arc09: "HOW LOW CAN A PUNK GET?" Folk review triple: Lower Plenty (M+N, 2011); Snake (Crawlspace, 2013); Russell Street Bombings (M+N, 2015)
+++archived reviews of three experimental/folk releases from the cultural capital___
I was hoping to have a new interview up for this edish, but I couldn’t get my act together in time to even ask anyone to chat, so instead: this archival triple. These releases by Lower Plenty, Snake and Russell Street Bombings are three of my favourite all time recordings; all seem lost to early 2010’s churn. These all came to mind after being sent a copy of the Escapist Blues LP by Jensen Tjhung (spoken verse, also of Lower Plenty) & Tom Lyngcoln (composed & arranged, also of Harmony and The Nation Blue) which is a great listen and brings to mind some of the space the below three albums all played with. If I even knew how to review music any more I would have put something about it here, but I feel there’s a patience and attention to silences and poetics that unite thema ll. They are also created by a network of Melbourne-based musicians that I think has already revealed itself to be a cultural moment, unacknowledged though it may be!
REVIEW: “I’M NEVER COMING BACK” - Lower Plenty’s Hard Rubbish LP (Mess+Noise, 2011)
Comprising members of The UV Race, Total Control and Deaf Wish, Lower Plenty are not the band you’d expect of their lineage. They rollick where their former counterparts ravaged; representing less the sweaty mass of bodies at a UV Race gig and more the winter afternoon you slept through to the day after.
Their second release Hard Rubbish is a transfixing record. You might only ever walk away between sides for a cup of tea from a garage-sale mug, in search of something quaint and nostalgic to bring you back to your listening booth. From the band’s name (sourced from an outer suburb of Melbourne) to the album’s art (featuring a rusted Hills Hoist among a collection of weather-worn furniture), it’s a record that knows its place. So when Sarah Heyward sings, “you left it on the grass,” you know she’s singing of an un-mowed lawn somewhere beyond the tram lines. On Hard Rubbish, all the fun was had last night.
The record opens with the dueling vocal and lethargic acoustic of ‘Work in the Morning,’ a twilight haze that sets the record in its realm of late night depressions, early morning blues and listless heartbreak. With a stream-of-consciousness narration of the events occurring outside the screen door, it simmers with a tired confusion before finishing in the regrettable realm of a late-night phone call. Al Montfort mumbles: “don’t you know I got work in the morning?”
This undercurrent returns on songs like ‘Strange Beast.’ Marked by the line “loneliness is the biggest killer of them all,” it places the murmur of Jensen Thjung against Heyward’s mirrored vocal, both singing “dance with me strange beast” ad nauseum, just out of time, with barely an acknowledgment of each other’s tune. Like ‘Work in the Morning,’ these characters sit out of phase, a theme which continues through to the single the record will be remembered by. ‘Nullarbor’ is the end of a romance, threading across the country in a stolen Commodore. A woman flees from Melbourne to Adelaide before heading west in her boyfriend’s car, checking in flatly on what’s left behind:
Out on the Nullarbor,
In Jack’s Commodore.
She says: “I’m sorry Jack,
I’m never coming back.”
The back half of the record continues in this vein. ‘How Low Can a Punk Get?’ answers its own accusatory question with, “I did not know/but there you go.” It’s full of stilted rhymes (“Do you really think it’s gonna be not bad?/Everyone…you made them sad”) among sloppy fields of spare-part percussion and meandering guitars. These lines (which read broken on paper) form a weirdness that clashes with the more direct moments like ‘White Walls.’ Here, Heyward’s vocal creates a counterpoint to Montfort’s lazy, rock-bottom moans. Her questioning of, “Where was I when you needed me” is a guilty address of distracted insecurities far removed from the ensuing accusations of ‘Close Enough.’ There, Heyward cuts through the echoed crashes with the claim: “in my mind, you had no legs to stand on.” Another song of departure, she tugs at the remaining threads of a dead relationship before finishing the record with the unresolvable affirmation of: “I was close enough away just to see the fading of the dark.”
Lower Plenty’s Hard Rubbish is an incredible assembly of some extraordinarily normal scenes. There are no pointed fingers or worldly issues addressed, just insular observations of personality flaws, baseless accusations, lost relationships and confused emotion. It makes for a very human record that, as a result, feels achingly familiar.
REVIEW: “JUST YOUR AVERAGE BLOKE NEXT DOOR” - Snake Self-titled Cassette Tape (Crawlspace, 2013)
At a recent Dick Diver show in Sydney, Al Montfort’s on-stage appearance felt like that of a sitcom character as received by a live studio audience. He would smile wryly, and before he had spoken, the crowd would meet him with whoops and hollers. I found it unsettling that an audience could so outwardly and unquestionably enjoy a moment that hadn’t happened yet, but that is the strength of his charm. If Al Montfort has the ability to turn a crowded room into a canned laugh track as part of Dick Diver, then he has let that slide for his solo tape. On the Snake cassette, there’s very little to laugh along with.
Snake was recorded by Montfort both on his travels in India and on his return home. On it, songs are written around any one of a saxophone, guitar, organ, drum machine or instruments like the Sarangi and Assamese buffalo horn. The tape sounds very insular (as you’d expect from a hostel project), but that feels like a requirement. It explores ideas that might be rapidly vetoed by a group, and it’s these spaces that are most deeply affecting.
