garage

“Just A Bad Dream: Sixty British Garage & Trash Nuggets 1981-89”– Various Artists (Cherry Red)

While most of us in Australia in the ‘80s and ‘90s were obsessing with the US resurgence in trashy ‘60s garage rock, the Brits were having a wild old time with the same sort of stuff. This stellar three-disc, clamshell box set lifts the lid on what was going on behind the Warm Beer Curtain, in cracking fashion.

Flash back to the dawn of the 1980s: Boxed in by the constraints of punk rock - which had morphed into a fashion parade by then - and repulsed by the rise of New Romanticism, a good many Brit bands made like it was still raining German V2’s and headed deep underground.

To be fair, you can also blame the Cramps for much of this, although the Poms were arguably able to tap their own deep, local wellspring. We Aussies, on the other hand, got locked into our own US ‘60s punk trip, thanks to our own tastemaker bands, and those buyers for local record stores who spent most of their time in the States.

If you hate hyperbole, stop reading now. The verbiage will pile up. This Sydney band draws from previous endeavours (notably, The Dolly Rocker Movement), inhales deeply from the musty vault of '60s bubblegum and psych and puts their own bent on things. They are The Shit That You Need To Hear Right Now. They're just what this city's flaccid music scene needs.The same probably applies to the postcode in which you reside.

_{Mickster Baty at home in his Off The Hip shop.}

The music industry is a shallow trench full of sharks and transient imprints, to paraphrase Hunter S Thompson. Independent record labels come and go with the regularity of manufactured reality TV stars and only a few manage to find their niche and prosper. In Australia, only Citadel is still standing from the halycon days of the 1980s. A few rose in the '90s to fill the gaps left by the demise of Phantom and Waterfront. Since the 2000s, the most enduring has been Melbourne-based Off The Hip.

Off The Hip grew out co-founder Mick ("Mickster") Baty's love of all things garage rock, powerpop and psychedelia. A drummer and veteran of one of Sydney's finest garage-trash outfits, The Crusaders, he went on to killer powerpop bands The Pyramidiacs and The Finkers. Baty saw Off The Hip as an outlet for his own music. He had re-located to Melbourne by then and formed The Stoneage Hearts, a shifting cast of players who produced top-shelf garage rock with a pop bent.

A retail operaiton operating out of his house morphed into a bricks-and-mortar shop in Melbourne's CBD and a floodgate of releases via the fledgling label ensued. It's been an enduring success - on its own terms - since then. Off The Hip - the label and the shop - have inspired and contrinuted to the existence and growth of hundreds of bands. 

Last month, the Off The Hip label celebrated its 15th birthday. We decided it was high-time for Mickster to occupy the interview seat.

One of the lesser-known musical pleasures in Australian over the last decade has been the quirky garage sound of the Hekawis, a fuzz-and-organ-driven combo prominent on the Brisbane and Melbourne underground music scenes. Churning out release after release, partly via the then prolific Courdroy label (who happened to own the country's sole vinyl pressing machine for a period in the '90s), the Hekawis pushed all the usual '50s and '60s buttons but came up with a sound unlike any other of their ilk.

It’s four albums into the game for French band Guttercats and it’s with an almost entirely new line-up. Vocalist Guts Guttercat is the sole original member. Before you ask, he sings in English - and with more than a little sense of drama in his delivery.

Not to be confused with the UK Gutter Cats (punks) or their L.A. counterparts (sleaze-glam), both contemporaries using the two-word form of the name, this crew cites The Only Ones, Rowland S. Howard, Nikki Sudden, Chris Bailey and Gun Club as influences. 

That’s a varied bag and so is their music. It runs the full gamut - from Bohemian semi-acoustic, dark pop to garage-style rock rave-ups. I’d throw the Bad Seeds and Dream Syndicate in there, too, or even final days Johnny Thunders.

Pierced Arrows and Dead Moon frontman Fred Cole is on the mend after undergoing major heart surgery, he and his wife Toody report.

The Breadmakers - The Breadmakers (Soundflat Records)

The Breadmakers are a Melbourne institution in a town that has plenty of them. They’ve been peddling their authentic brand of rhythm and blues around the Victorian capital, its environs and various parts of the world since 1989, and their seventh album sounds as fresh as any of its six predecessors.

R&B. Everybody’s on the correct page regarding R&B, right? The term’s been appropriated by the global music machine in recent decades, and applied to bland, largely soul-less genre of soft pap that permeates the airwaves like an insidious virus.

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.

Tall Order b/w Something Inside - The Fangin’ Felines (Evil Tone)

It’s no tall order to like this brace of sassy and smart tunes from The Fangin' Felines, who come from Wollongong south of Sydney. There’s just the right blend of bawdy garage rock rawness and girl group sweets to rattle almost any I-94 Bar barfly’s cage.

“Tall Order” is catchier than a Chinese bat virus after a side order of snakeskin soup in a Wuhan roadside diner. It coms out all guns blazing on the back of a Jerry Nolan beat and a brash Carrie Phillis vocal, aided and abetted by fullsome harmonies and some coo-ing and whooping. Morgana Ancone’s deft guitar adds a light touch.

Flip the sucker over and “Something Inside” is another winner. An undulating melody and a rolling feel nail this one to the floor with the Felines again showing the value of solid live gigging and knowing their way around a studio. Not as immediately addictive but you'll get hooked soon enough. 

Surely a full-length album is only a formality? Meanwhile, grab this while it’s still available. The purchase link is below. 

