Capital City - Bad Money

Wed 28th Mar, 2007 in Music Reviews

The best and worst thing about debut records is that in this fast-paced music industry, a band is forced to play its best hand to catch the attention of the fickle masses. Most debut records these days include a handful of great standalone tunes but after repeated listening, everything else comes across as filler or, at best, unfinished business. There are only four aces in a deck, right?

Not with Capital City. Bad Money, the Perth band’s first album, is 50 minutes of top quality product with no fat. And how does the band achieve this? Presumably by throwing out any preconceived ideas of what the band should sound like. You see, instead of an album that defines the Capital City sound, we have 10 tracks that could easily be by 10 totally different bands from 10 totally different genres.

Opening track Let’s Throw Our Love Away kicks off with an organ sound that smells suspiciously like the one at the start of the last Interpol album. Another exercise in 80s fetishist faux wave? Not at all. Over the next three and a half minutes, Sam Scherr’s Jagger-like vocals tear through a textbook pub rock verse-chorus-verse-chorus formula like he was born to do it. There are shades of Status Quo, the Stones and everything else your dodgy uncle still listens to, and though it’s not the most original offering on the record, it’s impossible not to enjoy.

As the album progresses, the band works its way from classic rock to 1970s surf-punk, blues-tinged country and country-tinged blues. Come On and Work for the Lord, It Ain’t a Lonely Hurt No More and How Come? all demonstrate strong Johnny Cash influences, with catchy lyrics and bread-and-butter melodies with all those chords that were just made to be together. There’s a cheeky nod to The Jesus and Mary Chain on in the verse of Beggar Please before it develops into a full-blooded rock tune like all the bands they learnt from while the band again show their versatility with guitarist Kate Mills’ noodling during A Less Accessible Jet. And as though they hadn’t shown enough faces already, closing track I Felt the Light is 13 minutes of drawn-out jamming with reverb-heavy guitars floating over a constant, driving beat that builds in intensity as the song edges closer and closer to blowing its load.

But with the exception of How Come?, which is more of a breather in amongst all the mayhem, the one thing that’s constant throughout the course of Bad Money is the rock & roll oozing from Scherr’s pores. While all 10 songs here have their own individual character and stand out in their own right, the style and swagger evident in every one of the frontman’s lines ties the album together and makes it more than the sum of its parts.