Let me start by saying I’m one of those rarely encountered casual fans of The Shins. There are many thousands of Shins lovers with much more love for The Shins than I, and although for many years I held a slightly fearful belief that listening to Oh, Inverted World in its entirety more than three times would turn me into a Shins fanatic, I’m reasonably happy to report that it hasn’t, and I exist in a contented place between total indifference towards the melodic folk-pop stylings of The Shins, and worshipping at the altar of James Mercer.

I like the music of The Shins very much, and Mercer, who these days essentially is The Shins, is the biggest stumbling block between like and love. As frontmen go, Mercer has always been relatively aloof in live situations, and I can’t help but feel a little frustrated by a sort of mismatch between my initial perception of him as indie rock’s warmly accessible everyman, and what he’s actually like on stage.  Watching last Wednesday’s show at the Hordern, I would have liked to see Mercer show a little more willingness to engage with his audience, but I don’t doubt his aura of shy brilliance is incredibly appealing to others.

All the same, seeing the prodigious singer-songwriter and his newly assembled band was an unexpectedly delicious treat. Nothing reinforces just how sensational songs like Saint Simon, Port of Morrow and 40 Mark Strasse (one of the highlights of the night) are than hearing them played by a band at the absolute top of their game. Each song was given a tight, confident, finely-nuanced treatment by the sextet – a well-oiled machine bringing The Shin’s lush layers and lovely, wandering melodies together with precision and grace. There were sublime moments when Mercer’s coolnesss would dissolve and his impassioned vocals commanded absolute attention – in the crescendoing final chorus of Simple Song, the gently stirring September, or during the band’s rollicking, muscular performance of So Says I. Mercer’s match on stage is his lead guitarist Jessica Dobson, effortlessly firing off thick, shimmering riffs, owning each moment in the spotlight with a glowing, masterful stage presence.

The encore was rounded out with a swirling, spacious, extended  jam on One By One All Day that clearly wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but for someone still coming around to The Shins, it was an impressive show of musicianship that made for an inspiring end to the evening.

Sound-wise, The Shins are pretty damn close to flawless, but helmed by an overly reserved frontman, their audience’s attention was left flagging at times, bringing the overall mood of the show down with it. While the acoustics at the Hordern were unusually outstanding, it was clear this wasn’t the ideal venue for a band like The Shins. A more intimate setting, where Mercer’s subtleties could be better appreciated, would have turned a fine show into a truly memorable one.

With a discography that spans 32 years of enormous hits and colossal misses and a predilection for bizarre, grandiose public announcements, Prince is an ego of mythic proportions. Prince is still waiting for the rest of the world to realise, like he has, that the internet is a ridiculous fad.  He thinks suing his fans for taking photos of him is an OK thing to do. He thinks people should be banned from covering his songs, yet a significant proportion of his catalogue is considered borderline unlistenable by most sane people. But hey Prince, it’s cool, you can say whatever you like, because you’re a freaking genius.

There was an intense feeling of fanlove in the crowd at Friday night’s Welcome 2 Australia concert at Allphones Arena. When the beglittered one finally emerged from within the Love Symbol shaped stage, 40 year old women shrieked like schoolgirls. All of us were there because we love Prince and wanted to tell him so at the top of our lungs. But, speaking purely for myself here, as someone with tremendous admiration for his musical talents and an affectionate fascination for his egotistical rants, I really don’t believe he has any obligation to tell us that he loves us back.

Prince proved he is still one of the world’s most formidable performers. No, he’s not the limber purple pocket rocket he was 20 years ago, but he still struts, he still swaggers, and when he rips into bangin’ versions of Jam of the Year, Mountains and The Cool he still funks the house down like nobody else. What sat uncomfortably with me was Prince’s insistence on patronising, stereotypical stage banter. Sure, he appreciates his fans in his own way, and he probably figures he’s just dishing out what the crowd wants to hear, but his straight-faced “we love you”s and his repeatedly insisting that “Sydney, we on a first name basis tonight” just felt kind of insulting, and the audience quickly seemed to tire of it.

