31Knots The Days And Nights Of Everything Everywhere by: Steve Scully Mon:19-Mar-07 Label: Polyvinyl Year: 2007 WB rating 72 out of 100

It’s 11:00am, I’m listening to the radio. The guy on the other end – a scientist, supposedly – says that elephants have hands. Who am I to doubt him? Elephants actually have hands. Confused and disillusioned, I think I need a coffee – 11:00am is an ungodly hour, and I’m not suited to the sun’s intense morning glare.

This is the perfect state for listening to 31Knots’ new record. Squinting, sucking the last drops of glorious, caffeine-riddled ambrosia from my mug, and wondering what elephants actually do with their hands – and where exactly on their bodies they’re hiding these mysterious appendages – I allow ‘Beauty’, The Days and Nights of Everything Anywhere’s opening track, to assault me in a way I haven’t experienced since first seeing Perth band Snowman at the old Duke of Windsor. This track is the strangest love song I’ve heard in a long while, lovely lyrical moments such as: “You can sing me pretty lullabies/How everything that matters is in your eyes” are immersed in a sea of crashing distortion, and almost lost amidst it. This first track is the paradigm of 31Knots’ new album; nothing on this record is meant to make any discernible sense and the pastiche of punk, circus-rock and distorted sea-shanties makes for as idiosyncratic a work as any. It may seem a mess of incongruities, but The Days and Nights of Everything Anywhere is as meticulously structured as any album, and leaves the listener questioning both the music’s worth, as well as their own worth as a listener.

This versatility is when 31Knots are at their most impressive. ‘The Days And Nights Of Lust and Presumption’ is a track of glorious emptiness, and as understated as any take on punk-rebellion has ever been. Consisting entirely of one vocal line, the occasional burst of a distorted chord and beat of a bass drum, the true cleverness of this song lies in it’s juxtaposition with the subsequent track. ‘Imitation Flesh’ is over-the-top guitar work, heavy bass lines and energetic drumming, all of this sending the instrumental into the realms of quasi-‘80’s hard rock excess. My confused state is being continually toyed with by the men of 31Knots. It’s as if they don’t want me to relax.

The lyrics throughout the record only enhance my detached state, as they are cryptic at the best of times. In ‘Man Become Me’, Joe Haege engages in sphinx-like riddling: “How did me become man/Become men again/Become man and then become me?” Such confusion leaves me with a desire to do just what Oedipus did after he’d had all that sex with his mum: rip out my eyes in annoyance.

At other points the lyrics do gain more substance; as their music seems to fly in the face of popular conceptions, so too do the anti-social, anti-consumerist messages. In ‘Savage Boutique’, Haege’s ‘heave ho’, sea-shanty lyricisms allude to the unshakable consumerist ‘beast’ strangling the life out of modern society. While in ‘Hit List Shakes (The Inconvenience Of You)’ he sings: “I’m the assassin of the reason you want to exist/I’m the assassin of the logic you would like to resist,” voicing his distrust of society’s predictability.

This predictability is something that Haege and his band are at constant loggerheads with. His lyrics make fools of ‘number-crunchers’, and warn against the dangers of a society that sees things in absolute terms, as in ‘Hit List Shakes’ Haege sings: “Think of a number between one and itself/I can hear a million that you can taste, touch and smell/Or a letter, yes, that might work better/So you can have a story to tell,” and in ‘Pulse Of A Decimal’: “To see the world in black and white/Is nothing more than suicide”. Whether it goes any deeper than Haege and his friends being frustrated at their own inability to follow their High School mathematics teacher, I can’t be sure. But the pervasive message is clear, and in some ways is the only instance of clarity on the record, it is testament to the flexibility and fluidity of language and art.

In the press release that accompanies The Days and Nights of Everything Anywhere, Joe Haege is quoted as saying, “we wanted to push ourselves into an area we didn’t know and see if we could pull it off.” I think my complete lack of understanding of the music on this album can be interpreted as a victory for the band; they have not only taken themselves to a new musical realm, but they have introduced me to something I’ve never heard before. Standing between the prog-rock wankery of Tool and the insane circus melodrama of Mr Bungle, I think 31Knots could very easily carve themselves a niche.

Haege’s last lines on the final track of this record, ‘Walk With Caution’, sum up my state: “Because cause affects the effects of the cause you embrace.” I don’t know what that means. I will probably never really try to understand it. All there I know is that I don’t mind feeling this confused and this at odds with the scientist on the radio. Elephants having hands is a concept that turns my world on its head, and 31Knots, like this cup of coffee and the intolerable heat of the sun, sit there and make my disbelief and disillusionment that little bit more intense.