User:Snuggy5/sandbox

Lobsterman

Lobsterman are a Sydney post-punk band that formed in 1996, and had its most creative period from 1996 to 2005. Named after band leader, Chris Lobb, Lobsterman began as a 3 piece outfit, building on the reputation Lobb had established for off-kilter art-pub-rock and folk in previous Sydney bands Unseen and Mexicans Trapped Under Rubble. Leaving behind the frenetic post-punk surf rock of Mexicans, and the violin-driven minor harmonic and rhythmic complexities of Unseen, Lobb pared down his songwriting and guitar playing for Lobsterman, relying on Missy Owly Girl (Melissa Hunt) on double bass, clarinet, vocals, and Chris Baz on drums and vocals, to co-create a sound that melded elements of early Go-Betweens with a Tom Waits-inflected approach to jazz. As a three-piece, Lobsterman produced the musical staging for a transformation in Lobb's songwriting, where drama and romance were mixed with equal parts irony and nostalgia, enabling Lobb's seductively wry storytelling- through-song to be performed with a fresh and touching directness.

In this first incarnation of Lobsterman, the band's sound was an amalgam of Lobb's skeletal, quirky and simple guitar figures, sweetened melodies and poetic, observational and self-reflecting lyrics, often telling idiomatic stories focused from his past and transformational present, highlighting an irony or emotional weight that he filtered through his sense of the absurd and the tragic, the power of male friendships, and his emerging relationship with  at this time, Lobb was drawing closer to members of a number of other prominent Sydney post-punk bands, and and Chris Baz's basic yet swinging drums provided a

to produce a skeleton of quirky yet simple electric guitar figures, and sweetened melodies, still filtered through his poetic observational lyrics