Recent History: the post-punk revival (pt 1)

Running across an Expatriate album on a friend’s iPod the other week got me thinking about the rash of bands that sprang up in Australia (particularly in Sydney) between 2004 and 2008 in the wake of the success of Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Interpol, The Rapture and the like. For lack of a better term the bands playing music in this vein were variously characterised as being part of ‘the post-punk revival’, the ‘new-wave revival’ or as playing ‘dance-punk’, ‘indie-dance’ or, somewhat erratically, ‘nu-rave’.

Anyway, it struck me that so many of these bands are defunct, broken up or otherwise faded into relative obscurity. And it’s quite eerie to consider that this was the first musical movement that I feel I’ve closely observed from rise to fall, having moved to Sydney at the beginning of 2006 when the city was fully in thrall to the glamour of the post-punk revival. “Modular Records,” a new friend told me at the time, “think they own this fuckin’ town.” Much the same could be said of promoters like Boundary Sounds and Popfrenzy, both of which arose around the turn of the century and came into their own organising ‘crossover’ nights where indie bands and DJs co-existed in harmony. This was a fairly big deal at the time – as recently as the late 1990s many Sydney bands were directing antagonism towards DJs for contributing (along with poker machines) to the death of ‘rock venues’ by filling dancefloors for a fraction of the space or cost of hiring a band.

But circa 2005/2006 you could wander down to the biggest nightclubs in the city (notably HOME on Darling Harbour) – massive clubs in other years reserved for mainstream pop-house DJs and rarely for bands - and dance to bands made up of dudes in skinny jeans playing wiry four-to-the-floor post-punk stuff with lyrics yelped in British accents. The scene was marked by its overt debt to the 80s and its strong connections to the fashion world – designer jeans label Ksubi (then Tsubi) were prominent and Cut Off Your Hands’ Blue On Blue EP was released by Levi jeans’ short-lived Levity record label. Another feature was the extreme ambition of bands whose hype outweighed their actual output. People really believed they were going to get famous and end up on the cover of the NME.

The musical trend has certainly moved on – skinny jeans and disco-beat high-hats are no longer in favour quite as much, at least. What exactly has taken its place is harder to quantify – in Sydney there’s been something of a counter-push by psychedelic and shoegaze bands like The Laurels and Warhorse, an upsurge of bands taking cues from the swampy, bluesy punk of The Birthday Party, and a wave of ‘experimental pop’ groups like Ghoul, Kyu, Seekae and megastick fanfare.

In any case here’s a sample of some of the bands that exemplified the trend in Sydney and Australia. I still feel like many of them were entertainingly addictive and maddeningly arrogant in roughly equal measures.

____________________________

The Valentinos – Man With The Gun

Later on these guys had to change their name to Lost Valentinos, but as The Valentinos, this was their ubiquitous early single. As Jonny Polaroids writes:

During a brief period of Sydney music, when you couldn’t swing a Candy’s Apartment without hitting a skinny jean cunt dancing to a Kings Of Leon disco remix, The Valentinos ruled this town.

That said, it took them until 2009 to actually put an album out. Having looked this up on YouTube I’ve also just noticed that the description of their clip for 17 Deaths, a tacky horror-movie thing, somewhat tastelessly makes a point of mentioning that it was shot in the same national park where Ivan Milat tortured and buried seven backpackers.

____________________________

Starky – Is This How It Ends?

Sydney band Starky occupied something more of the celebratory, major key territory of the genre. They started out on Laughing Outlaw Records, were later signed to Universal but broke up after leaving a few decent singles like this one as well as Hey Bang Bang and Me Michelle.

____________________________

Damn Arms – Test Pattern

In much the same way as Brisbane band The Saints pre-dated The Sex Pistols, Melbourne’s Damn Arms pre-dated British nu-rave hype kids Klaxons by about six months. I loved this song when I first heard it (as an next Crop mp3 download from Triple J) and learned the bassline. This song and that Death From Above 1979 album are still the only reasons I’d consider buying a bass fuzz pedal. Test Pattern actually achieves the frantic, buzzing energy that makes this kind of stuff worth doing, and I think it’s because Damn Arms formed from the ashes of Snap! Crakk! who played house shows with hardcore bands in Adelaide. That is, they didn’t start out playing in nightclubs with expectations of fame, like a few other bands in this genre did.

____________________________

More soon!