Guitar Wolf aren't for everyone, as I found out when 3 of my 4 companions left halfway through the first song. Seji (Guitar Wolf) U.G. (Bass Wolf) & Toru (Drum Wolf) have returned to Australia for the first time since their short East Coast tour back in 2006. Billing themselves as "jet rock 'n' roll", they are influenced by The Ramones, rockabilly & garage rock.

The Tote is having a party... kind of. It’s actually more like a months worth of gigs to celebrate their 30th birthday as a venue. The lineup for this particular event was a quieter one with acoustic sets by Ben Salter, Tendrils and Gareth Liddiard.

Ben Salter opened up proceedings playing to a mostly empty band room. Donning only an acoustic guitar he rushed through a set of typical folky love songs.

I was expecting a night of surprises and nuttiness with this night of some odd sounds at The Tote (well, when isn’t there nuttiness at The Tote?), and I got more of the latter than the former. However those surprises and nuttiness at the end of the night were not something to take really in a good way. It was like each band were given a memo to theme their set around the word “weird”.

I’ve been a Dandy Warhols fan since heroin was so passé, and after running into Brent DeBoer in the crowd at Laneway Festival and chatting about his new Melbourne-based side project Immigrant Union, a trip to the The Tote was in order to check out their live show.

It felt as though it were a hundred million degrees inside the Tote band room as the sold out crowd packed themselves in for a night of garage, punk mayhem with Californian rockers Thee Oh Sees.