Anchors
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Anchors

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Punk rock has the tendency to go through lame patches.

Punk rock has the tendency to go through lame patches. And, considering the narcisstic drivel that has passed for ‘punk’ over the past decade, it’s been lame for a long time. But one of the great aspects of punk is that there’s always a seething undercurrent of ‘fuck you’ just below the surface – bands that still maintain the rage, sans the fucking makeup every sobbing twenty-four-year-old major-label shill is wearing. Even then, there are still those punk bands that impress so quickly, so brashly, so resolutely, regardless of stature that they’re a breath of fresh air in a stale room. Like Jennifer Aniston’s nipples in an old episode of Friends . Anchors are those nipples.

Wait. That doesn’t make too much sense. Scratch that. Anchors are simply a no-bullshit punk band that offer a viewpoint that modern punk has all too-often eschewed – one of a tangible anger and frustration at society making us all a bunch of conformist pussies. For a ragtag band of Melbourne-ites who’ve only been around a year and a half, it’s heady stuff, but one that ought to be roundly appreciated. Gone are the narcissistic whining of this decade’s punk staples, also ignored are the torch-bearing, flag-waving fire-brand politics of bands like Rise Against. Anchors are a punk band who are simply fucked off about apathy and the world in general.

“My mum told me I shouldn’t hang around with Brett, or associate with people like that after she read the lyric book,” laughs Anchors guitarist Pat when considering the frontman’s penchant for a biting lyric. “Brett’s a happy guy in real life, and he can certainly be quite cynical; he’s been around and he’s seen a lot of things come and go and he’s seen things change and things that don’t change… I think he looks at that and it’s made him cynical about things musical and otherwise.

“It’s something I like about Brett,” Pat adds, happily confirming the point made earlier, “a lot of punk bands will say ‘we’re about this politics, man’ or ‘partying, awesome’. He just looks at things differently.

“It’s not love songs…” he muses, “it’s life songs,” he shrugs, realising that sounds kinda lame. “But really, it’s the shit we all have to deal with – jobs not seeming to go somewhere, life getting you down; it’s all stuff you can easily relate to I guess.”

It certainly is relatable – as you grow older and witness the machinations of society that turn people into boring-arse automatons or self-serving blowhards, it’s hard not reflect on your own position. Something Anchors achieve quite poignantly.

“When I listen to the CD, it’s almost half hatred for stupid people and the other half is my own life!” Pat reflects on that sentiment. “It’s a weird feeling…. You feel slightly hypocritical for hating everyone else, but you still hate them,” he grins.

With their debut album Bad JuJu, Anchors pull that attitude together with incisor sharp punk tunes that are as exhilarating as they are thrash-yourself-around inducing. It’s a melding of those usual punk influences, technical riffage and Brett’s origins as the vocalist in thrash-metal heroes The Omen.

“We’ve got a tonne of influences; none of us had been playing in a ‘punk’ band for a really long time, so this was sort of coming back to the stuff you liked, and all the stuff you’ve learnt to make something different,” Pat offers. “It was sort of a side project for everyone at the start, but we all enjoyed it so much that it became the main band for everyone.”

Bad JuJu also marks the best-sounding enterprise of Anchors to date, something to be marked down to the band actually being able to record properly and think about their songs for once. “We tend to write stuff pretty quickly,” explains Pat. “We’ll say, ‘we’re going to release something here’ then just write the shit out of songs for a couple of weeks. We tend to rush the writing a bit – Chris and I will come in with riffs and we’ll put it all together – but this time we actually demo’d songs pretty extensively, which we hadn’t done before. That’s what makes the album that little bit more polished than the EPs – that extra step of demoing – we’d always just gone ‘written, yep, recorded, yep’. We took that extra week or two to think things through.”

If two weeks is all it takes to come up with something as accomplished and more badarse than Billy Zabka as Bad JuJu, then what the fuck are every other band wasting their time doing? Jerks.

It’s also scored them a spot on both Soundwave as one of the Triple J Unearthed bands, and a spot on the bill for all ages extravaganza Pushover 2011. “When I heard about that, I was psyched,” Pat enthuses. “I thought back to my first Pushover in 2001 and that was the only festival I’ve been to that I can remember how much fun it was. It was Frenzal, Grinspoon and Motorace and others, and I haven’t enjoyed a festival as much since – to be able to play it, I’m stoked. To give kids good shows is important, and now there isn’t so much of an opportunity as all ages shows are so hard to put on now, I think these festivals are priceless.”

ANCHORS play SOUNDWAVE at the Melbourne Showground on Friday March 4 with Iron Maiden, Queens Of The Stone Age, Slayer and heaps more. They also play PUSHOVER 2011 at the Abbotsford Convent on Sunday March 13 alongside Children Collide, Oh Mercy, Deez Nuts, Break Even and heaps more – tickets and info from thepush.com.au. Bad JuJu is out now.