Rather than lying in the rubble of Nelson Rockefeller’s failed welfare state, they’d had to brave the draconian brutality of Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s hillbilly dictatorship. Instead of freezing in the Manhattan winter, they’d gone troppo in Fortitude Valley. And if they had, would they have written a haunting punk song like ‘IBM’, the third song off RVG’s re-released album, A Quality of Mercy.
Would they have crafted the title track, an abrasive pop song that’s part Stranglers, part Lloyd Cole, part post-modern, post-punk observation, the staccato emotional pleading of ‘Cause and Effect’, or even the rolling Go-Betweens-ish ‘Heart Paste’? It’s a fair chance ‘Eggshell World’ would have been on the menu in darker moments of contemplation, and ‘Vincent Van Gogh’ is de rigueur for anyone who, like the deliberately troubled Meyers, sees punk as poetry, and poetry as the natural literary expression of angst.
No, all of this is irrelevant: RVG is much more than the Go Betweens watching Television in Brisbane, and A Quality of Mercy is an album that you should listen to. Now.
8/10
