garage

With Sydney's long-running Dunhill Blues on hiatus, bassist Adam has opted to crank up the rumble with a new band, Space Boozies. "I Feel Alright" is their debut LP.

The Dunnies have been through several phases - garage big band, thrash country rock and battered blues rock - and but for a few superficial similiarities, Space Boozies sound a lot like none of them.

The Boozzies keep it short and sharp but there's a touch of bitter-sweet jangle in the guitars. Their music is still parked in the garage, but it's not as determinedly abrasive. Think of them as an Antipodean version of The Raunch Hands. Music to drink rather than to think by.

Where the Dunhill Blues wanted to tickle Nick Cave, Space Boozzies are keen to share some quality time with Australia's Queen of Decollage ("Tonia Todman's House") and swap egg recipes with Peter Russell-Clarke. The irreverence of the Dunnies hasn't gone away.

Stuck firmly in a time warp of their own making, Brisbane’s The Stinkbugs make music that bears no relation to anything you’ll hear on mainstream radio or oh-so-limp reality TV shows. Fuzzy ’n’ frothy, psychedelic garage rock is their stock in trade. 

With a lineage that includes membership of Shutdown66 and the Hekawis, The Stinkbugs mix their ’60s acid punk with their ‘70s hard rifferama to come up with their own distinctive, odd sound. This is their second album (with a couple of fine singles in-between) and veers between trashy lo-fi ragers and cloudy, acid-washed trips. 

It’s all so obvious and so much more childish than Parliamentary Question Time, but how can you resist a male-female duo called The Sex Organs who dress like they’re named with songs like “Lubrication” and “I Wanna Be a Pussy”? Oh, you can? If you have sufficient taste to push back, you can leave now.

Drummer Jackie and guitarist Bone formed The Sex Organs in 2014 to play European festivals and quickly recorded a single, “Fuck The Human Race”, in Amsterdam’s red light district. They come (pun intended) from somewhere in Europe. This is their debut album and of course it’s on Voodoo Rhythm,  the people who peddle “songs to ruin any party”. Or orgy.

Like Johnny Appleseed, The Strypes travel the world and beget a host of similar teenage bands playing garage and beat rock and roll. At least that’s how we all want the story to go. The simultaneous existence The Arrogrants in the same hemisphere might be a complete coincidence, but there’s no mistaking the common influences and sheer unbridled firepower that this band packs.

And it’s about rock and roll. Eleven tracks of it from a French four-piece from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in the country’s south-east.

Many people say French garage bands can’t cut it because they weren’t brought up on rock and roll and lack that attack and swing that sorts the great bands out from the pretenders. There’s no rock without roll.

That might be true for many of them but there are exceptions to the rule. As rock and roll is pushed further down the cultural mine-shaft, the really good ones struggle up into the daylight. Which is what The Lonely Dogs have done.

The UK’s most rocking outfit, Jim Jones revue, has announced a farewell tour before a planned October break-up. Seven years, three studio albums and a compilation of their singles will culminate in a sweep through France, Spain and Amsterdam before a lap of honour of the UK that winds up at The Forum in London on October 4.

Why? is anyone’s guess as the band isn’t going into detail. Here’s their last single “Where Da Money Go?”, from the 2012 album "Savage Grace", to see them out.

If you can imagine a soulful, bluesy engine room with guitar that has a tone thicker than your great aunt's cankles, you're halfway to getting a grip on the sound John The Conqueror shoots for. Named after a psychotropic herb rather than a dead King of England and with members drawn from the Mississippi Delta, Philadelphia and parts in-between, this power trio hits their intended mark with accuracy, more often than not.

Wrong Turn is a duo-grown-into-a-trio from Melbourne that puts the primal back into rock and roll. Two albums in, this single is the first new recording to make it into the record racks since the band became a three-piece and it hits the bullseye, right in the fucking centre.

Wrong Turn is Ian Wettehall’s band and what his c.v. (The Philisteins, The Freeloaders, The Lords of Gravity, Seminal Rats, Stoneage Hearts) doesn’t tell you isn’t worth knowing.

Don’t let the jokey cover art fool you. The A side comes over like Chuck Berry on 11, telling a story about a man called Johnny Collingwood who never left home. It’s seriously raw and sounds like it was recorded in a toilet. There’s enough fuzz in the guitar to rattle your fillings loose, the vocals growl and the engine room of Myles Gallagher (drums) and Pip McMullan (bass) deliver appropriate crash-and-wallop with powerful fills. 

Flip it over and “Baby No Good” hits you in the solar plexus with equal effect. Vocally, there’s a touch of Hasil Adkins in the scream-and-stutter, reverb-soaked chorus (“B-b-b-b-b-b-baby no good!”) while the band sounds even trashier than pn the A. It's all recorded in glorious mono so you know it kicks like a mule. Score this gem at the band’s shows or hit them up on Facebook.

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Born in the Suburbs – Suburban Urchins (Aeroplane Records)

The concept of “let’s get the band back together” isn’t new. Not by any stretch. And the thought of yet another obscure ‘80s garage rock crew reassembling and trumpeting how good they were/are doesn’t automatically fill anyone with confidence.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. If only every band’s midlife crisis sounded this good.

Suburban Urchins were a mid-‘80s band from Hobart, the epicentre of a small but fevered Tasmanian underground music scene that notably spawned The Philisteins, with whom they shared stages.

One man's Mantovani is another man's "Theme From M*A*S*H*" so I just want it known that Bob Short's review below is a tad harsh. "Just Want To Be Friends" isn't as good as "Four Flights Up" but it ain't a pile of steaming donkey turd either.

