Male Bonding - NothingHurts

Thu 19th Aug, 2010 in Music Reviews

The giddy sound of guitars in a garage has been a staple for a good 50 years now, so much so that it’s become part of rock’s mythology. Part of it is to do with convenience: just about everyone has a garage, or knows someone whose parents don’t mind a little bit of good-natured chord bashing. More than that, though, it’s an unpretentious space, where the joy of making some noise comes before anything. Male Bonding know this place well.

That joyful mess has had something of a renaissance in recent years, from Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s bare-bone rock to the roughed-up girl-group of Vivian Girls. Whether it’s a reaction to the sci-fi production values of modern pop, or to humourless, synth-waving indie-rockers, there’s a surge of interest in the drums-guitar-barking simplicity of garage rock.

At its heart, garage rock doesn’t really have much room for experimentation. Sure, you might see some great little pop hooks poking through the noise (especially on air-drummer’s delight All Things This Way ), or some surf-guitar twang ( Weird Feelings ), but ultimately, its passion over precision that elevates a record like this, and Male Bonding are bursting at the seams with untamed energy. From the first desperate chords of album-opener Years Not Long, Male Bonding race headlong through most tracks like Mum is going to bang on the door and call them in for dinner any moment now.

Although there’s more than a little room for feedback and noisy bursts from Male Bonding, they’ve got more in common with bands like Japandroids and Surfer Blood than redline distortion merchants like Times New Viking. More than a few lazily placed mics and one-take recording, Nothing Hurts is in fact a neatly recorded record, one that keeps its distortion and tape-hiss under careful control without sacrificing energy or immediacy. Without this control, slower songs like the reverb-heavy Franklin would be dangerous diversions rather than welcome breaks in the album’s frenetic pace.

There’s not a lot of novelty on Nothing Hurts, but to worry over that is to miss the point. What Nothing Hurts has in spades is galloping energy and plenty of charisma, amplified by the sort of memorable hooks that most straightforward pop bands wish they could write.