“We got [two songs] up there and sent a few emails around, to triple j, to those guys,” says guitarist Ben Woodmason, the self-described “bearded, long ginger-haired one” from the Melbourne fuzz rock outfit. The emails obviously worked because within a couple of months Them Bruins’ tracks had harvested zealous reviews from Rosie Beaton, Lindsay McDougall, Dave Ruby Howe and Maggie Collins. “I think we’re pretty lucky to have got the reviews we’ve got in a short amount of time; it’s pretty sweet, I’m not complaining,” Woodmason says in his paced style.
Actually it’s difficult to connect the calm, measured voice with the ebullient energy of Them Bruins’ quite distinctive sound. The two released tracks from their forthcoming EP (titled God Bless, Them Bruins) detail hammering drums, unabashedly gnawing guitar and vocals from singer Joel G that sound like Peter Garrett with a mohawk and studs through his face. Joel himself looks far too pretty to be able to produce such a UK punk kind of racket, and Woodmason is sure that Midnight Oil wouldn’t be among the singer’s conscious influences. “Our roots are probably more rock than punk, I think,” he says. “When I was writing the riffs for these songs I was listening to more of Future Of The Left and Pulled Apart By Horses, sort of UK bands. Even some Aussie bands: Violent Soho I was listening to. The punk thing just sort of came into it, it’s never been a big influence.”
Joel was Woodmason’s first official collaborator, after the former contacted him through an ad the latter had put up in Polyester. “I conceived the whole project probably in my bedroom, when I was just coming up with heaps of riffs,” Woodmason says. “[I] got a bunch of them together and realised it was probably time to get a voice involved. But I didn’t really know anyone that would fill the void. Joel answered [the ad], and it ended up we sort of knew some mutual friends. So it was Joel and I jamming together for a couple of months and finishing off these songs, and then I roped [drummer] Tim in.” Tim happens to be Woodmason’s brother. His drumming is very tight but with a bristling slop, and the hats clanging away. “We grew up playing together,” he explains. “He was always banging away on the drums and I was always smashing the guitar.”
The cover art for God Bless, Them Bruins is kind of intriguing. A scratchy Ben-Day print of a row of urinals backgrounds a lone silhouetted figure standing over on the right. There’s something not quite right about itl; the urinals look like oyster shells or pitted avocados, and you can’t tell if the figure is pointedly looking outwards at you or is facing inwards, attending to his business. “I put that together,” says Woodmason. “I was looking for a photo that didn’t represent much, and came across that on the internet which I thought was pretty cool. And we ended up using it with our online stuff. And it ended up on our EP; we didn’t originally think we would use it but everyone kind of liked it.”
As for the band’s name, it was also stumbled upon. “Joel came up with that,” says Woodmason. “There’s [an ice] hockey team in America called the Bruins. We thought, ‘That’s not bad’, and then we put the ‘them’ in there, and away we went.” Easy as pie. It may interest you to know that a bruin is a bear, and the Boston hockey team has a pretty adorably menacing mascot called Blades the Bruin to accompany them at games. It’s kind of apt, because the relatively unassuming look of Them Bruins (coupled with their extremely unsuspicious boy names: Joel, Ben, Tim, James) belies the incredible punch that they generate behind their respective instruments. Bassist James C in particular owns the sound which most reviewers have grasped as the band’s defining blow: the dirty bass which carries each track like a bunch of hands under a crowd-surfer’s body. “James actually got his buddy to make a custom fuzz pedal for his bass, which is pretty cool,” Woodmason says. “Definitely that’s the fuzz sound you hear in the bass. In terms of me I’m pretty straight up, just distortion pedal and delay, and another fuzz pedal I use to generate lots of feedback, that sort of thing.” That sounds reasonable. Just don’t expect reason to come into things if you give yourself the pleasure of attending the boys’ EP launch. It’ll be loud, sweaty, and you might find yourself inexplicably jerking around like Garrett himself.
BY ZOË RADAS
