Adding Up The Statsmen Data

One of the most exciting bands going in Brisbane when I was "growing up" in my 20s was the stupid noise fury of Eat Laser Scumbag! Fast, furious, shouty, colour-coded - they were the ketamine Wiggles for the Ramones kids with ASD and middle ear infections. They tore everything apart, a cyclone of hypercolour decimation. The members of these bands went on to other endeavours (the slacker pop nous brilliance of Nova Scotia, the cartoon punk splurge of Undead Apes, the guttural pub punk of Eyes Ninety etceteraaaaaaaa).

But sometimes you gotta keep the dream alive.

Admittedly Champion Data, the throwaway album from 3/4 of ELS!, called here Statsmen, is decidedly different, more interested in Guided By Voices, Pedro The Lion and infinite other 90s guitar bands, taking the combustible energy of cassette-chewed lo-fi rock to all corners of the canvas (with some 8-bit Numan-highfiving-Devo magic on 'Candy', retrofuturist synth silliness on 'Indestructible Roger' and excellently warped motorik psycher 'Taken Over' thrown in to keep you on your toes). This may have been something to do to fill in time - but seriously, this is a great release that everyone should get into. I for one cannot get enough.

HMAS Scrap Rock Gods

Finishing off the week with not one but TWO Hobart-related posts, because. Homeless Records have not steered me wrong once, so when Richie sent me through the archival material of lost Tassies hMAS, as if I wasn’t going to dive headlong into the murky waters without testing the depths. Sure, Fear God Honour The King has enough aural debris, sonic outcroppings and shaggy rock to knock someone out, but these are the types of waters I regularly bathe in. Recorded in 1997 (!) and remixed by lazy sonuvabitch Mikey Young (and mastered by Ben Crothers), this bears much resemblance to the kind of fuzz-damaged literate silliness that Sonic Masala band Tape/Off spew out at irregular angles (‘Fungus’ sounds like the broken bridge between EP and album for the Brisbane slackdog millionaires), and is the unassuming cesspit that geographical brethren Treehouse sprouted from. Richie’s phrasing of hMAS as ‘pointless yet essential’ is a great way of describing the bent and blasted guitar rock here, as concerned with smashing things in some form of identifiable tempo and melody as they are at being noisily indecipherable – it’s the kind of cacophonous mess that is also bristling with hooks, tone deaf yet glistening with naïve-pop noise. The backwards oscillating loop that sounds like an stoner experiment takes up the first half of the appropriately titled ‘Absurd’ (the second half is a demo-esque punk blast of questionable quality, but what good punk isn’t?); the pig-fuck scrawl that permeates the pub-punk sweat-flecked ‘Bucket Boy’; the Devo-meets-addled-Jim-Carroll-with-added-space-wah ‘Friend Is Dead’ – it is all a bunch of friends fucking about. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be heard. Thank the Lord for Homeless that hMAS now has a home.

You can grab Fear God Honour The King here - be quick though because there are only 3 left! If you are lucky you can get versions of the other two releases – The Computer Tape, a experiment (hMAS to a tee) of their songs reconditioned to a Commodore Amiga 500, vocal melodies and all. A Kraftwerk-meets-Devo reimagined score of an Atari 8-bit version of Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome. Weird – and pretty amazing. Then there is 1996’s Goes Pop!, which was originally released for 25c with an added A4 zine, and has had some of the hiss and banter cut out. Lowest fidelity, the mud at the bottom of a creek beer, misplaced, waylaid, laced with memories. A remnant of what may have been, a holographic projection of fizzing, sparking, faux greatness. Get in.

A Hozac Triptych Of Seven Inches

I’m kinda getting 7” (and revisionist garage rock) happy this week, and here are three more, all from the Hozac world, that have been taking turns at spiriting me away from the real world, into one filled with attitude, mayhem and hedonistic fun.

