(Green/MGM)

A new bunch of Melbourne guitar-slingers with plenty of promise

Like a lot of straightforward guitar bands these days, Melbourne five-piece The Smoke spend plenty of time looking over their shoulders, specifically at garages in different decades and different locations. Add to that a determined DIY approach to recording this debut album (it was done bit by bit over six months in a lounge room) and you’d expect those two factors alone would make this effort rather limiting. A bit like a downsized Jet. But, though it is necessarily simple and direct in execution, and retro in style, the surprise is how controlled and creative the whole exercise is, and how in the end The Smoke have carved out their own space in this overcrowded field. The band served notice of this with their first two singles, Defeat Retreat  and Sweet Spanish – the first suggests they’d been listening to The Strokes listening to the New York garage punk of the ‘70s, while the second has a ‘60s Britpop bounce to it. Either way, they’ve infused it with their own take on things. And, from the clap-along rumble of Baby’s Got The Shakes to the angular jangles and nervy turns of Midnight, it’s clear there’s more where that came from.

BILL HOLDSWORTH

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