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.You may try and classify garage bands (and garage band songs) by who they sound like and when the original was recorded but it's a pretty fruitless exercise akin to playing My Record Collection Is Bigger Than Yours. In the end, you might have more scratchy volumes of "Boulders" and "Mindrocker" but so what? Nothing's new but the bands putting it out today hit the mark more often than their past cousins from the '60s. How many classic albums from the so-called garage band heyday can you name that weren't 30-60 per cent covers or filler? Not many because in those days, the great bands were single bands. Hold that thought when you listen to "Hear Some Evil".
I'm not making a case for The New Invincibles being particularly original. No sir. But they are a whole lot of fun and each of these tunes would hold up as a single in its own right. From the dense opening instro buzz of "Barnaby" to the psychobilly-laced warble of "Money" and the shuffling chug of "Bomb", it's apparent that this is a gas.
"Luvin' U Baby" ups the nasty guitar ante in the same way the Lime Spiders used to crank in their most focused recording moments. "Rubber Lovely" is a scrappy paen to inflatable latex love with guitar trading off against organ line with the twin vocal falling somewhere in-between.
There are only seven songs on "Hear Some Evil" and it only runs just past 21 minutes. but you can have a lot of fun in a third of an hour. Maybe that was the devious plan all along.
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