Buy it on Discogs

Here’s an album that starts relatively sedately, grows a brass section and descends into off-kilter garage rock hell. If that sounds like a dissing, think again.

The Revellions are from Dublin in Ireland and have made a nine-song album of two distinct halves. The first recalls, at times, Boston institution The Lyres with its strong reliance on surging organ and wailing vocals, while the second goes to that noisy and mind-altered place where the Black Lips and The Oh-Sees reside. Soulful versus Trippy. Both bases covered. 

Three days, no brakes, something to celebrate. That’s the state I’ve found myself in after constantly playing King Salami & The Cumberland Three. This is what music is all about: Transcending barriers that are put up by the music snobs.

How the hell do you get a Japanese punk joining forces with a French punk and then finding a Caribbean tennis teacher for oral scintillation? Then they come up with a name that covers a love of sausages, calling themselves “the best party band in the British Isles” And they pull it off. How?

The answer is Music, pure delightful music. Music that you dance to. Music that you can surf to. Music that you can chop wood to. Pure music.

This New Jersey four-piece might be one of the oddest bands to grace the reviews section of the I-94 Bar - or most other places. if you know of any others to have a lead xylophone/glockenspeil player as backing vocalist, well you know our address.

OK, Dave Graney uses a fair chunk of vibraphone in some of his music. Mark Sultan made a killer solo record("The Sultanic Verses") with dinky keys and xylophone. Tommy Hall’s jug rhythms made 13th Floor Elevators sound other-worldy. Using a glockenspiel as a melodic advice puts Crazy & The Brains in a different category.

_{The Downtown 3 are (from left) Carrie Phillis, Craig Jackson, Scott Nash and Johnny Casino. Emmy Etie photo.}

During some lean times for rock and roll in Sydney, two staples of the live scene have been Johnny Casino & The Secrets and the Booby Traps. Casino (aka John Spittles) is a guitar toting veteran of hard-hitters Asteroid B612 and a variety of bands also much of his own making, The Secrets being the most durable (and essentially a two city collective with bases in Sydney and Melbourne) playing rootsy but righteous rock. The Booby Traps were a wonderful collision of fuzzy garage pop and girl group pizzaz, fronted by fetching songstress Carrie Phillis.

Say what? There's another garage band with fuzz and Hammond B3 on the shelves? West Australiab band The New Invincibles aren't so much new - they've been around since Dirk Hartog was in training clogs - but they manage to sound fresh. And there's the rub, boys and ghouls.

Badass Mother Fuzzers (BMF hereafter) is a trio from the French city of Toulouse, the name of which always brings to mind a famous Johnny Thunders throwaway line about being “born too loose”.

Musically, BMF is a much different kettle of fish but it’s a fair bet they’d appreciate the play on words being applied to their place-of-origin. They sound like they’ve been trying to corrupt Toulouse for years. “Heartbreaker” is more Hip Priests or Zeke than “Live At The Speakeasy”, but the intention is the same: Hit ‘em hard and hit ‘em again.

By the time you reach the chorus off opening song "Way Beyond Tore Up" you'll cross the line or stay on the other side. Primevals are Scotland's coolest band. They play irrepressible garage-blues rock and roll. There's no halfway point for them and neither should there be for you.

Not to labour the point, but we live in troubled times. Terms like "hardest working band in Australia" are an irrelevance, a relic of the days when Oz Rock ruled our roost and beer barns were places of worship that were embedded in every town and suburb across this wide, brown land. Bands could, and did, play as many as eight shows in a week. Then it all faded away.

The re-birth of the Stoneage Hearts sounds like a sequel to “High Fidelity”: Three guys walk into a record store at various times, buy the new Red Kross album from the owner and they all decide to form a band. They rehearse at nights in the shop, record an album, tour together and achieve global success.

Apart from the last bit about the worldwide success, the story is true. Not that global domination isn't possible, but more on that later.

This is the third incarnation of this Melbourne garage-pop band and apart from a stack of classic garage and powerpop influences, drummer Mickster Baty is the only constant. Previous line-ups were fronted by Danny McDonald (P76) and Dom Mariani (The Stems, DM3) with Ian Wettehall (Seminal Rats, Phillesteins, Freeloaders) on bass then and apart from guest Farfisa organist and Mickster, this one is populated by relative unknowns. Not that it matters a jot. They’re up to the mark and this is a great record.

I was a fan of Sonics/Seeds/Shadows of Knight-inspahrd garage grunt right up until the moment when the likes of the Hives (My new favorite band? Not likely, pal) and the execrable Jet arrived on the set – which coincidentally was around the same time I started running, not walking, away anytime some SXSW shill offered me a new band’s CD-R that sounded “just like the MC5!” It seemed to me that the whole trip was starting to sound not just stale and derivative, but even a tad bit formulaic. What to do, then, but recede back into my bunker with my Boris and Ornette Coleman records? But The Barman pulled my coat to these guys, and the Barman is an honourable man.

Too much Lux is never enough for some people and Finnish band The Country Dark are clearly lifetime members of the Interior Fan Club. This is Album Number Three for the five-piece from Somewhere Near The Arctic Circle (where the fuck is Kuopio anyway?) and just like the output of The Cramps, it’s laced with humour dark enough to eclipse the sun during the depths of a Scandinavian winter.

The Country Dark play rockabilly-trash rock with lashings of twang. Appearances count for something when you mine that groove and from the cover picture of a hand with a dismembered pinkie to song titles like “Useless (Like Tits On A Boar)” and “Two Dicks In One Hole” (it’s a detective story, you porn fiend) it’s evident what you’re getting.