Our Local
Garage Showdown
Featuring: Super Wild Horses, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, UV Race, Constant Mongrel, Royal Headache
Written by: Thomas Mendelovits
Published: Mar 18th '10
Australia is in the throes of a late summer garage-punk heatwave. If you’re in the country, turn on your TV to commercial network Nine, Seven or Ten and you might hear Melbourne duo Super Wild Horses on a Bonds commercial. Girls in briefs, forget about it.
Everywhere else, it’s all about Frankston heroes Eddy Current Suppression, who are continuing a career built on strength-to-strength. With an off-the-charts headline-timed set at Meredith Music Festival late last year and a few months prior a win with the Australian Music Prize for 2008’s Primary Colours, the band have just released their third long-player, Rush to Relax. Reportedly recorded during six hours of jams, more of the $30,000 AMP prize money went toward hiring the airplane that flew the titular banner that adorns the album cover. Eddy Current launch Rush to Relax at the Palace in Melbourne on April 16; tickets look like they’ll sell out.
At the moment, there’s no sign of ECSR’s rising star abating. While by nature as lackadaisical as previous efforts, Rush to Relax has moments that nudge the band closer to their idols the Troggs or even the Zombies. Lead tracks ‘Anxiety’ and ‘Rush to Relax’ don’t manage the genius of ‘Which Way to Go’ from Primary Colours, but Eddy Current continue to show their great strength in elevating decidedly rudimentary hooks into something possessing not only economy but verve and intelligence. The clip to ‘Rush to Relax’ is a strange meeting of French New Wave/Italian neorealism, Point Break and David Lynch and the final lengthy shot of waves lapping foamy rocks is a moment of true beauty. The album ends in an extended version of the same thing.
While some may write off the UV Race as ECSR protégés, if not knockoffs, with a record of the quality of the UV’s self-titled debut (released in late ’09) under their belt, it seems the elder statesmen of the scene may have lost some of their edge to the young Warragul-bred band. The UV Race has about as many great ideas crammed into it as humanly possibly under their rubric of floor-filling second-wave British punk. There’s even a killer slow song or two. I haven’t fully taken in Rush to Relax yet, but I reckon The UV Race pips it. Time to dig out ECSR’s debut, maybe? But, as another new, like-minded Melbourne band, Constant Mongrel, sing: “we all sound like the Eddy Current Suppression Ring/We are all fans of the Eddy Current Suppression Ring”. That may be so, but the UV’s Marcus is a frontman of equal charisma and persona to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s Brendan. That’s not to say that Constant Mongrel’s Tom Ridgewell, who, I just realised (in an amazingly unplanned coincidence), did a brief stint at Wireless Bollinger, isn’t.
Contesting the UV Race’s crown for best live rock ‘n roll act in a field made smaller by the vanishing upward Eddy Current, is Sydney’s Royal Headache, another newish band so touted that they got the opening spot on the recent Golden Plains festival bill. Shogun, their singer has to be heard and seen (on a good day) live to be believed. He has a voice more reminiscent of James Brown than Pete Shelley. Check out ‘Eloise’ on their MySpace. This is real pop music, played fast, recorded average, no tricks.
