Screenings The Sunshine Pills Conspiracy Theory by: Steve Scully Mon:27-Aug-07 Label: Hoo Records Year: 2007 WB rating 14 out of 100

Screenings, five Melbournians, seem to know music well. They claim to be heavily influenced in the New York indie guitar rock of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Citing influences like Velvet Underground, Yo La Tengo, Devo and Talking Heads, it’s clear they fancy themselves to be as well-versed as any in the history of indie rock, and specifically the music from this platform. Of course, knowledge is always a solid basis for any band to start from: if you know how to write a song, if you know what a good song sounds like, then surely all you need to do is get yourself into the right frame of mind, and it’ll happen. It’ll happen, right?

There’s a bit too much ‘should’ in Screenings’ latest offering, The Sunshine Pills Conspiracy Theory. All involved are seasoned campaigners, knowing music back-to-front and exactly what sound they’re going for. But, opening track ‘Dark Pete’ is an uneventful instrumental exemplifying their struggle. Simple, strummed electric guitar, tinny drums and understated bass all make for something that should, for all intents and purposes, be a rather effective little opening number. The organ underpinning the track is, however, the most impressive element on show, its hum adds a palatable texture lacking in Screenings’ minimalist escapades. The crescendo/tempo change is rendered sterile by the hollowness of sound that is this band’s ailment. This hollowness runs like an epidemic through the remainder of the Sunshine Pills.

The production on this album is the dominant reason for its falling short. Modern rock groups forever reference other bands, but there is never any willingness to compromise when it comes to production value. Those huge rock groups who have been accused often of derivativeness and plagiarism – bands like Oasis, Jet, even The Strokes or Interpol – all have an additional element that has allowed them to set themselves apart from their influences/victims, their songs may reek of others’ ingenuity, but their ‘sound’ is undeniably modernized – making them ‘reinterpreters’ rather than common thieves. Screenings write pure, straight-forward indie rock songs, obviously steeped in the music of their forebears, but perhaps the least impressive part is the way this derivativeness has seeped into the sound production and execution on Sunshine Pills. Now on their second album, signed to one of Australia’s strongest indie labels, and having world-class recording facilities at their disposal, Screenings have produced a record that sounds painfully like a MOR demo tape.

Similarly, the band’s lyrics are a mix of pilfered Americanisms, clichéd turns of phrase and sadly flaccid rhymes. Album-closer, ‘Electric Shocks’ exhibits their laziness in wordplay: “So pack up your bags/And roll up your socks/Get yourself ready/For electric shocks.” Even the rather innocuous use of terms like “Ma and Pa” (‘Sunshine Pills’) imbues Screenings’ songs with a forced sense of another time and place. It seem they are not just trying to help you imagine this scene – the feeling of a past indie scene they hold so dear – they try to echo it with every breath. In stomach-turning fashion, rock pretentiousness rears its head in the track ‘Reflections in a Lone Star Bar’, as listeners are dealt a ‘lessen’ in rock ‘n’ roll history that itself borders on cliché. Here, the band is even more blatantly referencing their heroes – this time Sterling Morrison, an interview with him the inspiration for the song itself: “I’m sitting here talking to Sterling/He tells me he once played in a band/Obscurity but influential.” To say now that Velvet Underground are not revered as highly as they should be is like kicking a decomposed corpse on the ground that barely resembles the horse it once was.

At every turn Screenings fail to deliver. In ‘Words of Comfort’, the well-worn pages of the Casablancas book of vocal melodies again see the light of day, as the flat vocals follow a very underwhelming guitar melody, the recording peaking ever-so-slightly in the chorus, adding to the song’s amateurish feel. In ‘Carry Me Home’, what is potentially the record’s strongest track tapers off, at least a minute too long and having little dynamic shift. ‘He and Me’, an indie-country, Meat Puppets-esque dirge, on top of the poetic licence taken on grammar, displays some grating, flat vocals and a muddy, cymbal-filled crescendo.

Despite their obvious clarity of vision, and the depth to which they have scoured their hearts and minds to fully realize their sound, Screenings sits with the now high-flying Expatriate as one of the most heavily-influenced albums to come out of Australia this year. They may be educated in modern music, and they may have consciously made this record, shamelessly evoking the past, but theirs is a mere echo, just a whimper when you consider the influence of the bands to which they’re paying tribute.