There seems to be a consistent high quality of music coming from Western Australia. It has been non stop in my memory since Jebediah arrived on the scene back in 1994. The Panics were yet another talented bunch from the far west. It was with their third album that they conquered the eastern seaboard back in 2007 with the J Award winning Cruel Guards. Four years later they are back touring follow up album Rain on the Humming Wire.

Georgia Fair are entertaining the merry crowd when I enter The Metro. The band seems to have a fun lighthearted flavour to their acoustic folk music as well as in their body language. "Picture Frames" had the half empty metro bouncing and singing along, feeling carefree and, well, happy. Just what you want in a warm up act, someone to put the crowd in a good mood. Georgia Fair did this well and without struggling.

Being generally impressed with their previous album I was quite interested in hearing their new material. I even dragged my girl along to the gig thinking she would enjoy it. In the end I think she enjoyed it more than me. A lot of the newer songs seemed to flow into each other and really failed to grab me. I was really struggling to stay focused on their music and everyone up the front around me were rather statuesque.

As I analysed the mix of the show I noticed the lead guitarist Drew Wooton was running his sound at very high volume from his amplifier on stage and not relying on the venues speaker system so much. The effect this had up the front near him was I really struggled to hear Jae on vocal. The music itself has a very outback Australian twang to it and certainly was not bad, it just didn't have the edge between bland and exciting that good melodic lyric can provide, perhaps because I could hardly hear it. I had to move to the back steps and center stage to get a more balanced opinion.

Trekking through the crowd I see people slightly back from the front are actually dancing! Song Cruel Guards gets a rousing reception. I can hear Jae properly now and have actually stopped yawning. It wasn't much later than they pulled out the hit "Don't Fight It". This is a great song, and most certainly a crowd singalong, the irony is however that because the vocal is quite soft, you have a crowd almost whispering the song in an almost haunting manner and I can still hear Jae!

It is a little sad that I wasn't in a better position to enjoy the first half of this set as much as I did the second half, which leaves me sadly unmotivated to listen to their new album. In a world where there is so much constant new music around I am worried The Panics may struggle to repeat the impact of their previous fame. They do have a very warm and unoffensive sound, I guess it's just hard to sell that with a single unfortunately poor listening, this band needs airplay to survive.