Once upon a time Link McLennan mused that The Bakelite Age were about a quest for a particular sound that had been rumbling around in his wild and tempestuously creative mind. By the time the third Bakelite Age album, Shoot The Messenger, was released, McLennan’s sonic quest appeared to have been shelved, and The Bakelite Age appeared to be morphing into a sickle-edged garage band.
With that historical context in mind, The Bakelite Age’s fourth album, Fly Trap, is arguably closer – in a philosophical sense, if not musically – to where The Bakelite Age started their journey. Fly Trap has all the hallmarks of a Bakelite record – jagged edges, arresting tempo changes, McLennan’s stream-of-consciousness lyrical observations on the idiocies and pretensions of the world around him.
But Fly Trap is also comprehensively different from anything the band have created previously. On opening track I Can Make Fire, the marriage of heavy minor chords and McLennan’s obscure intonations provide the soundtrack funeral march for the ideological death of humanity. Next up, Hollywood Lied is a garage pop track, sliced and diced with The Bakelite Age’s unique set of steak knives in a presentation box, and A Childish Problem is a slacker track for the thinking generation.
World’s Deadliest Creatures contemplates warped nationalistic fervour on the fringes of Purple Haze, I Dig You Flytrap is a certified garage nugget found lying under the rotting floorboards of a Sunbury shack and if Tony Abbott was half as interesting as the spacerock weirdness of The Mad Monk he’d be less of a concern.
From there it’s back into The Bakelite Age garage, and the elegant regional three chord acid rock of Quasiman, the trans-Bowie freaked-out speed-rock craziness of Music To Die For, the symmetrical pop brilliance of Flatline before Defcon 1 situates The Ramones in the heart of the Pentagon and basks in the dysfunction of it all.
After the warped-Beatles musings of On The Fly, the album finishes, counter-intuitively, with the pomp and ceremony of Epic Theatre. Close your eyes, and you can see McLennan in his Sunday afternoon gladiatorial best conducting his Roman-rock minions, a wry, piss-taking grin smattered across his face.
In that most execrable of movies, Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks mused that life was like a box of chocolates, ‘cause you never knew what you were going to get next. You never know what you’re going to get with The Bakelite Age, but it’s always shit hot.
