I had such a great time at River Rocks 2024 (read about part 1 here, and part 2 here), so 2025 was definitely on my radar. We saw that the Fadeaways were on the bill. And Asteroid B612. And AC/DC was playing the next day. And Metallica would be playing across the street from our hotel. So with all those factors on the bill, we booked a trip to Australia.
And it’s not all about the big name bands. I had such a great time discovering and/or seeing more local bands (I already was familiar with a lot of them), it was more than worth it just to make the trip for them. We did 9 shows in 9 days and this is one of them.
The River Rocks “festival” is actually just a big club show that runs all day and evening with an indoor stage and an outdoor stage. It features bands from all over the world. This year, they brought in the Fadeaways from Japan and Zeke from the US, and Slander Tongue from Germany. The rest were some bigger name bands from the Australian scene and some smaller bands from Melbourne. All willing to bring the rock!
We got up early and took the 90 minute train to Geelong. I think we were the first people in the door! People were impressed that we came all the way from CA for this. Some people even remembered us from last year! Had a great time. Really great time. And this was even better than last year! Put it this way: we saw 11 bands and all 11 of them were great! We had to leave early, missing the headliners (Zeke, who we can see in the US, and Asteroid B612 whom we saw the previous day) so we could uber back to the city to the Curtin to see The Prize (more on that later).
But enough of my schedule, here’s the rundown of what I saw at River Rocks 2025:
TTTDC: What a way to start the festival! Melvins meets Fu Manchu. A jammy band in that the four guys in the band just faced each other while playing and completely rocking out. When there’d be a slower moment, just at the last minute, they’d just turn it up a notch and throw in a quirky twisted riff. Great!
Juliette Seizure & The Tremor-Dolls: the reason why I wanted to show up very early to this show. I didn’t want to take the chance on missing them. Turns out this is Shannon from the Blowers’ band and she really knows how to rock, so you kind of know what you’re getting into. Buzzsaw guitar, catchy choruses, and two background singers! Think the Cosmic Psychos (whenever I hear buzzsaw guitars, I think of them) playing straight ahead aggressive rock ‘n roll, being backed by the Ronettes. They even did a cover of “Taken By Surprise” by Poison Idea which was pretty impressive!
Scarnon: Another extremely impressive band. Sludgy, but sometimes fast. Loud guitars. Intense with a little sense of humor. With songs like “I Wanna Dance (But Don’t Know How)”, you can’t go wrong in my book. Intense vocals too. Everything about this band was intense. And they really know how to play. I don’t know what it is about every band I’ve seen in Melbourne: they all are experts at their craft. They had some sort of gimmick during I think it was the song “Dickhead”, where he had a motorcycle engine inside of an amp and he cranked it up while doing a solo. It was way too loud (drowning out the guitar) and even caught on fire. But regardless, this band doesn’t need gimmicks like this. Excellent stuff. I bought an album.
W.O.M.B.A.T.: This was the surprise “Holy fuck!” moment of the festival. The “I never heard of this band before, but they blew me away moment”. Like Fly! was last year. The first song was pretty good. As in “not bad for a bunch of kids”. Then after that, they kicked into an extremely impressive 30 minutes of punk rock that sounded so classic, but so fresh. Imagine if you’ve heard unreleased songs by one of those pioneer “sing a long” punk bands like the Angelic Upstarts or Peter & The Test Tube Babies, but with a modern twist. Pretty charismatic band, with the singer having a really quirky sense of humor which I loved. I expect great things from these guys in the future. And gal… she was playing some great leads! Absolutely loved this band!
Public House: Full on punk rock. Top notch punk rock. Kind of reminded me of Split System. There’s a whole rash of newer bands out there that are doing things just as well as the classic bands. This is one of them.
Blowers: Saw them last year at the Tote. Punk rock. Like the Wipers meets Screeching Weasel. I want to say “fun”, but one of the guitarists scares me. He certainly doesn’t like his picture being taken, so I kind of stayed away. I learned my lesson last year. I guess people know him though, as they fucked with him a little while taking his picture and he flipped them off. It didn’t scare me any less when they played a song called “Sick Of You” and at the end of it, he put his fist in his mouth to make himself throw up.
The Maggie Pills: Played goth punk. Not really my style of punk, but they do it extremely well and I enjoyed them nonetheless. In fact I enjoyed them so much, that I took a bunch of pictures.
Emu: This band, like many others I’ve seen in Melbourne this trip, got their beers ready all lined up before the set, ready to drink in between songs. Jammy groovy loud rock. Lots of excellent solos. My kind of thing!
Leatherman: interesting band with a variety of styles. Heavy Thin Lizzy influence with the twin lead guitars, but also garage rock, with the emphasis on ROCK. Very cool. One of the guitarists was wearing a Tank t-shirt! I swear ’80s underground metal/rock is a huge thing in Melbourne. Last year I went to a record store (Searchers) and they were playing Brats (pre-Mercyful Fate band) as I walked in! And Vixen Scream played a great NWOBHM set last week. And Aardvark later this night opening for The Prize. This is cool. Very cool.
The Fadeaways: THIS was the band that my wife insisted that we maybe should start looking into tickets to go back to Australia for River Rocks again. From Japan. Loud intense fast guitar driven garage rock. They do a lot of covers and even brought out a cover of “Johnny & Dee Dee” from the Eastern Dark for their Australian friends. Totally wild live, jumping all around the place. They totally took control of the stage and then proceeded to lose control of themselves. Not a band to miss!
Slander Tongue: Johnny Thunders/NY Dolls type of rock from Germany. Good band. They had the singer from W.O.M.B.A.T. on background vocals and percussion.
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