I have a feeling these are the first Australian artists on this list (the Bee Gees being a kind of Anglo-Australian hybrid), and they take the punk aesthetic and give their own twist to it, falling somewhere between the cynicism of British punk and the knowing irony of American punk.
Musically, they’re not vastly different in the most part to bands we’ve had before, from The Only Ones, The Adverts, Buzzcocks – fast tempo guitars from Ed Kuepper with half-sung vocals from Chris Bailey. The old cicada theory still holds, since some tracks, notably Memories Are Made Of This (not the Dean Martin song) is yet another track that has a very Nineties Indie feel to it. Other tracks, including the opener Know Your Product, have had some soul horns added to them; this doesn’t seem to have been widely appreciated at the time, even by the band themselves, but to me it gives them a bit of a different sound and does kind of work.
There’s nothing defiantly Australian about the songs (not like, say Men At Work or Midnight Oil who never let you forget where they come from) apart from the track Orstralia, but even that’s only slightly tongue-in-cheek Aussie, with lyrics like “You can hang your washing on the line, because the sun will always shine”. Unless there are more albums by them later in the list, I feel that I’ll probably remember these guys within late-Seventies punk as I do bands like Country Joe And The Fish or Thirteenth Floor Elevators within late-Sixties psychedelia – that I enjoyed the album but couldn’t tell you within the context of all the albums exactly how any of their songs went.
Comments
Post a Comment