What is it about a noisy, brattish, barely listenable garage rock record that makes it so utterly compelling? There’s little but white noise, indecipherable lyrics and a frenzy of drums that’s crying out for a dose of Ritalin.
What is it about a noisy, brattish, barely listenable garage rock record that makes it so utterly compelling? There’s little but white noise, indecipherable lyrics and a frenzy of drums that’s crying out for a dose of Ritalin. It’s angry, pissed off, confronting, arrogant and fucked-up to the point of requiring long-term incarceration. The agents of respectable society and contrived musical taste are circling, waiting for the moment to pounce and remove this sonic aberration from public circulation. But still the noise continues on, and what a glorious noise it is.
The dysfunctional scenario described above has been seen and heard before – some would say The Stooges created it, and everyone since has been a pretender – but every time it appears again, it’s a welcome event. And so it is with Sydney band Dead Farmers. Suitably, Dead Farmers play the type of music that causes neighbours to petition local councils for quite zones, hotel managers to exile bands like lost members of Stalin’s Politburo and tabloid columnists to scream for a return to corporal punishment and rigidly policed anachronistic social values.
On the other side of equation, there’s the healthy collective of supporters: Dead Farmers represent a cause that’s guaranteed to bring comfort to a legion of garage rock aficionados. A case full of time-honoured Stooges riffs, sprawling slabs of wah-wah guitar, manic beats and a dose of nihilistic rhetoric: this is the stuff of attitude that keeps society on its quaintly turned toes.
You can throw the book at the disturbingly brilliant tracks on Dead Farmers’ debut album, Go Home: the prototypical Neanderthal rock of Down Low, the amphetamine-spiked suburban speedway garage of Slow Time, the Dum-Dum simple thundering beauty of Iron Giant, the naked Stooges love of Goin, the fucked-up garage pop sensibility of Run Home. It’s all there, and it’s all fucking superb.
Without bands like Dead Farmers, the world is completely fucked up.
