinkled with a mix of the hairy, the tattooed, hipsters and the overweight middle aged. What united them was a desire to have their socks rocked off, and The Datsuns obliged.

What their music lacks in originality or diversity- every song, engrossing though it is, can be more or less broken down to a powerful riff, big solo and plenty of shrieking – they make up for in gusto and unabashed enthusiasm. And sheer volume.

Charismatic front man Dolf de Borst swaggered around the stage, pulling out every trick in the big book of rock showmanship and ramming the pages into the face of the audience.

With boundless energy, he gyrated, wailed, high-kicked, played his guitar at bizarre angles, climbed on top of things, sat down and emphatically refused to let the energy die down.

The band flailed around like marionettes under the control of an eight-year-old puppeteer with ADHD and a serious sugar rush.

With the abandon of a band yelping ACDC tunes into hairbrushes and playing air guitar in a New Zealandish bedroom, The Datsuns sway violently towards to line of parody like a drunk on a cliff edge, somehow managing not to fall off but at the same time turning the speakers up to 11. Quite a feat.

By Jim Palmer

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