For a culture that prides itself on style and aplomb, France does a good line in dirty, scungy garage rock. In an act of Franco-Australian camaraderie straight from the villages of northern France, Homeless Records has decided to release Subtle Turnhips’ latest record, Redhair with Some.
You get a sense of where the band’s coming from – and going – with the grime-and-blues Tubbyz: it’s dirty, grinding, repetitive and symbolic of the inanity and frustration of modern existence. Skip to Don’t Mess With My Time and you’re in the time-honoured nihilistic garage rock tradition where tomorrow is a distraction from today’s hedonistic pleasures.
Reisen is fucked up, in the nicest possible fashion; Shame is power-pop punctuated by bursts of confusion; and Tweez (Francoise) is the sort of ranting garage angst you’d expect to find on the cobblestones of post-cultural revolutionary France.
Digit is a wander in someone’s else dream, where nothing is what it might seem; Slime is Radio Birdman through some sort of weird juvenile comic book lens. The title track is the great lost UK punk track of 1977, complete with myopic adolescent preoccupations (and drum fills to die for), In-thing Baby is threatening and foreboding, a journey into the darkest depths of garage noir, before Eileen ushers in a rambling emotional discourse. Cousine is the demented meanderings of Sonic Youth aficionados; Heidi is stream of consciousness for the fidelity-challenged and Las Bas is a brutal attack on your cerebral foundations, where ne’er a prisoner will be taken, whatever the cost. This is some weird, out there garage rock – and geez it’s good.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Las Bas
If You Like These, You’ll Love This:HAUNTED GEORGE, DIGGER AND THE PUSSYCATS
In A Word:Dirty
