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New Zealand’s Kora returned to Sydney on Saturday night for yet another performance to their faithful masses. Playing in Coogee will always guarantee a venue full of fellow Kiwis, and even Easter Friday and an early start time didn’t deter a healthy and enthusiastic crowd from turning up en masse.

Budspells had the task of warming up the audience and they delivered with their signature mix of hip hop, dub and drum & bass. With the dancefloor in the cavernous Selinas filling fast, MC Kye and Ants (plus trumpeter) built the tempo from laid back lyrical tricks on the Q-Tip influenced tracks through to the jungle and ragga infused tunes that had heads bobbing frantically.

MC Kye has one of the more natural flows in the Australian scene, never dropping a line and always keeping up in the crowd’s face rather than stalking the rear of the stage. Their album Nomadik Souls was released mid last year and its poly-genre sound combined with the confidence of their live show makes them deserving of a wider audience.

Kora are a strange musical beast. Their calling card a few years ago was the dense dub reggae sound in the swirling reverb and delay of ‘Burning’ and the melodic sing-a-long of ‘Politician’. Since then the band has developed and mutated into a much more muscular and varied unit. The dub elements remain, not as whole songs but more as an influence underlying the soul of the music. On the surface there is now a funk metal flavour to many of the songs that brings to mind Faith No More and Prince while the vocals are reminiscent of Stevie Wonder and New Zealand’s Che Fu.

‘Flow’ was huge and stomping like New Zealand’s Supergroove were back in the mid 90’s while the restrained ‘Skankenstein’ opened the set with its measured cyberfunk attack. The metal/funk mix is an interesting proposition for a sound that could easily be written off as dated if viewed in the same light as progenitors like Fishbone, Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Nonetheless Kora brought enough of their own musical history to the stage to ensure the comical and wacky side of funk metal was kept at bay.

Through the aggressive performance there was a constant embrace of the audience with brothers Laughton and Francis inciting interaction, checking on the crowd vibe and responding with huge grins at the screams and sea of arms rising from the dancefloor. They were consummate performers in that they delivered both musically and with personality to match.

There were moments where the momentum was lost and the crowd took their chance to rest their feet. These tended to be on newer songs that had a decidedly more electronic focus. Minimal electro sounds were worked up into hypnotic pieces that served to highlight the power of the full band songs when they dropped back into those. Kora’s recent remixing by Cabaret Voltaire on the Kora! Kora! Kora! EP may have encouraged the band to explore more synthetic sounds. You get the feeling that their sense of exploration is strong and that they are constantly seeking to meld disparate styles into their own singular sound.

Kora is band that has their own sound and to a large extent their own audience. Expat Kiwis obviously love them because they see the band as their own and on foreign soil nationalistic pride plays a big part of their attraction. Outside that the band showed that well honed playing skills and knowing how to create a party atmosphere will always guarantee a satisfied audience.