If you're looking for an expert on Danish acid rock of the early '70s you're in the wrong place. That period of music is the reference point for Spids Nogenhat but if they hit their mark, I have no idea. I do know that this, their second studio LP on champion Copenhagen label Bad Afro, is excellent.

If you could bottle the brashness on the five tracks from this EP by The Jenkinses you’d have a product to bring lasting peace to the Middle East, send a man to Mars and restore hair to Peter Garrett’s head. All considered impossible before now. 

The Jenkinses are a two-guitar four-piece from Brussels, full of grizzled veterans from Belgian bands like Contingent, Nervous Shakes, Vice Barons and Wild Ones. Only Nervous Shakes are familiar to me and they were great. The exception to the grizzled descriptor is guitarist Juliette Drumel, who’s the other guitarist-vocalist James Neligan’s better half.  Juliette gets her own picture on the inside of the digipak.  Happy wife, happy life, right James?

“Langered” - that's an Irish term for drunk - see, I like ‘em already - is the band’s second release, the first eponymous EP presumably being physical product when it came out four years ago, but now only available digitally. So how's it sound?

_{Nao of Stompin' Riff Raffs. 3PBS-FM photo.} 

Stompin’ Riff Raffs

Northcote Social Club
Minibikes

Merri Creek Tavern
Saturday, December 14 2019

One-time I-94 Bar writer Trevor Block once described Melbpurne suburb Northcote as "the capital of the People’s Republic of Darebin". Trevor’s colourful description had some currency at the time: you could still find Californian bungalows inhabited by half-a-dozen social security recipients-cum-performance artists, including an aging dreadlocked hippie who quoted Engels over late breakfast and invoked Proudhon in defiance of the sticky note instruction to avoid using the carton of soy milk in the fridge.

But times have changed. Northcote is still, according to psephologists, the hub of the Melbourne inner-city leftie latte culture, the loud, politically correct class who drown out the quiet Australians of the suburbs and regions. True, there is plenty of good coffee to be found in Northcote, but the fact that the only significant community uprising in recent times was about the council’s plan to restrict parking (“What? I can’t park both the Beemer 4WD and the Jeep Cherokee in front of the house? And where will I park Angus’s new Mercedes Sport?”) says everything about the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the middle-class.

You thought "the New Invincibles" was a tag invented for the Aussie cricket team? Think again (especially after the Ashes loss). It’s the dying days of 2005 and this debut album from a Perth, Western Australia, four-piece - which came out a few months previously - almost slipped through the cracks. Almost. Thank the punk rock gods and pass the ammunition.

This is an intruiging and charmingly all-over-the-shop album on which this Sydney five-piece sheds its alt.country label and heads for a garage in a swamp. There's more variety in this Licourice than a pallet-load of Darrel Lea Allsorts. 

The Ramalamas have been around for a decade or so, led by Chris Nielsen (vocals-guitar) and subsisting in their city’s fragmented live circuit while putting out a string of albums, of which this is their fourth. Nielsen name-checks the usual ‘60s references (Kinks, Stones) with a nod to the US West Coast’s psychedelic folk-pop scene. 

As well as owning a serviceable pop voice and playing nifty guitar, Nielsen is an award-wininng illustrator and his work adorns the CD cover and inlay. 

French one-man band King Automatic now has four albums on Voodoo Rhythm and still can’t make up his mind what musical genre we should put him in. Amen to that. This record is his most cosmopolitan so far.

“Lorraine Exotica” bounces from exotic organ-drenched garage to fuzz-soaked blues to Jamaican rock steady, with maracas, Russian folk music and trash exotica thrown in along the way. It jumps around like a tenderfoot tourist in Fiji lingering too long on hot coals. King Automatic has toured everywhere from Eastern Europe to South America and this album sounds like he’s sending a musical postcard from every stop.

In the last year I've seen or listened to more ragged garage bands than most of you have whinged about the weather. I've endured more crap than than a proctologist whose patients are addicted to laxatives. I've listened to the same three chords played ad infinitum, sometimes very badly and often in the same order. We all suffer for our art, sometimes moreso for the art of others.

Monkeypig covers a lot of ground in the space of its 10 punk-pop songs. An entirely self-sufficient and self-produced band now based in Newcastle, north of Sydney, it’s the vehicle for front-of-house operator and band-member-around-town, Christian Ryan.

“March of the Jack Boots” was recorded in a home studio in the bushy Sydney suburb of Engadine. No offence to Engadine, but it’s an unlikely well-spring of musical creativity. Ryan recorded, mixed, mastered, sang lead vocals and played almost all the instruments. He wrote every song except one (a co-write). The label is his own. Considering the record’s humble origins, he must have a good ear because the album sounds great.

Revelation – Los Revelators (Los Revelators)

Kamloops? Sounds like what a car mechanic has for breakfast, right?

Nope. It is, in fact, a place. In Canadaaaa!

Placenamesa? Australia has a few beauties: Grong Grong, Iron Knob, Woy Woy, Sydney. 

But, I mean, Canada, right? They really know how to give a town a name, don't they?

This Parisian band brags they’ve been “playing garage-blues-punk since 2003” and that’s no mean feat in a city where rock and roll gets simultaneously downtrodden by dance music and high culture. 

Two more things in their favour is that they’re on Beast Records, a well-established home for music that flies a ragged freak flag, and “Memories From a Shithole” was produced by expat Detroiter Jim Diamond, the ex-Dirtbombs bassist and sonic master now spending much of his work-time in Montpellier. His credits include the Bellrays, the Fleshtones and the White Stripes so he’s qualified to make this sort of noise. 

Whodunit aren’t your standard ‘60s acid punk rehash or two-chord crash-er-rama thrash artists. They don’t play second-rate Serge lounge tunes or bother trying to de-construct the blues. They just go for broke.