rock

Since, I was recently taken back by Suzie Stapleton’s compelling performance at the Bitter Sweet Kicks album launch Prince in St Kilda on Anzac Day, I did some searching. I found Suzie’s hypnotic and dark EP, “Obadi Diablo”, and it’s been on heavy airplay for more than two weeks. I contacted Ms Stapleton and requested a copy of her self-released debut EP of a few years back. Again, I was not to be disappointed.

Just coming off a scorching Los Chicos’ set on a cruise in Sydney Harbour and looking like a man who had just met God, I hit the concession desk and picked up a copy of this disc. I showed it to The Barman and asked him if he’d reviewed it yet. He had but suggested I did too. So this means a bit of an experiment in reviewing. Without reading the Barman’s review, how different will our opinions be?

Hard-Ons and Nunchukka Superfly bass player, chatterbox and all-round nice guy, Ray Ahn, has been telling entertaining yarns on his Facebook feed for eons.

They've irrevent, rollicking tales that have taken on a life of their own lately, generating a big following and constant comments to the effect that Ray should write a book.

He's done the next best thing and is putting his stories into a blog. You can read it here. 

Fucking brilliant. Primitive. Slightly awkward. Like bad early Nirvana, but with decent lyrics. Ugly, nasty stuff. But brilliant. Brave - particularly since this is an EP and no-one in Australia is buying fucking them now. So who are these idiots?

_{Tamam Shud back on stage at Byron Bay's Great Northgern Hotel.   Al Heeney photo}

The Northern New South Wales Australian coastline has changed dramatically over the last 50 years.

Remember the pilgrimage of holiday time, with caravans lined up on the Pacific Highway…the tribe of kids in the backseat of the Kingwood (or Ford Falcons) bellowing out of boredom on the inteminable drive north? Then there was the weekend pilgrimage of surfers with their Sandman panel vans. Followed, of course, by the night drive back to work to Monday. It was a long trip back down to Sydney with car headlights on high beam, dodging speeding semi-trailers with speed-driven truckies, in-between stopovers at the Oak Milk Bar or the Big Banana.

Dotted along the NSW coast, from Hornsby to the Gold Coast, are memories. Of stop-overs at Frangipani-lined caravan parks, or pitstops at the homes of relatives. Memories marked by places like Foster, Nambucca Heads, Coffs and Byron. Sleepy little towns that were bursting at the seams on long weekends and Chrissie holidays.

It seems a lifetime ago when the two great outposts of Sydney rock and roll were its northern and southern beaches. They were feeder tributaries to the inner-city and spawned bands like the Celibate Rifles and the Trilobites, to name just a couple. 

The venues that were their spawning grounds have long closed down, the bands willing to play their own music thin on the ground. Only a hardy few are still willing to take a risk and make the swim up-stream.

Been on a Humble Pie trip for a bit around the I-94 Bar and it struck me that the less pastoral and more excessive they became, the better those guys got. This Mississippi-via-Memphis trio Dirty Streets is coming from the same place and despite their album's misnomer of a title (there's no sign of rolling fields and English countryside here) they purvey a fine line in swaggering rock.

This album title should be filed under the Don't Try This At Home Kiddies label. Everyone knows cheap booze + cheaper speed = a killer hangover. Played at volume, the amphetamine rush of The X Rays is likely to have the same effect. This is English gutter-punk, turned up to 11.

There's nothing subtle about these 26 songs. Each one is cranked out at extreme volume and pace. The effect is as bracing as it is tiring. The attack is incessant and bruising, the product of too many beer-soaked nights spent on heaving stages in Europe, supporting the likes of New Bomb Turks, Gas Huffer, The Motards and anyone else who'd have 'em. All but one song is the product of 10 singles issued in the '90s, the closing "Drinkin' For My Baby" being from a recent session by the reformed X-Rays. That last one is a keeper, by the way.

You know what to expect but you might not anticipate the sole cover, a take on the Saints' sublime "Erotic Neurotic", to be as distorted (or good) as it is. "Recording quality varies from cruddy to better than OK. Audiophiles, The X-Rays are not.

A third of the songs are presaged by a blast of white noise feedback. The rest simply lurch out of the speakers at you, unannounced and reaching for your throat. With titles like "Arrogant Fucked Up Shit", "Drahstrip Killer", "2 Bit Whore" and "PCP", it's punk rock in the Killed By Death genre, which if you don't know is the seamy under current that erupted all over the US of A without the straight edge affectations or extreme violence of hardcore.

Look, you're might have to be in the mood to be belted around the ears like this. There's precious little in the way of a saving grace like a melody line or a slow song. This is raw and insistent music to get blasted with. Judged on that basis, it works a treat. - The Barman

High Noon Records

Look, it's a punk rock record with some funny little new wave songs thrown in. You were expecting prog rock? It's also a bedroom album by Dean Agostino, one-half of Digger and The Pussycats, so that should tell you right there that it's pretty fucking good, OK? DIY rules!

