Grim Fandango - BirthmarkBlues

Sat 27th Nov, 2010 in Music Reviews

It’s a shame Grim Fandango can’t make a living from their music in Australia. In fact it seems tough for any punk band. Frenzal Rhomb did it. The Saints did it. Bodyjar did it for a brief period. One Dollar Short did it for an even briefer period. But four bands out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of past and present budding punk collectives isn’t much of an average.

Birthmark Blues deserves to sell, or at least be downloaded in the thousands. In a country where garage rock and indie bands hog the spotlight, this album stands as something truly alternative. It brings some understanding back to the trivial 90s term.

And appropriately, there’s plenty of 90s in this album. It’d sit nicely on a three-disc carousel with Archers of Loaf and Dinosaur Jr., taking the role of gruff complement to the former’s indie and energetic punk to the latter’s stoner.

The guitars jangle and the melodies are pop but the lads at Capital Sounds Studio have kept the disc off the sanding block and left it with a texture that suits the band down to the ground. It captures the raw feeling of the Grim’s live show but doesn’t leave it too underdone, as if they’re making some arrogant point. It also helps when you’ve got a perfectly-suited gravelly voice fronting your band.

It’s a sound that could have been made even bigger and hints (see Cotton Wool Kids and the conclusion to Life, in the Absence Of… ) at where the band might like to go next. They use the kind of open chords that J. Mascis has proved can be stacked and stacked again to create a gloriously full-bodied brew. The thought of Fandango embracing this is both exciting and worrying for our cochleae.

Or perhaps it will be a more countrified direction the band takes. There’s plenty of twang about this album to suggest that Grim Fanbanjo, the band’s alter-ego, could become a more prominent fixture. On The Same Page closes with what could be the desolation of a western town and an acoustic croon fit for Chuck Ragan’s Revival Tour. Cotton Wool Kids has an interlude that sounds like a cartoon western hero just galloped into town. Excuses Excuses with its use of banjo and hammer-ons is not far off being a punk hootenanny.

But with so much whoa-ing and chant choruses happening Birthmark Blues never moves too far away from the band’s punk and hardcore roots. The quartet closes each track with an exclamation point of riffage that would have Christopher Reeves on his feet. It’s music that’s made for and will deliver a cracking time of mosh-pit joy.

With a pulp of influences and collection of songs worth listening to from start to finish every time, the album is a WA highlight for 2010.