Winter Bear is the new venture from ex-Cave Weddings songstress Erin Dorbin, and the two tracks here are imbued with enough summertime revelry and devil-may-care energy to fuel many a beachside moon party. ‘Jump In The Fire’ has the requisite punchy vocals and doo-wop backing vocals, but it’s Dorbin’s steely guitar riffs that infuse this with enough growl and bluster to supersede the cutesy exterior and be a true acolyte of 50s leather rock n roll. ‘Should I Leave’ flows on, more of the same, and it spins around and around, a youthful elixir that pushes aside the clouds and back the clock. Vintage pop tunes, shrink-wrapped and left in an attic, left until now, a true relic of then and now, if slightly warped from the sun and Dorbin’s overflowing charms.

But you can only by walking on sunshine for a certain amount of time before getting burnt and hurtling back to earth, and Cop City/Chill Pillars’ Gift Shop/Brand New Neighbor Blues has the requisite cement in the scorched punk rhythms to make that trip all the quicker. There is a primitive baseness to these two tracks (and indeed on the band’s debut eponymous LP) that disarms. The DEVO card is whipped out regularly when these guys find their feet, and it’s pretty warranted – the spaced out, deliciously warped compositions shouldn’t make sense – at all – yet inexorably draw you in. Before long you are splattered on terra firma, every bone, muscle and organ turned to jelly, yet you continue to hum these tunes through cracked teeth as you breathe your last.

  

Finally we are slammed with some squalling psych detritus from Chicago’s Verma. I know Hozac isn’t just a dirty, scuzzy garage den – they harbour the likes of The Band In Heaven and Human Eye in their midst - but it always blindsides me when something outside the mold crawls out of the darkness and into your ear. The assault is duly justified though – the uneasy motorik energy informing the swirling ‘Ragnaraak’ evokes the most ethereal yet dark machinations of the likeminded Cave, blistering the walls and scorching the floors with their fiery outro; whilst ‘Chrome’ ploughs through serrated tempests of noise to settle into a insidious groove that is pregnant with ill-tempered intent. The kaleidoscopic undulations are insistent, incessant, invasive and invigorating – you won’t be yourself when the needle stops, nor will you want to be.

 

You can pick all this slices of heaven up here.

DIY Is Good - DIT Is Better

 

I came across the trailer for this documentary earlier this week, and have spent the consequent time trying to find out what the hell it's all about. Do It Yourself is a collective of youngsters based in Amsterdam who create new media and organise events, bringing together creative people who like and make honest and independent art. Yet the endeavour is to stress that this is global. Currently, their main project is a documentary [named, funnily enough, Do It Together]. It explores the life of independent artists who struggle to survive making music in a changing world, with a large number of DIY artists taking part, giving their opinions and ideas of where this medium is heading to, along with plenty of great live performances. The movie is focused on the DIY ideology and the artists' independence, today's music industry issues, copyright matters, young artists barriers, the experience that people have and new ways they find to spread their art.

Take a look at the collaborators: So far we have many artists involved in this film. To name some:
- Devo [US]
- Steve Albini [US]
- Flux Information Sciences [US]
- Shipping News [US]
- David Yow /The Jesus Lizard [US]
- Lite [JP]
- John Dikeman [NL]
- Adebisi Shank [IE]
- Hella [US]
- Julien Fernandez [IT]
- Polvo [US]
- Tera Melos [US]
- Giraffes? Giraffes! [US]
- Chevreuil [FR] - Deerhoof [USA]
- The Ex [NL]
- Knalpot [NL]
- Le Singe Blanc [FR]
- Boutros Bubba [NL]
- Petrol [RS]
- Parts & Labor [US]
- Aural [UK]
- Deformica [ARG]
- Pneu [FR]
- Aucan [IT]
- Dan Deacon - [US]
- Part Chimp [UK]
- Al Scorch [US]
- Nelson Can [DK]
- Hurtmold [BR]
- Gijs Gieske [NL]
- The Bulletproof Tiger [CA]
- Kit [US]
- Selfkill [TWN]

That's a mere fraction. With the documentary due out in March, the collective aim to conduct some workshops to teach people how to do audio engineering and lights at shows, to get people more involved in their respective DIY communities. I'm very keen to see how this progresses, and what local communities already in existence think of this. You can visit their website here, and by all means, leave your thoughts below. You can also email them here if you are interested in finding out more.