The Buoys, Betty Taylor, Breakfast Road @ Jive, Adelaide 6/9/2024
I was so happy to see The Buoys and their supports at Jive tonight. Jive is one of my favourite venues as you can easily see and hear the bands from anywhere in the room and the sound is always great.
First up tonight is Breakfast Road who cheekily advertise themselves as “Planet Earth’s Final Boy Band” The three-piece band is from Western Sydney and there is something very special about the way they merge 90s pop sensibilities with today’s sounds. The vocals are silky sweet with a touch of vocoder and the music is jangly guitar and catchy beats. They played Lost and Found, Wait on Me and Take Off from last year’s Deluxe album but my favourites were recently released Global Warming, Endlessly and the as yet unreleased Home Alone. They did a brilliant version of Beyonce’s Crazy in Love and finished off with Pipe Down which to my ears is their most appealing song.
Second up is Betty Taylor from the Sunshine Coast who I was lucky to see doing a support slot in Sydney earlier in the year. They are an excellent band with dreamy indie leanings. Betty Taylor is made up of lyricist and lead singer Sophie Patrick and supported by Kayla Smart on lead guitar, Claire Chittick on bass and Katie Ishaque on drums. Much like The Buoys, they have great harmonising backing vocals and catchy songs. The catchiest is Fuck You which is followed by their latest release Hollow which is a sort of lyrical follow-up to the previous song. They did a new song called Gaslighter that sounded great before ending with two bangers Young Dumb Immature and the super catchy Stallin. After joining The Buoys for the last date of the tour in WA, Betty Taylor are off to Europe to tour with The Grogans. They are another band I want to see again and I will be following their career.
I have been lucky to see The Buoys do a few incredible support slots over the last two years. In 2022 I saw them support Wet Leg in a small venue in Sydney and for that year I thought The Buoys were the best support I saw all year. I have “not” been patiently waiting for them to do their own show in Adelaide and was ecstatic that their very first headline show in our fair city was sold out. Sometimes I feel isolated in my music likes and was concerned how the band would go here but I was so happy to see so many of the sold-out audience tonight singing along to most of the songs.
The Buoys are Zoe, Tess, Courtney and Hilary and they are such a fun band to see. We get such melodic, strong vocals and heartfelt lyrics from Zoe and excellent guitar licks from Hillary and are ably backed up by Courtney on bass and Tess on drums. I loved every one of their catchy songs tonight and the recently released Lustre album is one of my favourite albums this year. I hope that more people listen to it so we can see many more concerts from the Buoys in Adelaide.
The stand-out songs from the latest album for me were Settle Petal, I Think I’m in Love with You and Subject A with the latter being a shoo-in for me for my Triple J Hottest 100 Top 10 picks. It is an uncompromising take on sexism and it just rocks. The older songs that I was so happy to hear were I Want You, Lie to Me Again and Linda. Linda is a song that sounds so good live and it just made perfect sense to me that they are still playing this early hit.
The final song of the night was Totally Completely Fine and it turned into a celebration as every member of both support bands joined them on stage to sing it. A wonderful end to a fantastic night.
Live Review By Richard De Pizzol