When Prince isn’t singing, dancing, or shredding (and by God, to watch him manhandle that telecaster is to bear witness to one of the true wonders of nature) his stage presence is flat out weird. At one point, about a dozen audience members were invited on stage to dance, and by Prince’s total lack of interaction with any of them, it was clear they had been warned to keep a respectful distance from him. Awkward. You get the feeling the man is constantly conflicted by a sort of throwaway contempt for the large majority of his fans, and the burning need to evangelise to us. He prostheltyises to us in the form of Love Thy Will Be Done, the unremarkable gospel song he wrote for Martika in the early 90s which would have been one of the low points of the night if it wasn’t so amusingly overzealous.

It’s these odd, somewhat ill-timed song choices that made the flow of the evening falter a little. Gold is a big, burning stadium ballad, but it wasn’t the jamming hot opener everyone was hoping for. The 10 or so minute sans-Prince intro to Purple Rain was truly agonising, but when Prince finally took the mic, he sang it as well as he ever has, and his soul searing guitar solo made the wait oh so worth it.

The best bits of the night were the parts that were pure posturing, pure tremble-before-me, ego stroking indulgence. “How many hits Prince got?” he boomed as he triggered a string of backing tracks to hit songs from his disco light flashing, piano shaped synthesiser. “These songs can’t be recreated by a band… because I am that band” he proclaimed, launching into a medley including When Doves Cry, Hot Thing and Sign O The Times. The band returning to the stage to bust out the deliciously spare funk of Kiss to a display of age defying Prince dance moves will go down as one of the most exhilarating concert moments of my life.

He may be past the days of singing lewd, cuss-word peppered sex anthems, but when he’s on stage, in complete control of his band and his own unparalleled musical prowess, Prince is still a total badass. He made us wait almost 20 minutes in the dark for an encore – a rocking but all too brief version of Peach. But in exchange for almost 3 hours in his awesome presence, it’s the sort of punishment I’m more than willing to take.

Prince, we’re not worthy! You don’t need to pretend to suck up to any of us – just play the hell out of those songs, and nobody will forget you’re still the funkiest MF around.

Years of incessant touring have not wearied the Mountain Goats or their fans. Since 2003 the extraordinarily prolific John Darnielle has toured Australia (rotating troupe of band members in tow) as regularly as he’s put out albums, and on Sunday night’s show at the Metro there were no shortage of fans seeing him for their fifth, sixth or seventh time. Two things were apparent by the end of the Mountain Goats’ set – that John Darnielle is a performer of extraordinary generosity, and that his fans are more than willing to take everything he’s giving and make it their own.

At what other gig will you see blokes fist pumping and finger pointing with furious conviction to acoustic guitar driven folk rock, and friends swaying, arms around shoulders in the wide-eyed crowd, singing along with joyous abandon to darkly anthemic ballads about child abuse, mental illness and domestic rage?

The audience’s devout adoration is palpable the second Darnielle appears on stage and begins with the warm, gentle build-up of For Charles Bronson. Between every line his smile beams through the crowd and by Damn These Vampires and Birth of Serpents, he is bounding around the stage with barely contained energy and joy. The fervent admiration of the audience has ramped up and imploded into sheer elation, the crowd now feeding off each other as much as they are off the band. Darnielle looks at the audience through geeky glasses and sweat soaked hair and shakes his head, grinning. “Seriously, great fucking audience… I’m gonna be telling people about you guys for quite sometime”, he says, and he sounds utterly sincere.

It’s this sincerity that endears his fans to him. His anecdotes, some metaphorical, some candid, all of them touched with his poignant humour, flow generously throughout the night. There is plenty of laughter, and an intensely observant silence as he shares several new songs with us from the piano – the solemn White Cedar and the exuberant The Diaz Brothers, which he explains was inspired by watching Scarface with his infant son.

Darnielle has an incredibly rich catalogue of songs to delve into, and at one point he digs out 1994’s Love Cuts the Strings for the die-hards, but for the most part this was a please-all set drawing heavily from The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee, two of The Mountain Goats’ finest moments  The bleak, gorgeous Game Shows Touch Our Lives is startlingly triumphant, the crowd roaring the lines “People say friends don’t destroy one another / what do they know about friends?” back at Darnielle with telling veracity. By the time he’s wrenched the desperately passionate last lines of International Small Arms Traffic Blues from his vocal chords, the set is coming to its close, but the energy in the room is at fever pitch. The encore is rapturous – three all-time favourites ending with The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton.  Darnielle pummels his guitar to exhaustion, inciting the crowd to raise Satan’s horns to the high heavens during that delirious “HAIL SATAN” refrain.  Looking around for something else to do with all his manic energy, he leaps behind the keyboard, bashes the final chords of the song out of it, then takes a last look at the audience, smiles his wide crazy smile, and leaves.

