Emerging from the ashes of the Lemon Kittens (formed at Surrey University; 1979-’82), England’s Danielle Dax, Our Lady of the Arabic dance slink, has a voice like vanilla yogurt: cool, high and honey-sweet with a tartly mysterious flavor that keeps her work from sounding the slightest bit mainstream. From the old Hebrew inscription of her…
There’s nothing tribal about the sound of these Aussies, and they don’t scream either. Their music is full of pop-song harmonies, including “oohh” and “ahh” background singing, jangle chords and repeated refrains. From beginnings as a post-Ramones punky ensemble (on the first four-track EP), they’ve gone through an assortment of members and sonic textures but…
An Australian response to every noisy, scum-sucking band that ever crawled out of the Detroit hardrock scene, early Rolling Stones records in hand. The Seminal Rats make primal, ’70s-rooted three chord punk with chanted vocals, loud hard guitar, more and even more guitar. Omnipotent, a seven-song introduction to the quintet, contains such gritty numbers as…
Playing power pop with muscle, this Sydney quartet — sort of a punkier, street-level Hoodoo Gurus — fills Scrap with six spunky songs about love and introspection that are both fresh-sounding and high on buoyant energy. Guitarists Paul Berwick and Tim McKay intertwine and interact — one a warm box filled with enough fuzz to…
After hearing so many art bands buried in their own sense of self-importance, it’s refreshing to bask in the modesty of Athens’ Oh-OK. Like R.E.M. (with whom they share a family tie), this humble group put their elliptical ideas over as much by being good guys as anything else. Oh-OK was a guitarless trio on…
They cover such songs as Link Wray’s “Preacher Man” and Terry Jacks’ “Which Way You Goin’ Billy.” Every other word out of their mouths has to do with god in some shape or form. There are enough sermons embedded between the notes to stock a religious radio station. One song even begins with a sweet…
Inspired by New York’s Suicide, the Fugs and the Godz, as well as Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, this influential Melbourne avant-rant quartet (singer/guitarist Stuart Grant, synth bassist David Light, keyboard player Denise Rosenberg (now Hilton) and Frank Lovece on drum machine and vocals) made stripped-down, noisy and intense music with guitars, harshly pounding electric…
For all the stylistic presumptions that have arisen about the sound of the scene, some of the bands on Washington DC’s Dischord Records would sooner experiment than go along with the generic ‘core. In the case of the Holy Rollers, this proved to be a worthwhile endeavor. The trio’s first album, As Is, can’t be…
The antithesis of a sex pistol is a celibate rifle, but Australia’s Celibate Rifles are anything but the opposite of loud, snotty and fast. A fusion between Detroit-style straight-ahead hard rock and Ramones pop, steeped in Stooges and Radio Birdman milk, the Rifles began as a party-time Sydney band, racing through deliberately silly and simple…
If David Lynch were to assemble a hard rock band from scratch, chances are he’d come up with something that sounds a lot like Thin White Rope. The Davis, California-bred group defined its high-lonesome desert-rock with enough metallic edge to get the pulse pounding — and enough ominous surrealism to make the blood run cold.…
Descended from pre-hardcore punk and electric blues, this Australian trio offers a fast and loud journey down Tylenol territory, playing it dark, dank, dense and devastatingly simple. “Ha Ha,” the first track on Feedtime, pulses with deepness, guitar sawing in repetitive circles like the mating call of a didgeridoo, with vocals that are pure low-frequency…
The Deadly Hume takes its name from the Hume Highway, a dangerous and desolate stretch of roadway between Melbourne and the band’s hometown, Sydney. The band’s sound derives from the clash and grind of urban Australia and the swampy darkness of American blues, although the records encompass everything from a cappella spiritual choruses to acoustic…
Perth, Australia; May 1978. An unrecorded band named the Invaders (which included bassist Boris Sujdovic, guitarist Rod Radalj, and guitarist/lead vocalist Kim Salmon) joins forces with drummer James Baker, changes their name to the Scientists and releases “Frantic Romantic,” a bright little pop single. A four-track EP and a delightfully gritty LP of hard pop…
Originally named Africa Corps, Los Angeles’ Savage Republic got its start at UCLA, where Jeff Long, Bruce Licher, Mark Erskine and Jackson Del Rey (Philip Drucker) were attending school. The twin-bass lineup (plus some outside assistance) yielded an arty, industrial ensemble which serenaded cement walls with lightly droning grates of monotone guitar, exotic percussion and…
Droning and dragging rusty guitar streaks and deep stormy basslines as dark as bus exhaust, Live Skull combine great grating sheets of guitar shimmer with deliberately monotonous vocals to create swirling intense tunes that you couldn’t hum if a loaded gun were aimed at your head. As part of the same New York avant-noisy scene…
Vancouver’s 54-40 got their name from US history. “Fifty-four forty or fight” was the 1844 presidential campaign slogan of James K. Polk, who promised to go to war with the British over the Oregon territory, which extended north of Vancouver west of the Rockies. Polk wanted the northern US border in the region moved north…
Finland’s Electric Blue Peggy Sue and the Revolutionions from Mars may not be big on evolution(ion) but, if you got it, why change it? What Peggy Sue’s got is a big, hard, all-dark-meat sound with lots of grit and grimy gristle. Lead vocalist Ray Katz has a voice that sounds like he drinks Drano for…
In the wake of the Birthday Party came a worldwide wave of psychoswampabilly rockers who took that band’s manic-depressive bluesrock and turned it into a music genre. Belgium’s La Muerte was one of those bands. With growling, howling French and English vocals, stop/start frenzy and a guitar that at times does nothing more than squeal…
As the band Budgie drummed in before the Slits (or Siouxsie and the Banshees), as Ian Broudie’s group long before he was a hotshot producer or a Lightning Seed, as the first recorded sighting of wild Bill Drummond (future mastermind of the KLF) and as an early proving ground for bassist (!) Holly Johnson (later…
The first band to appear on New Zealand’s vaunted Flying Nun label (with the “Tally-Ho!” 7-inch in 1981), the Clean technically existed for a mere eighteen months before sending its members (David Kilgour, Hamish Kilgour, Robert Scott and, at times, Peter Gutteridge) off to a multitude of other projects. But over the years, the trio,…
