(Aarght! Records/Shock)

Rush to get, relax to listen

Melbourne punk four-piece Eddy Current Suppression Ring have deservedly become quite popular since their 2006 self-titled debut, with follow-up Primary Colours so successful it actually forced the ARIA charts to have something in them that wasn’t shit. The horror! It’s hard to pick exactly what gives this band their punch; there’s Brendan Suppression’s droll, deeply Australian delivery and lyrics. Eddy Current’s guitar is sometimes a beast that pounds and lurches, but equally capable of precision cutting as a foil to Suppression’s own sharp tongue. The muscular rhythm section drives ever onward, almost willfully oblivious to what goes on elsewhere in the track in order to keep things grounded. What is particularly good about this record is that each of the ten tracks has something to offer, even the sixty-second punk ramble of Walked Into A Corner and the slightly longer Isn’t It Nice. When you can throw a riff of that quality to a song that doesn’t reach eighty seconds you know you’re doing okay. Opener Anxiety is loose, energetic and catchy as hell. Tuning Out and Second Guessing are long tracks for a punk band, but they don’t lose their way at all, the former elongating itself with some fantastic guitar work and the latter diving headlong into krautrock, keyboards and all. My only complaint is that some great bass riffs are buried deep in the mix when they need to be punching you in the face. The swampy, blistering title track closes the album and is annexed by 19 minutes of the sound of waves crashing. I’m guessing that is the ‘relax’ portion of an album that is otherwise quite a rush.

****½

MICHAEL PINCOTT

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