Rentboy EP (Nocturnal Emissions) launch with guests at Horse Bazaar on Saturday consisted of three hours of jolly good times and not a minute more. Beers were eight, the gig was six. Got there about 7. It was still hot and it stayed hot. Got even hotter the next day. Tad cooler inside the Horse, but what the hell. Got home by 10:15.
Rentboy Dan played along to an old-school backing track. Five songs just like the CD advertised and in the same sequence.
‘This is rentboy’ – a despondent rap in a Buffalo Stance bridged boasting & banality by bragging like a pimp one moment and offering to buy you milk the next.
His red face was probably a sunburn, all things considered.
Next he shifted down into a mode that would comfortably sit well with fans of St. Elmo’s Fire (movie soundtrack or Eno song). However as the song began to wig into my ear like a hook-tailed insect I turned my attention to a Madonna tune I couldn’t quite put my ear on, other than my certainty of its role in a 1980s film starring Sean Penn and Chris Walken about a dysfunctional father/son relationship.
What the heck was it? I made Tristan look it up on his iPhone. I watched the entire video on youtube, and by then Rentboy was onto their next song and Tristan was asking me if I had worked it out yet and I said oh yeah long time ago it’s Live to Tell, and at that, he yanked his phone away from me in furious anger.
Rentboy feeds wet 80s pop through a dry Tasmanian cigarette filter. Take the industrial throb of someone fun like Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft (D.A.F.), throw in ripened cheeze guitar and then sing like you’re having dirty thoughts about Debbie Gibson. Dan’s turning shit into expendable waste product with every slip of his tongue/grope of his guitar.
Popolice finished the night in style, covering Rentboy’s Girl on a Bike (“she’s so inde-pen-dant”).
