Good Famine/Bad Gentlemen

Before Melbourne leather-clad degenerates Gentlemen bring out their new album, I thought I would delve back into their last two short-form releases, and carefully peel back the diseased canvas to show you what writhes and pulses beneath. The first 7" is 終焉 on Tokyo label Episode Sounds, which delves much deeper into their hardcore roots with 'Good Omen/Bad Husband' before hitting a spewing, mewling punk squall on 'Dead Hand' and 'WD2F' melts it into one insoluble mess.



Then there is Pro Famine, out through Ken Rock. 'Gaunt Boys' is the Gentlemen I know and love - sub three minutes of hateful vitriol, staring into the abyss with dead eyes - the Bird Blobs connection is well and clear. Australia knows how to mewl and gnash teeth in the dark, covered in shit and piss, and love it. No objections from me.

Busting Up The Ballroom

I was not expecting this. As always I am procrastinating from doing any actual ‘work’ by listening to music – and NY band Ballroom’s debut 12” EP dropped into my email. For whatever reason I downloaded the album without listening to a sample of the music (with the amount of music that I get a day, and the limit my work has on downloads, you have to be extremely picky – although the fact it’s on Ever/Never Records, who put out Degreaser and Wilful Boys (who shares band members, along with connections to Home Blitz), might have been a persuading factor) – but it is clear that this was meant to be, as Ballroom has blown me away (and successfully wasted a good hour of the day, so double win). The visceral burst of chaos and barely-bridled gritty aggression launches out at you and grips your by the throat. For whatever reason, I felt ‘I’ll Be Coming Back’ could have fit into the Australian noise rock tradition, and whilst not as unhinged as say Bird Blobs or Deaf Wish, there is a pub rock nihilism that lurks beneath the serrated exterior. Like a seething mass of heaving paranoid psyches in one sweat-stained room, Ballroom cannonballs through from start to finish, invoking violence with a sense of desperate, orgiastic gratification. I’m sold.

 

Drowning Under Bird Blobs

This is an album I haven’t been able to stop listening to since stumbling over it again a few months back. It’s not like I never got into Aussie gutter gurus Bird Blobs in the past, but possibly because the re-emergence (or reawakening) of the nastier nihilistic sewer rock here in Australia over the past few years it’s resonating all the more. The band split in 2006 to form other bands (Minimum Chips and Degreaser are the two most prevalent of these future projects, but also includes Coconuts, Bushwalking, St Helens, Mum Smokes and Mad Nanna amongst others) but it’s hard to pass up their 2004 self-titled LP for lightning-in-a-bottle feral ferocity. Seriously, with Tim Evans' guttural spew of a vocal delivery and songs that covered the detritus of the debauched masses (‘If I Could Kill’, ‘Stealing Again’, ‘Settle Down + Breed’, ‘Drunk At The Mill’), the guitars rolling drunkenly and wilfully into every sensitive corner of your inner ear, the drums pounding rabidly until they break the bedrock beneath – it was a fetid mess, but this four-piece had tapped the open vein with gleeful aggression. I always return to the bookends of Bird Blobs, ‘Billy’ and the aforementioned ‘Drunk At The Mill’ – the former is squalling, spewing venom at its most freebased; the latter for its dessicated rhythmic roll through the scorched undergrowth and throat-tearing screams puncturing the senses. In fact the opening drumming gambits for most of these tracks are killer - Steve Masterson proves to be a hedonistic animal on the skins, and his subsequent efforts with New War exemplify this.

Is this still available? Worth finding out. In fact, maybe Sonic Masala should reissue it? It’s an awesome idea, because Bird Blobs has now fused with my DNA. You see, once you taste Bird Blobs, it infiltrates and desiccates; it mesmerises and maims; it hypnotises and horrifies. And for me, that is some of the most viscerally exciting things music can do.

Squalid Degreaser

I didn't even know that ex-Aussie Tim Evans' band Degreaser were still an active thing. I bought their first two albums, Bottom Feeder and Sweaty Hands, not that long ago, and those are two slices of fevered nastiness, unfettered, unrelenting, unrepentant. They also scream of a band born to implode. You can't tame such fetid beasts, and new record Rougher Squalor (out on Ever/Never Records) still attains some of the rust and grime of those awfully awesome releases. But it is clear on LP #3 that the trio want to fuse their dissonant elements into one awed, cellular whole, and in so doing have carved out a squalling psych behemoth where the trip is long and real yet the songs retain brevity and bite (not one of the eleven tracks breach four minutes). It's like someone herded Bo Ningen, White Hills, Straightjacket Nation and Coloured Balls into a holding pen then eviscerated the lot of them, scooped up the guts and sinew and molded them into the band we hear vomiting forth from the speakers. It's all in the wailing wah-riddled guitar, ripping the ozone apart fibre by fibre. There is still moments of Bird Blobs chicanery in the morbid monotone delivery of 'Do Me In', but mostly Rougher Squalor is all about cutting loose and steering straight for the eye of the sun, dragging us all kicking and screaming along with them. Fantastic stuff.