Indie Sounds from Newy and The Hunter – Various Artists (Vi-Nil Records)
He’s never been seen in anything other than a T-shirt and one of his own label’s trucker caps, but it’s easy to picture Vi-Nil Records label boss Mark Fraser as the Pied Piper of the New South Wales Central Coast and Newcastle music scenes.
The analogy has to stick like baby shit to a blanket after the release of his second collection in the Indie Sounds series. Fraser is batting 2-0.
Picking a bunch of local bands and presenting two songs each on CD and vinyl is some brave/crazy idea in these days of diminishing economic returns.
Taking some of the bands on the road in a package tour to promote the release seems even more deranged, but you must do what makes you happy when you’re an evangelist and young bands need to hone their craft in front of new audiences.
A former Sydney street press writer and onetime part-owner of Woy Woy’s Link & Pin music café, Fraser is on a mission to document the sounds of regional bands who might go otherwise unnoticed outside of their own backyards, and despite the mix of styles on this compilation hangs together incredibly well.
Each band gets two tracks so think of the collection as a jukebox of A and B sides where they need to show their best.
Nobody’s going to tell you that every band here will be 100 percent to your tastes or mine either, but much of it leans to the rock and roll side of the county line and it’s tracked intelligently enough to be coherent. Nor will we document the whole thing in playing order (that’s for you to do after you buy it) , but the opening salvo will give you an idea of what to expect:
With a recurring guitar figure and a languid Kim Gordon-esque vocal, “Dumb” by Goon Gremlins sounds like it fell out of the band’s parents’ record collection. File under late period Sonic Youth.
If feel like you’ve been transported back into the mid-‘90s after that, horns-fueled rock machine Mucho Sonar will bring you back to the present with a thud with the urgent “Flogging a Dead Horse”. The brash Boudicca sounds like the Riot Grrrl movement just connected to a defibrillator and received a second life with the short and sharp “Niamh”.
Howlin’ Rats add a lashing of dark swamp-blues with the wonderfully moody “Vixen”, reprised from their last EP. Elestial’s “Nineteen” sets the dial to dreamy pop and this one wouldn’t be out of place on a radio station that panders to yewf but draws the line at mediocrity.
And so it goes. Like the Big Day Out before it dumbed itself down past the point of no return, a bunch of genres rub up against each other here and manage to co-exist.
There’s plenty to recommend if Newcastle’s elder rock pop statesmen Drugs In Sport are in the house. I Hate People have a touch too much of the Cookie Monster in their vocals and Pit don’t stray far from the shadow cast by silverchair to do it for me, but the offbeat pop of Golden Gaytime sure does. Full props to Mucho Sonar for taking risks (their second track, “The Fall”, is a killer) and to Howlin’ Rats for wearing their retro blues influences fully on their collective sleeve. Their “One Minute Ronnie” is unashamedly stuck in the ‘70s.
More honorable mentions, too, to the raucous Jan, Trashed Again for their highly-string “Pathetic” and Butterknife whose electronic pop is a little out of place here but would be at home on most airwaves.
Drugs in Sport’s “Yes” is way too short than it deserves to be. And Boudicca are world class. Check out their dynamic second song “Broad Arrow” if you’re in doubt.