Rising from the ashes of trio Hy-Test, BRUCE! (capital letters compulsory) is a band from the once-industrial musical nursery of Wollongong, south of Sydney, that plays skull-crushing guitar rock with occasionally complex arrangements. This EP showcases four of their simpler tunes delivered to mostly damaging effect.

Paying attention? This album by a band from local serial killer capital Adelaide that hardly anyone outside Australia will have heard of celebrates obscene volume, filthy guitar sounds and a blaring bottom end. For these reasons alone, you should love it.

Members of sublime Danish '60s throwbacks Baby Woodrose make up two-thirds of Telstar Sound Drone, but that's where the resemblance ends. Recorded in a WWII bomb shelter, it mimics the sound of a psychedelic lava flow with each of its seven tracks seamlessly flowing into the next.

Clocking in at eight songs, it's a mini-album or an EP, but the brevity of "Crusty Seamen" won't be a problem if you play it back to back a few times. It might be the best 30 minutes you've spent since you pushed Aunt Maude into the pool and sat on the side with your foot on her head. Meatbeaters take a piece of four-by-two to rock's flabby arse on "Crusty Seamen" and smack it into next week.

What do you think we’d say? Sonic’s Rendezvous Band was truly The One That Got Away. It’s a crime they weren’t signed, recorded and backed to the hilt by a major label and elevated to a household name, but rock and roll is seldom fair. That’s why you need to hear everything you can of this great lost band.

Never heard outside a small circle of alumni and fans, this short but sweet five-song set comes from the January 14,1978 show, on the undercard to the Ramones and the Runaways at the Masonic Temple in Detroit. Maybe.

The opening act was un-billed and surviving band members (that would be Gary and Scott) can’t agree that they played it. All but one song (“City Slang”) has remained in the vaults and the label thought it had issued the gig as part of its splendid box set. But that disc wasn’t even from one entire show, if that makes sense.

Call me biased and armed with far too much hindsight for my own good, but for a brief time in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Detroit was the lesser-known but undeniable epicentre of genuine rock and roll. The music industry, as it was, might have had its moneyed roots deeply planted on America’s East and West Coasts, but the real action was occurring deep in the US Midwest.

Sure, there was Motown and its over-ground success that eventually shifted to L.A. to mutate and die but we’re talking a parallel universe here that was populated by a different cast of characters plying a blue-collar strain of music. It’s an eternal truism that musical scenes never last. The Motor City’s rock and roll had its moment but succumbed to fashion, drugs, shifting attention spans – whatever factors play to your own historical biases – and has never recovered.

This band goes back to 1983. They split up and re-animated themselves in 2005. The album itself dropped in 2010, and is worth moving heaven and earth to procure. If someone told you a tough rock and roll band with swagger to rival the New Christs came from Glasgow, would you believe them? Och, aye. Wake up and smell the thistles.

In a wired world of passing trends, the Buzzcocks remain a comforting constant. One of the best of the first wave of UK punk, the original band plied their singularly melodic, buzzsaw trade from 1976 to 1981, disappeared and resurfaced in re-tooled form eight years later. They’ve been going strong since then, with two early line-up members intact.

_{Luke Peacock and Vic Simms.}

Conceived by Luke Peacock of Robert Forster-produced Brisbane outfit Halfway, The Painted Ladies are a black and white supergroup brought together to celebrate and reinterprete the classic 1972 live-in-prison LP "The Loner" by Koorie country iconoclast Vic Simms.

The band released the fabulous album "Play Selections from The Loner" in 2014. Produced by longtime Simms spruiker Rusty Hopkinson of You Am I, the album revealed a fabulous and rootsy rockin’ combo and an all-killer set of songs, highlighted by the unabashed all-Australian classics "Get Back Into the Shadows" and "Stranger in My Country".

Both are depictions of a young black man’s life experience that remain both lyically potent and musically thrilling. In the Painted Ladies’ hands the former became a hard-driving pop-soul rocker, and the latter a sullen and beautiful, six-minute moan of alienation and anguish that builds to the sort of electrical storm that your average Died Pretty or New Christs fan should identify with. (And yes, I’m talking to YOU!)

Montana-based psych collective Donovan’s Brain returns after a four-year hiatus – hardly a blip, really, in a trajectory that’s now spanned two decades. Joining San Francisco expat Ron Sanchez for the festivities are his fellow Montanan Deniz Tek and Mississippi power popster Bobby Sutliff, who once drove 13 hours to record with Let’s Active honcho Mitch Easter. His Career stablemate Roy Loney, who’s been shaking some action this year in tandem with his Flamin’ Groovies partner Cyril Jordan, is also on board.

In a barely lit corner of the Sandringham Hotel in Sydney, the Barman slides me a white plastic bag stuffed full of CDs. I peek inside. Veteran tour manager Peter Ross looks on, shaking his head. “Those poor bastards,” he mutters.