Regurgitator - MishMash!

Sat 18th Dec, 2004 in Music Reviews

Living in Melbourne and (obviously) having too much time on my hands, I spent quite a bit of time hanging around Federation Square when Regurgitator were recording their fifth album MishMash! in a perspex bubble a few months ago. One day I sat eating sushi watching them record guitar tracks. Another day I drank coffee watching the band try to get a sampler to work. Another night friends and I dined watching Ben Ely spend half an hour trying to record the vocal track to album track I’m Sensible, after which we headed off to the pub and the band stayed locked in their domed confines.

People go on about the now infamous “bubble” stunt as being an exercise in post-modern voyeurism, but really, I’m not clever enough to, and I was really there because Regurgitator were a large part of my childhood – I grew up going to the Big Day Out to see the ‘Gurge, Grinspoon, Jebediah and The Living End. And while sometimes when you get older you wonder why you were ever into a particular band and subsequently sell your Blink-182 albums to Dixon’s Recycled, that never happened with Regurgitator and I. I’ve always had a keen interest in whatever they’ve been up to and bought all their albums.

MishMash! is not surprisingly given the album’s recording process, more than just another album from the band. It is a true conceptual product. From the collage-littered booklet containing handwritten notes from fans communicating with the band (unfortunately littered with several “OMG! LOL! CHANNEL V! Iz Jabba doin another season of Pizza?” type messages) to the between-track audio samples of the intercom interactions between band/fan, references to the bubble experiment are impossible to escape. “But what about the music?,” I hear you scream. Well, it’s good, too. A world away from the unfairly-maligned-but-quite-frankly-awesome ...art and Eduardo and Rodruigez, MishMash! is a true return to the band’s two-minute punk-pop blasts of the late nineties. With little rapping from Quan Yeomans save from lead single The Drop, the album shows off the Gurge’s uncanny ability to write a fantastic pop hook. Maybe you’ve forgotten about it. But if you try to tell me that you’ve never had I Sucked A Lot Of Cock To Get Where I Am, Black Bugs, Polyester Girl or Kong Foo Sing in your head for an extended period of time, well, you’re lying.

Furthermore, one assumes that it was the difficult writing process in the bubble which leads to MishMash! being an album of two clear halves – half clearly penned by Yeomans and the other half by Ely. The pair’s unique take on songwriting have never felt so starkly different as on MishMash! Ely-penned and sung tracks My Friend Robot, Shopping Mall Soul and My Computer Crashed (all potential singles) are in the vein of his noise-trash-pop side project The Stalkers – all two-minute hook laden pop songs. Considering that Ely drove such great Regurgitator singles as I Wanna Be A Nudist, this is a very good thing. Yeomans’ songs – with the exception of rocker Eye, Zombie are traditionally longer and more sample heavy (reference point: the mid-tempo My Ego with the refrain of “hello, welcome to my ego, wherever I go, he goes, too” and which wouldn’t sound out of place on a compilation released by Germany’s hip Kitty-Yo Records).

What is obvious about MishMash! is that a lot of the traditional quirkiness and non-conformist attitudes of the ‘Gurge have vanished. Don’t Go 2 Sleep is the closest to the quirky traditional Regurgitator sound with its cheesy Unit-era style keyboards. Yeomans’ Sonnet Of A Media Mogul, which the band performed live prior to entering the bubble, is a great slow-burning track with a catchy chorus which will go down a treat at next year’s Big Day Out, but elsewhere the rest of the album is full of tight, catchy pop songs with not surprisingly, a live feel. Sydney’s electro-clash one-man-secks-party Spod pops up on the album’s secret track The Battle and the vocal interplay between Spod and Yeomans would be a familiar sound to anyone who attended any of the Little Bong In My Eye Regurgitator shows in July/August.

How would this album have sounded if the band and longtime producer Magoo had have recorded somewhere where there weren’t 800 people gawking at them eating breakfast each morning? It is impossible to tell. But the 14 tracks on MishMash! and the environment in which they were produced are inexplicably inseparable. Indeed, MishMash! unequivocally feels like a by-product – a souvenir – of the whole crazy experiment. But not your “I recorded an album on live national TV and all I got was this lousy album” sort of souvenir, but rather, as the album title would suggest, a mish mash of genres, sounds, samples and experiences accumulated from the time in the bubble. Heard fragmented would make little sense but listened to as a whole, it’s great. As a stand alone collection of songs, MishMash! is not Regurgitator’s finest album, but the band still hold their position as one of the most innovative and damn vital Australian bands of the past decade.