The Metro show was one of those rare events where audience and performer both, at times, seemed equally overcome with gratitude for the other’s presence. Even if, or perhaps especially if you were seeing John Darnielle for your eighth time that night, you were left astonished by just how damn much this guy gives. His immeasurable generosity manifests itself in a contagion of joy, and in those moments where every strained lyric and every fist pump expresses the singular, shared experience of everyone in the room.

It’d been awhile since I’d had a meal that really challenged my senses. If you count last month’s chilli hot wing eating contest at the Northbridge Hotel as a ‘meal’, then it had been about a month. Ben and I have a not-unwarranted reputation for eating, or at least attempting to eat almost anything put in front of us that could be vaguely interpreted as ‘food’, so after a lengthy easter weekend of terribly tame fare like chocolate eggs and barbecued chicken, it was time to give our taste buds a good Asian-style ass whuppin.

On Tuesday Ben and I ventured over to Thanon Khao San on the ‘Thaitown’ end of Pitt Street for some authentic street-style Thai cuisine. We’ve had good experiences with the restaurants around here (we love Saap Thai and Thainatown especially) since the area has become an eating-out hotspot for the Thai student population in the last few years. I’ve spent many months eating in homes, market stalls and festive banquets throughout Thailand, so when it comes to Thai food, I’ll admit I’m a little fussy.

Although it’s named after Bangkok’s incredibly daggy backpacker precinct, Thanon Khao San reminds me very much of the young, buzzing Thai bars/eateries found in cosmopolitan, semi-hip Bangkok neighbourhoods like Pra Athit and Ratchatewi. Thai pop music blares from the bar at the back of the dining room, and there’s a very cool ‘Khao San’ street sign and an actual Thai tuk tuk parked out the front. There’s also a wonderfully authentic hawker stand facing the street, tempting passers-by with colourful, glutinous and gelatinous Thai sweets.

We order a few “safe” dishes – a slightly too sweet beef massaman curry with lovely Thai style roti and khao kaa moo, a sweet, fragrant dish of beautifully soft steamed pork with rice, cabbage and soft-boiled egg. What we’re really here to try is kaeng tai pla, an extremely pungent, salty and spicy soup from southern Thailand made from fermented fish innards. When we order the tai pla our waiter stares at us in surprise and at first tries to prevent us from proceeding with the order.  Eventually he gives in but warns us that we can’t send it back if we don’t like it.

The kaeng tai pla comes with kanom jeen, squiggly white noodles made from rice flour. The smell hits as soon as the dish arrives at the table. This stuff reeks. It has a very potent fishy odour with a sour, heady whiff of fermentation. There are various, mostly unidentifiable scraps of things bobbing around in the muddy, soupy stew. I recognise the miniature Thai eggplants and the chunks of fresh bamboo shoot, and the rest of the floaters I can only describe as random, entraily bits and pieces. The primary taste of kaeng tai pla comes from a curry paste made from the preserved contents of the fish’s belly and it’s an extremely overpowering flavour. It tastes exactly like what you’d expect fermented fish guts to taste like. It’s still however, an extremely clean fish flavour and although tai pla is sometimes translated as “rotten fish”, there’s (thankfully!) no hint of putrescence in this dish.  It’s very, very salty and there is a tonne of hot, hot chilli in the stock as well as lots of sour tamarind and lime to cut through the tastebud–walloping, pickled organ cocktail. We use lots of the Thai basil, bean sprouts and fresh, bitter chopped cabbage provided to try and temper the taste of the soup and we manage to get through most of it. It’s definitely a taste that takes a lifetime of snacking on stinky dried Thai fish jerky to acquire. It was kind of hard to eat, but for me there’s something thrilling and evocative about experiencing such an intense inundation of flavour. I don’t think I’ll order kaeng tai pla from Thanon Khao San again but somehow it has made me love Thai cooking even more.