Do the Robot Amp on Fire by: Thomas Mendelovitis Wed:04-Jun-08 Label: Valve Year: 2008 WB rating 69 out of 100

I was going to start this review with a petulant rant about recording values. About how it shouldn’t be too hard to record something near to top-notch these days, especially if you have made the decision to release it. About how, obviously, you can hear a big budget instantly, but that there are ways and means of getting around that. I was going to start down that path (and I think I just did…) until I gave Amp on Fire one last listen, but with the volume way up loud. There are stories floating around how, in a race for ever-more (and Evermore!) attention-grabbing volumes, radio stations have fuelled the compression of a recording’s peaks and troughs such that modern music is, in effect, louder. Thus, listening to Coldplay for 15 minutes at a moderate volume can damage your ears more than two hours of unrelenting death metal live. I suppose Amp on Fire is one of those records, just without the all-too familiar sonic bells and whistles. Played nice and loud, it sounds just fine; in places even excellent.

Do the Robot first caught my attention at a Cloud City Warehouse gig sometime in mid-2007. A three-piece from Brisbane comprising a platinum-blonde vocalist (Sera Mucha), a guitarist (Matthew Deasy) who, as the only tuned instrumentalist, was highly competent in filling out the large warehouse space, and a drummer (Derrin Cason) wise enough to keep to the beat through their extended songs- they were definitely the complete package.

On record, they succeed in imparting the same rhythmically atmospheric jam-like moods as they did live. Finding a singular sound somewhere between My Bloody Valentine, The Cowboy Junkies and new wave drumming, Do the Robot’s is an all-encompassing universe. The band have a strong figurehead in Mucha, who, playfully repeating and turning over her lyrics, has obviously learnt from the book of Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins.

On Amp on Fire, Do the Robot present a body of work based more on sound than songs. Where some bands find a comfortable sound on which to base standard issue songs, Do the Robot opt instead to create comfortable songs based on their effective sound. While a ‘sound’ has obviously been the hallmark of certain bands, to be truly great there needs to be a match with great songs. At times on Amp on Fire the results of this sound-based approach are underwritten. ‘Audrey’ is a case in point. After speaking “I can only hear you through the amplifier” and singing “amplifier” a few times, Mucha thinks to morph this into “amp on fire”- giving rise to the album title. She then intones the refrain: “don’t you ever stop”. On ‘Tambourine Beach’ the verses go from “don’t burn bridges, baby” to “push the dagger through my spine”. While the music swells with rolling beats and guitars, the vocals in these tracks do not impart the same sense of atmosphere. The lyrical ideas are nicely spare and dissimilar but undeveloped in their juxtaposition. There is nothing wrong with these songs, per se, it’s just that in favouring repeated lyrics over narrative we expect a kind of epiphany, which seldom comes.

Where Amp on Fire really shines is in the sounds Deasy coaxes from his guitar and amplifier. In this, the album title finds much more significance. There is so much depth to the playing, you wonder how this record could have been recorded on a smaller budget than Loveless’s famed multiple engineer blow-out. Where Loveless, and much of shoegaze, revels in multi-tracked harmonics, Deasy’s playing achieves a similar effect with what sounds like one microphone recording one amplifier. There are obviously different tracks to what we hear, but you can sense and appreciate each one. On ‘Blue’, swelling waves of guitar break over a twanging one-string rhythm, while on ‘In The Shadows’, delayed fret noise becomes a flock of seagulls and a single note becomes a cavernous hole of atmosphere. It’s headphone stuff to be played loud, or better yet, seen live.

A band can’t be built solely on the strength of one player alone, but in their favour there are moments where the three elements of the Do the Robot formula work in harmony. On ‘Blue’, ‘Play’ and ‘Six Dreams And Counting’, Mucha’s vocals do not suffer from strained poetics and the songs benefit as a result. She has a versatile voice, and on these tracks she best showcases her mix between girlish semi-spoken words and singing at a comfortable range. When she gently pleads on ‘Blue’ to “sing me a blue song/serenade me/sing me a sweet song” the effect of the repetition isn’t quite transcendental but, set to a potently low-key rhythm, sleighbells and the brilliant guitar, Do the Robot are certainly moving in the right direction.