Snake is flooded with loneliness. Montfort drives at feelings of alienation via two approaches. One is to mindlessly wander over instrument as backdrop; the other is to tunelessly narrate wayward thoughts over cheap, conventional instrumentation. There are also meditative moments subtly disguised as drawn out lyrics. It’s a traveler's tape, and the feelings of culture shock, confusion and neurotic personal explorations won’t be lost on anyone who has walked down an unfamiliar street as the lives of locals play out in a place not your own.
In looking at these ideas, Snake doesn’t force the point. There are no over-literal stories or blatant musical moments of fusion, just backdrops and vocal snippets left to be read into. He hums “I can’t help you” over the toy tones of a drum machine a few moments before a Sarangi takes over. He repeats the panicked line “What’s he laughing for?” as sound interjects. Later, he returns romantically, singing “The world is made for two, I don’t think that’s true, but hell I’m glad I found you,” through just-filled silences. These feelings of re-filed personal philosophies and self-assessment permeate slowly, but always strongly.
Snake leaves me feeling insignificant and unsettled in the same way that I’ve felt when I’ve travelled and returned to social circles that carried on unaffected. Yet it’s surprisingly good company. When the tape ticks off abruptly at the end of each side, I find the ensuing silence as affecting as anything that was recorded. It takes the wind out of my sails when I listen to it in the morning and it leaves me restless when I listen to it at night.
Note: the 2013 Snake tape doesn’t seem to be available online, but the 2018 LP linked above (with band expanded to an & Friends format) is a very good second.
REVIEW: “GIVE US AWAY” - Russell St Bombings Self-titled LP (Mess+Noise, 2015)
The first LP by Russell St Bombings is centred on instrumental forays that fall disjointedly in place one after the other. It veers into acoustic ballads sliced through by offhanded guitars, featuring blind muttering and repetitive thumps, shrieks from unknown sources and the howl of electronic mistakes. It’s then woven into an ugly tapestry that’s unbroken by the stops or starts of formal tracking. There is little to guide you if you wanted to understand the record; it’s often unknown as to what you’re hearing at all.
Russell St Bombings are the duo of Al Montfort and Zephyr Pavey (both of Total Control and Eastlink) and are almost reactionary in their lack of placing among their contemporaries. The only possible reference point that can be drawn to the duo’s other projects is to Montfort’s solo recordings as Snake, while in his disquieting intonations there are hints at the indirect moments of Lower Plenty—but you can hardly call these sounds recognisable. So I don’t recommend this record if you’re looking for some kind of tangent to the monolith of Total Control’s recent LP or the underrated power of Eastlink’s. Other than the fact that you can generally trust their musical projects, little of what would endear someone to the well-known work of Pavey or Montfort is present here.
On ‘711 Confusion,’ Montfort spends his time muttering sadly to himself. “This used to be the bush,” he mourns while walking down modern-day Russell Street, dreaming of the ruins that the rest of the record resembles. While features occasionally jut out from the record’s more broken moments (a voice questioning emptily, a guest vocal by Xanthe Waite, a once-appearing melody), little can be heard beyond the wreckage. It’s unlikely that this was an attempt to soundtrack the mess caused by the four Russell Street bombers, who tore apart the Victorian Police Headquarters with a car bomb in 1986 citing revenge for their incarceration, but it’s easy to pretend it sounds like that. It’s easy because there is nothing to give you a hint at what it might be aiming for. The only image or object to latch onto is a black-and-white photo of a mannequin head on the cover, accompanied by the name of an event that most would have to google to discover.
Russell St Bombings appeal to me (and maybe to you) because it exists completely untangled from the extraneous factors that lead people to waste time connecting the dots. Instead, you’re left with a bare and brittle canvas of the recording alone. The record won’t appeal to many—its starkness isn’t of the fashionable dystopian bent mined by today’s popular unconventional acts—but it draws a wavering line between bent folk and acoustic experimentation that exists to mystify more than entertain. Like kicking over an abandoned sand castle, there’s satisfaction to be found in its disorder.
+++other updates___
___for more writing tangential to the above, a review of the 2018 Snake & Friends LP is available at defunct website Difficult Fun here, and was the start of teasing out of the notion of ‘scenius’ that the interconnectedness of the Melbourne players was stirring (the many factual errors around the Hill Country Blues in that sloppy essay were corrected in too much detail in this barely human episode on R.L. Burnside). the Melbourne music community discussed above return in barely human episode 11 on Dick Diver & Total Control, with a step into the ‘dolewave’ disputes which I think about with embarrassment on occasion!
__a new barely human zine & cassette tape will be posting out to paid substack subscribers within australia before the year is out, or available for purchase direct by email/DM. titled ‘GIVE PHILISTINISM A CHANCE,’ it will be an approx five-page discussion of the great antagonistic quadrant of NO TREND, FLIPPER, THE CRUCIFUCKS and THE URINALS (and their specific brands of anti-punk/anti-hardcore). will be spending some time around the potential of reclaiming ‘philistinism’ from what is purely an insult directed towards a formless group of which no one identifies. where that might sit in the long evolution of underground/DIY music practice….i feel is up for debate.